Saints Belichick and Brady fail attempt at bodily ascension into heaven; whiney-ass titty-babies of WEEI-land put on suicide watch

On Boston’s WEEI radio, where mindless Republican cant mixes with sports cliche, capitalist hagiography and homoerotic hero worship, the pain is palpable.

I’m a fan of the New England Patriots and wanted them to win the Super-Duper Bowl. But I certainly didn’t expect that they would, given what went down the last time these two teams played. Neither did I expect that they would lose. I had no expectations; I thought it could go either way. It was a fun game to watch, back and forth right down to the last minute. The Patriots could have won it, but they didn’t. Oh well.

But there’s a bright side, a very shiny, happy bright side to the Pat’s loss. And that’s that the canonization of saints-in-waiting Tom Brady and Bill Belichick and Bob Kraft and the rest of the Patriots enterprise has been put on indefinite hold. And what’s even better, all the bozo Pats fans who take this stuff too seriously will have to shut up, at least a little. And what’s the best thing of all is that the talk radio radio hosts of WEEI, among whom are some of the biggest assholes in all New England, are going to be whining and weeping and wailing and gnashing their teeth from now until spring training, whilst the rest of the sports-watching country gloats about how the “arrogant, cheating” Pats choked.

What a happy thought!

When I was in high school in the late 60’s, I used to ride into Manhattan from New Jersey every morning with my father. He had the radio in his bedroom set to wake him up to Rambling with Gambling, and that’s what was on in the kitchen as we got breakfast, but in the car we listened to either a pop music station or a classical music station. My father hated the sound of Gambling’s voice, and despised his radio schtick, which he often commented on. So I asked him, “then why do you listen to him”? And he said, “He’s so goddamn irritating, it just wakes me up in the morning. It makes me get out of bed.”

I guess that’s why I listen to sports radio from time to time. I like to listen to the Red Sox games, and over the last decade or so, I’ve spent a lot of time in Boston, where the games are carried on WEEI. If I were listening to a game in the evening, the radio would be set to WEEI in the morning, and I would wake up to the sounds of the John Dennis and Gerry Callahan show. I can imagine a more obnoxious radio pair and I’m sure they exist, but Dennis and Callahan are at the far end of what I’m willing to subject myself too. They certainly woke me up in the morning.

Like most talk radio personalities, they’re blowhards who love to hear themselves speak. They talk over each other, and especially over their callers, and they have a miniscule ability to laugh at themselves. They both have irritating voices, and much worse, they share a whiney, put-upon, complaining tone of voice. They appear not to know much about sports, although they’re both professional sports writers, and they also give the impression that they don’t really care much about sports. Rather, what they care about is the culture of professional sports: the personalities, the gossip about player’s personal lives, the business strategies of teams and individuals, the contracts and trades, the buying and selling of television rights, the negotiations to get stadiums built with taxpayer money. I remember listening to them a few years ago when the subject of Hideo Nomo’s no-hitter came up. Neither of them could remember, at first, who it was against. How the hell could you forget that?

As you would expect, Dennis and Callahan are members of what Atrios calls the Whiney Ass Titty Baby, or WATB, that is, Republican, Party. They spend a good portion of each show droning on in a kind of watered-down Bill O’Reilly/Rush Limbaugh way about how they’re so horribly oppressed by the libruls of the world, especially the librul media. When they speak about political issues they are generally uninformed to the point of stupefaction & regurgitate right wing talking points. I heard them once talking about Attorney General Don Rumsfeld. No, I’m not kidding.

The rest of the WEEI on-air gang, with a few exceptions, is cut from the same boorish cloth — although none of them are quite as obnoxious as those two (and there are even a few Democrats among them). Some of them clearly know about sports, having been themselves professional athletes. But they share the shtick of being rude blowhards, talking over everybody except the hyperwealthy (athletes or owners), shouting down their callers–often before they’ve had a chance to make their point, and misinterpreting what the caller is trying to say.

There’s a very pronounced pecking order in their universe. Owners, the people with the real money, are given honorifics–as in “Mr. Kraft,” the owner of the New England Patriots; everybody else is called by their given names. When people like Mr. Kraft appear on the station they’re never interrupted; the questions they get are all softballs. Really, it’s like listening to Jeff Gannon interview George Bush; you wonder if the interviewers are going to offer to give blowjobs on live radio. Star athletes and coaches (and celebrity sports commentators) are treated differentially but more familiarly than owners; journeymen athletes and retired athletes are given somewhat less respect, and the fans who call into the shows are treated like rubbish.

It’s a very male-dominated world, probably 95% of the voices you hear are men’s. And it seems to me that it’s a very transparently masculine mammalian pecking-order kind of place, where the key thing to be established at all times is who is dominant and who is submissive, who ranks where relative to the ultimate, hypothetical, idealized Alpha Male.

There’s no question, of course, about who’s closest to apotheosis: Tom Brady, the aw-shucks regular guy with the fantastic ability to play football, the movie-star good looks, the supermodel girlfriend(s). Had the Patriots won the superbowl, Pats fans would be calling for his deification today. Meanwhile, Belichick is lionized as a football genius, and Kraft revered as a benign feudal laird.

