Changing Channels, Part 1

Dr. S is sick of ESPN talking head Stuart Scott. There are times when Dr. S hates Stuart (usually when Dr. S is watching ESPN). Stuart’s act has long since worn thin. Milwaukee Journal Sentinel columnist Bob Wolfley sums up the trouble with Stuart in a critique of ESPN’s coverage of the NBA:

Wolfley writes:

A little Stuart Scott goes a long way; the problem is he is being used a lot. His NBA programming role comes on Wednesday nights as a studio host.

He has very good presence, good electricity, but he shorts out viewers because of all the self-consciously hip jargon.

He’s terminally hip.

Language is supposed to be a tool you use to be understood. Does the average viewer, does the average ESPN viewer — and TV is supposed to be for the average viewer — even understand what the heck Scott is saying? Of course not.

And when he works, it always seems just a little bit too much about Stuart Scott, and not quite enough about just the telecast or game he’s setting up.

ESPN needs to consider providing closed captioning for viewers when Scott works, so when he says, as he did the other day during a telecast of a Portland Trail Blazers game, “Yo, `Sheed, dog,” the caption would translate: “Have any of Rasheed Wallace’s teammates taken him aside and told him his loss of self-control during games hurts the whole team?”

Or maybe picture-in-picture with Barbara Billingsley translating jive as she did so well in “Airplane.”

You haven’t lived until you see Scott talking to someone like John Madden and referring to him as “dog.”

God forbid Scott could set up a game between New Jersey and San Antonio and say, “Jason Kidd” or “Tim Duncan” — you know, those boring names they were given at birth — instead of “JKidd” and “TDog.”

Visit JSOnline, the Journal Sentinel’s World Wide Web site, at http://www.jsonline.com/