Tuesday, April 15, 2008

I cannot believe Jemele Hill got paid to write this

Ok so on friday night I went out with a couple of my friends. I hate to leave my parents' basement most of the time, but one of my good friends was in from out of town so we went downtown and proceeded to get wasted. I'm not trying to brag or anything, because these days I go out to drink maybe once every other month or so and usually when I do it's me getting dragged to a wine bar or some other gay ass trendy bar by my girlfriend so she can hang out with her obnoxious friends.

I managed to make it home at 3 AM and promptly passed out. Of course, like clockwork, my body decides it's time to wake up at 5 AM, because that's when I usually get up for work. I have a wicked headache, my stomach feels strange (maybe because I ate one of those burritos that vendors around Coors Field sell out of a cooler ), and my mouth tastes like a nauseating blend of jagermeister, plastic bottle whiskey and refried beans. I get up, sit in the shower for half an hour, pop an advil and lay back down in bed. I turn on ESPN and quickly get rewarded with an hour of masters coverage. I doze back to sleep and wake up in time to see the ESPN College GameDay crew LIVE IN SHITHOLE GAINESVILLE FLORIDA FOR ESPN COVERAGE OF A MEANINGLESS SPRING PRACTICE GAME FOR THE FLORIDA GATORS. wheeeee. And as always when it comes to ESPN, I cannot bring myself to turn the set off for some reason. I also cannot move as a result of my 24-year-old body's slow process rejecting my consumption of alcohol. So I sit through and hour of terrible analysis, Lee Corso sucking Urban Meyer's cock and some stupid school pride contests including a poorly executed series of student races. Then I managed to make it through a whole half of spring practice football played by a team i don't give two shits about. Plus I got to hear Kirk Herbstreit (I don't even care if I spelled that right, I'm not wasting a second of my precious time googling that idiot's name) go on and on and on about that retarded half-troll Florida quarterback who talks with a lisp and won't do a fucking thing in the NFL.

Dear faithful reader, you may be asking yourself, "why the hell is this loser telling me about his stupid, uneventful weekend?" The answer, of course, is that even watching that ESPN special through my partly drunken, mostly hazed and hungover state, I could have done a better job of reporting on it than Jemele Hill did.

It sounded a lot like a script for a Will Ferrell or Adam Sandler movie. The football coach at one of the best programs in the nation wants to find the fastest students on campus and see whether they can compete against his well-trained, finely sculpted football players in the 40-yard dash. The race will take place at the team's annual spring football game, in front of a record 61,000 people, including ESPN's "College GameDay" crew. If one of the 15 student finalists has the best time, that student wins a full scholarship.

First of all, Jemele, Will Ferrell has never done a movie about football. Sheesh. Secondly, your "The Waterboy" reference is fundamentally flawed. Your comparison would be correct only if: If the premise of "The Waterboy" had been that the coach of a big state school fresh off a national championship decided that he'd hire a bunch of waterboys from the student body so they could take shots at tackling his players in order to earn a spot on the team, knowing full well in advance that there was no way in hell the waterboys would succeed, and that the event would generate a bunch of publicity gobbled up by the likes of a certain hack journalist who somehow found their way writing for the largest sports media conglomerate in the world.

Phew. Was that a run-on sentence? Like there'd be any way Jemele Hill would know in order to call me out on it. HAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

The last thing i'd like you to notice (besides the awkward pop culture reference, a staple of Jemele's craft) is the tense she's writing in.

The race will take place at the team's annual spring football game.

I know I like to criticize Ms. Hill for her poorly worded, rambling, and typo-filled columns... but I have to believe that she can somehow know the difference between past, future and present tenses in the english language. That being said, she probably wrote this paragraph on or before Friday. She then zooms on into her next paragraph, which of course, is now in past tense, because she proceeds to retell what I saw on TV that morning.

Unfortunately for those students who raced against Gator players at Florida's spring game, it played out as expected in real life: The fastest student on campus was indeed a football player -- celebrated running back Chris Rainey, who dusted everyone with a 4.27. Florida fans were probably a little bit more impressed with Rainey's 75 yards on the ground and his 65-yard touchdown reception.

Do you know what this means? In between friday(or before), when she wrote the first paragraph, and monday evening when this column was posted, Jemelle either watched the game and pre-game on tv or went in person. Then she wrote a whole 5 fucking paragraphs basically reciting verbatim what she saw on TV. If this was a blogspot post by SteveAutoMechanic it would be nothing to fret over. But this Woman gets paid to watch TV and describe what happened, including repeating interview questions and answers that the sideline reporters asked the day of the event.

Furthermore, it's like after she wrote that first paragraph before the event, she was all "fuck it. I'm drained. That was a lot of writing for one day there. I'll finish the rest later. I guess I'll watch Access Hollywood now" It's like she's spitting in my face; bragging about her sweet ass job where she gets paid a nothing-to-sneeze-at salary to do no original research or reporting, write a paragraph a day which she refuses to proofread, and occasionally fill in for Jim Rome (whose throat gets sore from time to time from spitting out too many generic, cliched insults at "underperforming crybaby" athletes)

And if that wasn't enough, Jemele had to taunt me further.

Rainey nearly gave the student body unbelievable bragging rights. He was confused about the starting directions, and fans watched in horror as he stood still while his competition sped off. Rainey was allowed a do-over. No word on whether Tim Donaghy was the race official.

You have got to be kidding me.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Just think...only 2 more years of ESPN and CBS sucking Tebows nuts!

Anonymous said...

"it's me getting dragged to a wine bar or some other gay ass trendy bar by my girlfriend so she can hang out with her obnoxious friends."

Ah, relationships... remember to breathe in through your mouth to get the full wine flavor!

Anonymous said...

I'll join the Jemele Hill sucks nation -- she used to work in Orlando -- but chill out on the Tebow crap. He's a cool kid.