SportsCenter Next
One of the reasons that this trip seems to have less free time is that a couple other guys I’m working with are staying at my hotel, and, where in past trips I could repair to my room after work with a takeout dinner from Panera’s, on this trip the workday blends into dinner in the hotel restaurant, and I don’t get to my room until 10, leaving me 2 hours to take care of any issues that have come up among my other clients.
That was the case last night. We ate in the bar and resolved most of the company’s challenges by transferring blame to those not present, but even that process takes a while for people of character - there are resilient layers of conscience that one has to slake off first.
All the while, the TV over the bar would sometimes distract us. It must be a slow sports summer here in southeast Wisconsin, as the riveting attraction the last two nights has been the Little League baseball championships on ESPN. At first glance, it seems benign, if a little frivolous, to give the kids a day in the sun. Then, as it dawns on you that there are grown men sitting at the bar and shouting, swearing even, at the umpires, and the cameras close in on 11-year-olds with tears running down their cheeks after a miscue or strikeout, it begins to feel a lot like a weird sort of child pornography, demure, but somehow faintly prurient. I have sometimes favored banning parents from Little League games (especially when I was a coach, a high school kid, and had parents livid with me because their kid wasn’t getting playing time), so how is it better to invite a national television audience to the party?
Ah, it’ll pass. I wonder who’ll be playing tonight? You know, some of the moms in the stands are hot.
