Sorry for the delay in geting this up - typically I'm going to try and have something fresh up much earlier, but Time Warner cable's internet here in Columbia decided not to work this morning. I want to say thanks again to all of you have taken the time to email or post here regarding my departure from daily Gainesville radio. Believe me, all the kind words are appreciated. For that matter, not there have been many, but so are the negative words. To have an opinion on my show, you have to have taken time to listen. That's all I've ever asked, so thanks to you as well angry Hurricanes fan. Also, I feel bad that I left out two people in my closing thoughts yesterday - Miriam Fitch is the backbone of the station and Matt Marriot has had to endure many interesting phone calls off air as my producer. I want to publically thank both of them for their assistance and hard work.
In response to some emailed questions I've gotten, I want to emphasize again that my move had nothing to do with anything sports related (covering Spurrier versus Meyer, etc). If my fiancee was a sports anchor in Toledo and I could get a decent sports radio job there, I'd be getting ready to spend lots of quality time with Tom Amstutz and hear about how great the Hungarian hot dogs at Tony Packo's are. Some have asked my opinion about Terry Norvelle being hired as the replacement for me in the 11A-1P spot at the Star 99.5. While I've known Terry for a long time, I was not consulted on management's process for filling the spot. Terry was involved with potential All-American Football League broadcasts and came to the station's attention that way. Norvelle's been involved with sports radio for more than a decade, and I'm sure he'll do fine. Our styles are different, but I encourage you to give him a chance. I'm sure there were some Pat Dooley listeners who couldn't stand me at first when I began doing the show there who eventually came around.
On to the sports...
This Matt Patchan story continues to be really odd. We know that Patchan was shot on Friday night, apparently in a park. Apparently he was not seriously injured, which is a great relief to Gator fans who remember the losses of James McGriff and Eraste Autin too well. But how is it that four days after the shooting, no one can even seem to figure out what hospital he was taken to? I've seen three different ones reported by media covering the story. How did this situation happen in the first place? There are still a surprising number of questions that need to be answered considering how many days removed we are from the incident.
The Patchan story was originally posted on the gatorsports.com message board by a first time poster at 12:55 Saturday morning. Everyone feels like they're a reporter now. Message board rumors are always an adventure - there's no way to tell which ones are legit, which ones have an element of truth but are being posted by someone who doesn't know the full facts, and which ones are some guy making stuff up to screw with people. People who can confirm things like this don't appreciate being called everytime something funky shows up somewhere on the net. It's a very interesting time to be in sports media.
FSU's Preston Parker will be apparently soon be getting his charges dropped to a misdemeanor. This should come to the surprise of absolutely no one. For some reason, there was a perception from some Parker might have genuinely been in danger of losing his spot on the FSU team. He'll be back no later than game three against Wake Forest.
Baseball media is all excited about the 14th ever unassisted triple play last night. If you're one of those people who gets excited about this, I certainly don't begrudge your enjoyment of it but I don't get what the big deal is. Four homers in a game is a genuine individual feat. Hitting for the cycle is a feat, although one I don't think is that big a deal (wouldn't anyone rather have two homers, a triple and a double rather than being able to say they "hit for the cycle!"?). But an unassisted triple play always happens the same way - two runners are going, and someone hits a liner to a middle infielder. Wow - how captivating.
The Celtics still can't win on the road, which is disappointing but not shocking. I've wanted to believe all season, but I still can't. They'll beat the Cavs, but I don't see them winning the seventeenth banner this season.
Lindy's college football magazine is out - their earliest release ever. At some point they will hand the preview magazines out during the BCS title game celebration the way they do those quickie two page newspapers. In a world where instant information is available to us all, can anyone explain how these things still thrive? Is it just that you can't take the internet with you to the beach so you bring Lindy's instead? For the record, they have Georgia number one and UF at six. The Gators will supposedly face Missouri in the Sugar Bowl.
The post's title comes from the first song off Elvis Costello's new album Momofuku - the song's not on youtube anywhere, so here's the lyrics. It's an excellent album - if you've enjoyed Costello's stuff in the past, you'll like this a lot as well. The email's still heath@gator.net if you want to reach me directly, or feel free to comment here.
No comments:
Post a Comment