Why I Hate Janet Jackson

My father always had sports on TV when I was growing up. This was before ESPN, people (yes, there was a “before”), so by “always”, I mean “all day on the weekends and on Monday nights for football”. You couldn’t go anywhere in the house on the weekend without hearing some play-by-play or color commentary.

One day, I walked by the TV and the sound seemed really funny. Dad had his old, paint-splattered radio on top of the set. It was sputtering out the broadcast in that wavy, AM way. I asked him if the sound on the TV was out. It wasn’t – he had just turned it all the way down (again, this was before mute buttons. Heck – it was before remotes!) Dad then told me a lesson about bias in sports and about the value of your own home broadcasters. Turns out his beloved WSU Cougars were on National TV, but he didn’t want their commentary. He wanted to hear the voices he was used to – the home team broadcasters. I was too young to really understand, but filed the information away.

Fast forward 20 years, and I now am a big Seattle Mariners fan. The how and why of that is a different post, but suffice it to say I fell in love with the team in 1996 and have been smitten since. Once in a while, my beloved M’s will be picked up on FOX (again, a channel not around in my dad’s day), especially if they play the Yankees on a Saturday. I used to be able to drag my old radio out to the family room and tune into the wavy AM broadcast of my familiar voices: Ron Fairly, Rick Rizz, and Dave Niehaus. The voices matched the picture, pitch for pitch, out for out, and I could pick up where the broadcasters had left off the night before with their analysis and story-telling about the year as a whole and baseball in general.

Until Janet Jackson and her planned “wardrobe malfunction”. Now the networks use a tape-delay of about 7 seconds. The radio is now always ahead of the television. This does not work – the radio announcer is screaming about the runner digging in for second base when I’m still seeing the pitch go to the plate. I end up just choosing to listen do the game on the radio and run in to the family room for the delayed play if it was a must-see.

For this reason, I hate Janet Jackson.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 17th, 2006 at 11:13 AM and is filed under Everything Else, Rants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.