Goodbye, Pat Summerall

[Grouch]

Pat Summerall, who has been involved with the NFL as a player and broadcaster for 50 years, announced Tuesday that the Super Bowl on Feb. 3 will be the last game he will work with John Madden.

Click the link for the full LA Times story.

So, quick poll....will you be glad or sad to see him go (at least from this particular gig)?

[kurt_messick]

From the title of the strand, I thought he had died. Hmmmm....

[mrisch[$]]

Not glad, but the time is definitely overdue. Madden and Summerall are past their prime by 5-10 years. They get player names wrong, they don't know the new rules, they are just not very good anymore. It's really too bad.

(A little repost from my weblog...)

Looks like Pat Summerall is hanging up his headset.

There goes the only person to be able to handle John Madden in the broadcast booth alone and unarmed. Even if OJ Simpson were to show up in a mask with a knife, Madden would end up showing OJ some place very tender where the bloody glove might fit. Summerall and Madden have been the two kings at opposite ends of the card, and yet a single powerful entity together. You don't find partnerships like that often... Penn and Teller, Siskel and Ebert, Tracy and Hepburn, and Captain Lou Albano and Cyndi Lauper come to mind.

I'd like to see Chris Collinsworth in there with Madden next season, only for the sheer joy in the knowledge that the FBI won't negotiate with hostage-takers and pieces of Collinsworth will get slid under the door through all four quarters without a break.

Summerall said so much with so few words. Knowing when to be silent was what he was best at, refusing to wallpaper the "dead spots" with unnecessary facts, figures, and stats. You could actually hear the crowd and the boom-miked grunts of the colliding players. These days, play-by-play announcement ends up drowning out the actual event. Nattering retards like Don Criqui, Isaiah Thomas, Magic Johnson, and Paul McGwuire detract from the game, not enhance it. It's usually better to turn the sound down on the TV and look for audio from the real play-by-play veterans, the radio folks.

Not only does this apply to sports, but it also applies to those live events you see on television instead of your soap operas and actual useful news content. I don't give a rat's ass what intersection Carjacker Joe is being chased through now... if I am watching, I'm not on the road. If I'm actually on the road and watching, I'm probably a worse danger than the jackoff in the stolen car. [local reference removed]

The rest of the time, it's just noise. Pat Summerall will leave behind a gigantic void in football coverage, which others will all-too-easily fill, much to every viewer's detriment.

(As for Madden-Summerall getting player names and rules wrong, the player names are supposed to be "spotted" by support crew, which probably have been cut back due to cost-cutting measures. The rules, well, nobody knows the new rules.)