The people who call into sports radio shows implicitly buy into this whole pecking order. These are people who obsess about this stuff. They spend hours and hours watching games on television, reading about sports on the Internet, listening to and calling into sports stations, where they are shouted down and ridiculed, despite their vociferous agreement with the political opinions and world view of the radio hosts. It seems to me that these people are, generally speaking, desperate to be part of the testosterone-mad male-bonding universe of professional sports. When they talk about the Patriots, or the Red Sox, they don’t say “The Pats did this” or “The Sox did that”; they say, “we did this” or “we did that”, as if they were actually members of the teams. When the teams that they root for win, they’re ecstatic. When they lose, they’re despondent. And when anybody from outside their tribe criticizes the tribal leaders, they become literally enraged. It’s very curious.

What’s that line from Goodfellas?

And there was nothing that we could do about it. Batts was a made man, and Tommy wasn’t. And we had to sit still and take it. It was among the Italians. It was real greaseball shit.

In the sports-radio world, fans are the Henry Hills, the hangers-on, the ones who can never themselves become “made men” but who accept the rules of the social order because it fills some kind of deep need. I’m a fan, but I cringe when I hear some of the callers. Their need to be part of the gang, one of the guys, is transparent and sad. To me, it’s real greaseball shit.

So it was interesting to me, in a perverse kind of way, to listen to the talk on WEEI in the few days immediately preceding the Superbowl, when much of the discussion was about the so-called Spygate scandal. Bill Belichick was caught breaking league rules by taping the Jets’ signals at the beginning of the season, and more recently, other allegations have been made that this is part of a longstanding pattern.

For months, fans of every team except the Patriots have been saying that the Pats are a team of cheaters, that their NFL record of 18 wins in a season is tainted, that Belichick is a slimeball, even, gasp! that Brady is overrated. And this has driven nuts the whole of Patriot Nation. “Just you wait!” the fans have mouth-breathed for the last two weeks. “Just you wait until we smash the Giants to smithereens! Just wait ’til we beat the Giants 35-3! Then you’ll see who’s boss!”

Arlen Specter, my hero!

And then, late last week, Republican Arlen specter stuck his nose into the spygate affair, declaring that the matter of how the NFL Commissioner’s Office investigated and handled the Patriots’s taping activities was of grave concern to the Senate of the United States of America! Oh my God, too good to be true! Arlen Specter, the guy whom Dennis and Callahan excoriate at a “RINO”, Republican In Name Only, a fake Republican who votes against the President on Habeus Corpus, telecom immunity, “enhance interogation techniques” and GITMO! I heard Dennis and Callahan talking about him yesterday afternoon, a few hours before the game, and when they said his name they sounded like Regan MacNeil when Father Merrim throws the holy water on her. It burns! It burns!

Caller after caller chimed in to the effect that Specter was scum, Specter was worse than a Democrat; he knew nothing of loyalty and decency. Not only had he betrayed the Republican Party on innumerable occasions, now he was claiming to care about the “integrity of the game!” The bastard!

And all the while Dennis and Callahan, who on other occasions, different topics, love to echo the old empty cant about how sports is a noble endeavor, how it builds and reflects character, how “respect for the game” and “respect for the team” are transcendent virtues– these same guys are reduced to repeating ad nauseam that “everybody does it” (spying on other teams, in violation of NFL rules), and that the only reason that Patriots fans are upset with Belichick is because he got caught.

What’s so delicious to me about all this is how perfectly the Republican ethos comes out — a devotion to pieties that nobody in the Party takes seriously, coupled with a devotion to winning underhandedly, the more underhandedly the better. And who better to stir the pot than that old phony Arlen Specter! Nothing warms my old liberal heart more than the sight of Republican phonies turning on each other!

Well, for the record, I’m a Patriot’s fan, and I’m disappointed that the Patriots cheated, not that they got caught at it. Call me naive, call me ignorant of how the game is played, I don’t care. You see, I like pro sports but I really don’t care too much about it one way or the other. I prefer it when the teams I follow win, but it has scant effect on my well-being when they lose. I really do like the idea of a game played without cheating. I also don’t like how in basketball the star players and star teams get preferential treatment from the referees. I know it’s longstanding tradition, but it’s not necessary and it’s not right.

Bob Knight, a guy for whom I have no great affection, is known for being a stickler about the rules. He’s known for being an angry, possibly unbalanced, foul-mouthed jerk. He’s also known for the high rate of graduation among the kids on his teams, and for strict adherence to NCAA recruiting rules. Elsewhere in college basketball you can count on some kind of under-the-table payment scandal; some cheating, phantom-classes scandal to come up every other year or so. NCAA basketball is a billion dollar business, and everybody knows it. Bob Knight is a winning coach, a hall of fame coach, but he would rather lose than have a kid on his team who wasn’t doing his schoolwork. Does that make him ridiculous and naive? Hmmmm. . .

So now and forever, the Patriot’s 2007-2008 season will be remembered for the perfect season that might have been, for Belichick’s cheating, for Specter’s posturing, and for Tom Brady’s being human after all. I can live with that.

Because what if the Pats had won? Boston fans, flush with Red Sox victory and Celtics mastery of the NBA, would be well on their way to becoming as insufferable as Cowboys fans or Yankees fans — and arguable worse– and their flagship radio station would be filling the airwaves with triumphalist crap to compliment their constant undercurrent of misogynistic Hillary bashing.

As for me, I’m swearing off, at least until Spring Training.