Ted Leonsis vs. SportsTalk 980

I haven’t lived in Washington, D.C. since early 1995, but I follow my old friend Ted Leonsis’ musings on a regular basis. Ted was put off by when hosts of a talk show on SportsTalk 980 as he was headed, along with about 50,000 other people to see the David Beckham vs. DC United soccer match.

Beckham is a star in the international sense, had a movie named after him and married one of the spice girls and that’s the kind of star power we (the aggregate USA star-effer mentality) love.

The hosts on the talk show mocked the people who were going to the game. I understand the mentality: the jacked up attendance for that specific game (probably including Ted) is all because it was an “event” and had nothing to do with a love of soccer. We like the big events. It’s how the system works.

Unless the league can find 3-4 more players of Beckham’s star quality, and they won’t be able to without actually somehow creating the stars, it won’t matter. More to Ted’s real concern is hockey: he owns the NHL Washington Capitals, and has a loyal, but not huge fan base (especially compared to the NFL franchise, the Washington Redskins, but even the MLB and NBA franchises, and even some of the college teams have more of a following locally than the Capitals).

The problem for the NHL, in terms of sheer #’s is its lack of stars. Period. The end. Ted suggests that 980 was foolish for not embracing diversity of all sports leagues, and that it will perish into irrelevancy if it does not.

BIG DISCLAIMER: I love Ted. I’m serious. I have some genuine affection for the guy. He’s smart, charming, and funny and most definitely a “man of the people”, which I think is really cool. He says what he thinks and he’s authentic. I trust him. Plus, he’s been very helpful to me personally. He’s a great guy. But all that doesn’t add up to “he’s always right” and he’s wrong here.

First of all, 980 did cover the event, which I referred to as David Beckham vs. DC United because I can’t name a single other person on the LA Galaxy. I can’t name a single person on DC United either, unless Freddy Adu is still there and I believe the last I heard he was fleeing to play in a country that actually cares about soccer.

I think 980 covered this the way a Sports Talk station should've. They mocked the event nature of it. Sometimes, a part of human nature is that you get a lot more attention by insulting people than you otherwise would. This is a case in point. If they had simply celebrated the event as if it were the second coming of the Beatles, Ted would not have written about it for over the last week. The suggestion that sports talk needs to be diverse, especially in DC is likely folly. I believe 980 would have MORE listeners than it currently has if it said, “From now on, we talk about NOTHING but the Redskins! 365 days a year! All Redskins all the time!” The NFL is a big, big deal. Period. How big of a deal? The NFL DRAFT (yes, the boring ass draft!) was the second highest rated program on non-broadcast television the week it aired in April – edged out by the Sopranos. The NFL draft had MORE THAN THREE TIMES as many television viewers -- just over 5 million as the NHL Finals which had 1.4 million viewers.

The NHL has the same problem as soccer has. Not enough stars. Not nearly enough. Soccer has one. None of the NHL stars have the Q-Rating that Beckham has and only Alex Ovechken and Sidney “Sid the kid” Crosby have any Q-rating with the American public at all and again, not nearly as many people know who those guys are as Beckham and neither of them are in the public’s mind as much as Wayne Gretzky, Bobby Orr or Bobby Hull. The NHL is lacking good “Bobbys” these days! If the Capitals field a good team and are winning games, making the playoffs, etc., 980 will certainly cover the team locally. But the NHL has the bigger problem of lack of star quality. Even the most casual of sports fans can rattle off five NFL, NBA or MLB stars fairly easily. NHL? Soccer? NO FREAKING WAY.

Mark Cuban suggested to me via e-mail a couple of months back, and I believe not jokingly (though he might have been, I don’t think so) that the NHL needed to get Alex O. and Sid the Kid together with Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan. I think Cubes is correct. In the life imitates art department, fictional Entourage meets real life Entourage this week with Entourage star Adrian Grenier who plays Vinny Chase hooking his real-life star to the Paris Hilton gravy train. Paris is looking good by the way, perhaps incarceration is good for the skin.

I believe Ted would be better served by leading the NHL’s charge to somehow market its players to the broader public than solving the problems of a small sports talk radio station in DC. If successful, he will have killed two birds with one stone.

We Lie to Ourselves..but Why?

What we say: Pew: Consumers Tired of Celeb Scandals

What we actually do: Lindsay, Britney Boost Entertainment-News-Magazine Ratings

Please excuse me for being the kind of person who is more prone to believe in what we as a people actually do rather than what we say. What I am trying to decide between is whether:

1. by lying to ourselves as we do we are really, really holding ourselves back from progressing or

2. if lying to ourselves in this way actually saves us from extinction. I worry that the truth may make people more prone to killing themselves and others...

Forget the Calamari at Pacific Catch!

i'm glad hardly anyone is reading this blog yet because if it ever generates any traffic I could get totally sucked into my love of analyzing data. The amount of data available for free to find out who is looking at your stuff and why is fascinating to me. That someone wound up on my blog by searching on “iphone calamari” or “iphone pacific catch” doesn’t surprise me much because it was probably my friend Bill G.

