Sportscasters Gone Wild

“…I’ll rip your f---ing ears off and your nose off and I’ll shove ‘em up you’re a-- and I’ll kick your balls up around your head…“--Part of a run-on sentence from the John Dennis/ Ryen Russillo voicemail.

Is it just me, or are sportscasters getting increasingly out of control?

It was just a generation ago that the guy who gave you the sports scores was a nice, simple-minded buffoon like Champ Kind from “Ron Burgundy”. Or some non-threatening, happy drunk named Zip or Tank or Bob Gamere.

But more and more often, TV and radio sports guys are going berserk. It’s getting to be like that time back in the late ‘90s when circus elephants started going on a rampages and stomping people for no reason. The Dennis/Russillo contretemps is just the latest example of Sportscasters Behaving Badly. In the last dozen years or so we’ve had rapes, murders, sexual assaults, threats, and that old stand-by of people in the public eye: gross stupidity.

I’m not suggesting that all sports guys have gone crazy. You won’t turn on the TV tonight and find news helicopter footage of Remdawg scrambling over the Jersey barriers at the end of a long police chase. But you’ve got to admit, when it comes to anti-social behavior, sports broadcasters are now running a dead heat with NCAA coaches and the cast of “Different Strokes.”

I guess on some level, it’s understandable. It can’t be easy to spend most of your work week standing around a locker room, begging for interviews from guys who keep reminding you that they make more in one inning than you do all summer. Guys who can’t shut up about how many BU co-eds they’ve banged this week long enough to answer your question about how their back is feeling. Especially when these are the same guys who, in high school, got in shape by giving you Atomic Wedgies.

With all due respect, sports casting doesn’t typically attract the coolest people. At Weymouth South High, we had kids who covered school sports for the closed-circuit cable TV, and they used to get beat up regularly by the guys in the Dungeons & Dragons club. Hey, God bless those Audio/Visual guys; compared to them, me and my friends, who spent every study hall playing Strat-o-matic baseball, looked like Duran Duran.

There are four basic degrees of sportscaster misbehavior:

Level 1: “Give them enough microphone cord and they’ll hang themselves.”
This is the mildest form, and can usually be chalked up to stupidity more than psychosis. In a political campaign, they’re called “gaffes.“ One example: ABC used to carry “Monday Night Baseball,” with Keith Jackson in the role of World’s Worst Baseball Play-by-Play Guy. One time, someone (I seem to remember it being Reggie Jackson) hit a home run. An excited Keith told the world that Reggie had promised a boy who was dying in the hospital that he’d hit a homer for him, and here Reggie had come through. I swear this is true: My brother Bill turned to me and said, “I just the sickest thought. What if the kid didn’t know that he’s dying?” The next day the headline in the paper read: “Boy Finds Out He’s Terminally Ill from Mon. Nite Baseball.”

It’s amazing how many of these blunders are racist in nature. Like when Dennis and Callahan called the ape who escaped from Franklin Park Zoo a “Metco gorilla.“ Or when the loathsome Rick Barry used to do the NBA games on CBS alongside Bill Russell. One time they posted an old photo of Russell’s Olympic team, and Barry said, “Who’s the guy in the back row with the big watermelon smile?” So the cameras cut to a reaction shot of Russell, who looked like he was ready to do the Ezekiel 25:17 speech from “Pulp Fiction.”

Once on “Monday Night Football” Howard Cosell took his liver-spotted lips off Joe Gibbs’ butt long enough to say this about the Redskins’ Alvin Garrett: “Just look at that little monkey go!” I don’t know what was worse, the fact that he said it, or that we had to listen to the toupeed blowhard defending his honor for the next month.

Level 2: “I say what I mean and I mean what I say.”
This is bigger than a gaffe, because the guy had time to think it over and says it anyway. Like when Bob Ryan said on the air that he’d like to smack Jason Kidd’s wife, Joumanna. Bob Lobel did everything but tackle Ryan and duct tape his mouth shut to keep him from saying it, but Ryan insisted he meant it. The Globe editorial page would have demanded Ryan be fired if he worked anywhere else but…The Globe. Instead Ryan kept his job by apologizing, saying that when he didn’t mean it when he said he meant it.

Jimmy the Greek used to do the NFL pregame show on CBS. He was the only football handicapper I’ve ever seen get every pick he ever made completely wrong. He also once had an off-the-air fistfight with Brent Musburger (although he never got the medal he deserved for it). Later he gave an interview where he said all Blacks are great athletes because they were bred by slave owners to be lean, strong and fast ( at the time, Jimmy had never seen Mo Vaughn). Since The Greek knew as much about anthropology as he did about picking football games, CBS sent him packing.

Level 3: “World’s Dumbest Sportscasters : Caught on Tape”
Here’s where you’ll find the Dennis voicemail. And it’s precursor, the Pat O’Brien sex voicemail. To your wife, O’Brien hosts one of those Tom Cruise obsessed entertainment news shows. To me, he’ll always be the guy from “NBA on CBS.” But to all of us, the phrase “You’re so f---ing hhhhhotttt” will always belong to him.

But even Pat can’t outdo Frank Gifford, who was caught on tape canoodling with a flight attendant he had just met. Granted, he was set up by a tabloid who paid the stewardess to do it. But you’ve got to admire the old boy for trying to…ahem…”enter through the rear of the cabin” on the first date. And I was hoping the next Kathie Lee Christmas special would feature a frustrated Giff trying to get the hotel in-house porn to work.

Level 4: “Yes!”
We all knew Marv Albert had an odd voice and a bad rug, but who could have suspected he also had a penchant for cross dressing, bondage and leaving teeth marks? And when Letterman said to him “We don’t want our Marv to be biting women” it was pure comedy gold.

Level 5: O.J. Simpson
To you, he was a running back. To me, he’ll always be Nordberg. But he was doing the NFL pregame show on NBC when O.J. set the bar for sportscaster misdeeds as high as it can go. Looking back, I remember as a kid watching Simpson run for 253 yards against the Patriots in a blizzard. Somehow, I think he could’ve gotten his hands in those gloves if he really wanted to.

But even the Juice was smart enough not to leave any voicemail messages.