Sports Celebreality Awaits Troubled Athletes as Second Career
We're all familiar with the legal troubles of today's athletes and the referees who fix the games in which they are suspended from. But what happens to them after their careers and/or commuted sentences are over?
"It could be considered a kind of welcome back tour", said O.J. Simpson, the host of the proposed show on ESPN, "Sports Celebreality".
"Welcome back from what?" you might ask. Well, in some cases, the pokey, but more often than not, irrelevance. That's right, it's "Sports Celebreality" and it might just be the next addition to ESPN's popular-for-a-month-or-two genre.
"We're trying to give these guys a second, third, fourth or maybe even fifth chance to succeed in life. For some of them, exploiting their bad-boy image is the only way to do that", said the Juice. In other words, Michael Vick, Barry Bonds and NBA referee Tim Donaghy's new identity will have a future in the public eye. Other obvious choices to fill out the cast would be suspected cannibal Mike Tyson, gambling junkie Pete Rose, 'roider Jose Canseco, rainmaker Pacman Jones, world-class jerk Kobe Bryant and apologetic racist John Rocker.
Critics, quick to scoff at the idea, point out that the show is "an impossible idea with no real potential for any level of success whatsoever", says media critic Miles Fenster. First off, Tim Donaghy's placement in witness protection would exclude him automatically and his absence would make Pete Rose lose all interest in trying to rake in all that cash from the fixed fights between Mike Tyson and Michael Vick's dog. Bonds and Canseco's endless arm-wrestling matches and crying spells would become tiresome as would Kobe's incessant looks of frustration. Footage of Jones making it rain would almost surely be unusable and John Rocker is quite simply an asshole that nobody likes. But most importantly says Fenster, "everyone would be a little too freaked out to be around O.J. that much." (Touche Miles, Touche.)
To that, one anonymous ESPN exec responds, "We've put worse crap than that on and rode the wave of success for a year or two. Hell, we air bowling! Bowling! People will watch what we tell them to watch!" ESPN writes them off as "haters", claiming that the players' oversized egos, inflated sense of importance and spontaneous roid rages could make for great TV. That is, until somebody gets an ear bitten off.
by Harold Throckmorton