But “Lindsay lohan excess” landing on something I wrote, no way that was Bill G. and I’m almost aroused at the thought of someone finding my writing as a result of THAT search. In my own way I have been trying to understand the pop culture and I had a 20 month or so project with a B-Team Lindsay Lohan from my own neighborhood (she’s actually probably degenerated to the point of C-team at this point, but really hasn’t Lindsay too?). I do in fact consider myself one of the world’s leading experts on “Lindsay Lohan excess”.

I’d rather write much more about getting the Simpsons pre-loaded on iPods and Apple TVs, but I do have some bandwidth (and expertise) for the excess that is Lindsay and Paris.

But the fact of the matter is this: if you are already IN the neighborhood where Pacific Catch is, you don’t want THAT calamari. It’s a fine calamari, it is. But it just isn’t special. If you want special calamari and are already in the neighborhood go for the chili encrusted calamari at Betelnut, you won’t be sorry.

Is It Better to Act Like a Dope?

I am fascinated by the way things actually work, mostly because it's frequent that I suppose they "ought" to work some other way. If you do blog or Google searches on "Paris Hilton" you get much more up to the minute coverage (probably by at least one order of magnitude) than you do if you do the same search for "Bill Gates". It boggles my mind.

While I certainly understand that many more men would buy a Playboy magazine because it had naked pictures of Paris Hilton than because it has an interview with Bill Gates (and personally I'd be thrilled with that particular issue for both reasons) the pop culture seems to "value" Paris more.

Some people would say that's because Paris is way more like the average person than Bill Gates. Oh yeah? Really? Is the average joe an heiress who could live off the interest income of her inheritance 25x better than the average person who goes to work, and that assumes she actually ever had to pay for anything? I doubt that.

I think it's more that Don Henley was right: "People love it when you lose, give 'em Dirty Laundry". If Bill Gates got caught up in some juicy sex scandal, he'd probably trump Paris and Lindsay going to jail, but Mr. Gates has the good sense not to act like a dope. At least not in public.

Paris, Lindsay, Britney, Donald, Rosie – they all have one thing in common. They're skilled at acting like dopes in public and still being able to capitalize on it.

I actually kind of like Trump, and I confess, I enjoy it when he talks smack to Rosie. But he seems kind of decadent. I mean I can imagine the Donald having a 2400 square foot shower, with fifteen 50" waterproof plasma screens installed and solid gold knobs and whatnot. The stench of excess (at least in his public persona) is all over him. I don't view Mark Cuban that way. I don't see him being excessive in that fashion. I mean invest in a new sports league? Sure, but TVs and solid gold in the shower, nah.

Why? Well I'm sure from Cuban's perspective and certainly my own, that kind of excess would just be dopey. Exactly the kind of dopey stuff we Americans seem to love, love, love in the popular culture.

I think the reason that The Apprentice did so much better than Cuban's own reality series is pretty simple: Cuban's not a dope. Trump may not be a dope either, but he seemingly has absolutely no problem playing the fool in public either. More often than not, we seem more interested in that kind of behavior than about people who actually know how to behave.

Bad behavior is more entertaining. I think I am coming to the conclusion that if your goal is to run a software company, or run a TV Network and an NBA franchise, acting like a dope is NOT better. But, if you want to be an entertainer, it seems like it's better to be a dope.

Seidman’s Law: You Should’ve Never Trusted Hollywood

Actually that isn't "Seidman's Law".

Seidman's Law is simply this: if the truth hurts, it's because you're doing something that you know (consciously or subconsciously) that you shouldn't be doing, but you're doing it anyway.

I bring it up here only because Mark Cuban's solution to "save the National Hockey League" which pretty much jibed with my own solution does wind up hurting me on some level. The beauty of this law, if you care in the littlest bit about improving your own self awareness is that if the truth hurts you, but you don't know why, that correlates 100% with you (or in this case, me) being in denial about it. So the truth hurts me because I'm in denial in some way about being such a hypocrite. And knowing the truth hurts, but not why means: denial and that is an awareness opportunity for me.

For those who care, Cubes solution to save the NHL was for the stars of the NHL to basically get involved with the likes of Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan and wind up showing up in People magazine (or at least the National Enquirer).

I agree it would probably work, but something about this truth – hurt me, so I listened to System of Down's "Lost in Hollywood" about 30 times and it came to me.

Lindsay and Paris are pretty foul people. I mean they are famous and attractive, but really, they are pretty vile. They have the whole world by the balls and yet, they still need to be showing up skanky and drunk all the time. To the tune of they are both going to jail for being the skanky, out-of-control drunks that they are.

You wouldn't want your kids going out with girls (or their male equivalents) like this, but even though Lindsay and Paris both act horribly vile, regularly, and in public to the point of J-A-I-L they still have enough value that they could save the NHL.

Where's my hypocrisy? Well…

Writing about Cuban, Paris and Lindsay is the only thing that wound up automatically feeding my blog postings into the "world". In this case the small world of people who care about the NHL, but I'm not against capitalizing on the value of Lindsay and Paris' skankyness, or cashing in on Cuban's cred either.

The hypocrisy on my part? I'm SO over it.

I'm totally down, just like the NHL should be, to use Paris and Lindsay to get attention. Damn if it doesn't seem to work.

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Update, I'm not alone: Media in frenzy over jail-bound Paris Hilton