If anyone’s looking for niches in television scholarship, y’all should check out some of the programming on sports talk tv. I know that might sound like going out on a limb that’s already attached to another limb, but there’s some really fascinating stuff happening with some of the smaller-budgeted shows.
A recent example is Dan Le Batard is Highly Questionable, which airs weekdays on ESPN 2 unless there’s a ball game. The show’s basic structure fits the mould of every other midday sports talk show: two or three columnists take different perspectives on a sports topic and engage in pretty predictable debates. The host, Dan Le Batard, is your fairly typical sports analyst. Articulate and animated, he possesses a respectable knowledge of sports history. Recently, the show added another popular columnist, Bomani Jones, into the mix. By themselves, these guys are pretty much indistinguishable from the likes of Tony Kornheiser, Michael Wilbon, Skip Bayless, and any number of big ESPN personalities.
The real draw to Highly Questionable is Dan’s father, Gonzalo Le Batard (a.k.a. “Papi”). Unlike Dan and Bomani, Gonzalo brings very little sports knowledge to the table. While Papi’s a sports fan, he doesn’t have to live up to any pretense of journalistic integrity. His personality is genuine. If he doesn’t like something, he says so. If he doesn’t know something about a subject, he makes something up on the spot forming very poor arguments, but also very funny sound bites.
Everyone has an uncle, father, or grandfather like Papi, and the show does a good job evoking that tight-knit, quirky family atmosphere. This is a very welcome departure from the typical debate-fueled tirades of Pardon the Interruption, ESPN’s First Take, and Around the Horn.
Papi’s age and heavy Cuban accent are often played for laughs, which might be viewed as exploitative were it not for the way in which Gonzalo and Dan interact so honestly as father and son. Dan often alludes to how his father defected from Cuba and supported his family by working manual labor jobs for minimum wage. And this personal history even informs some of their analysis of current events in sports – specifically Major League Baseball, which features a large number of Latin American players who don’t really have a representative voice in an overwhelmingly white-washed sports talk industry.
The excerpt above might not jive with your political stance, but when have you ever seen issues like this broached on ESPN? While obviously not representative of the show’s usual lightheartedness, this moment is remarkable for its restraint. No one is yelling, no one is debating – it’s just one man and his son offering a perspective which provides context to a larger cultural issue.
So check out DLHQif you need a laugh or if you want to see a unique approach to sports talk tv.
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