Correcting a big mistake

In another life, I was once a sports media critic for a once great metropolitan daily newspaper. Mind you, my criticisms didn't make the paper great, though I'd like to think they helped.

Oh, heck, the bottom line here is that I once used to write about sports television on a daily basis, and had a story like the one that came up today, that former Tampa Bay Bucs coach Jon Gruden is joining ESPN's Monday Night Football booth to replace Tony Kornheiser, come up when I was on the beat, I would have written at least one word about it.

And that word would have been "Hallelujah."

The words that would have followed would have been about how woefully miscast Kornheiser was on MNF. You can certainly understand what ESPN executives were trying to do in bringing a supposed "regular guy" into the mix along with a football expert and a play-by-play man. The trouble is that Kornheiser has never been a regular guy, nor has he wanted to be in any of his platforms.

Frankly, the lure of the former Washington Post sports/humor columnist has always been lost on me, in print and on television. His humor fell flat, and he never has displayed any sort of intellectual curiosity about the people he supposedly covered, assuming that he ever deigned to show up at events.

Here's where a little personal disclosure is in order: When he hosted a radio show in Washington in the 90's, Kornheiser took a vicious shot at me on the air after I criticized him in print for something he had done on the air. And to make matters worse, he called some of my former colleagues to gather personal information on me to use on the air in the attack.

So, am I saddened by today's developments? Not entirely. But I still think ESPN's move was made for the right reasons.