For a sport that isn’t being played and may not be played this year, Major League Baseball is still generating a lot of discussion. Unfortunately, most of that conversation is negative as team owners and players battle over salaries to be paid in a shortened season with no fans in attendance.
But that means I got to talk with an old friend, Clint Domingue on Acadiana’s 103.7 The Game, and we discussed MLB’s tendency to hurt itself in terms of promoting baseball.
Great to be invited by Wes McElroy back to The Fan in Richmond (910 AM, 105.1 FM) to chat about sports media. We talked a little bit about the next ESPN “30 for 30” film, Long Gone Summer, but I haven’t seen it yet so couldn’t offer much other than my own personal experiences watching the 1998 home run race between Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa.
But with the NBA and NHL returning soon (we still don’t know if MLB is coming back), Wes and I discussed what those telecasts might sound and look like with the broadcasters likely to work off-site from remote studios.
The times, they are a-changin’ — in our culture and, therefore, sports. Sports have always been a reflection of the society in which they take place — which is why the “stick to sports” cries have always been absurd.
It’s long overdue, but even the NFL is reading the room and acknowledging systemic racism in all aspects of our lives. Well, at least commissioner Roger Goodell seems to be. The other NFL owners? Not so much. Not as individuals yet. That was the main topic on Asheville’s WISE Sports Radio during my NFL segment with Pat Ryan and Mike Gore.
Like an inning full of walks and errors that never ends, the spat between Major League Baseball’s team owners and players continues as the calendar shrinks, making a 2020 season less likely every day.
On this week’s WISE Sports Radio baseball segment, Pat Ryan and I discuss the latest salary and schedule proposal from MLB owners to the players, which really isn’t different from the previous plans they’ve proposed. This continues to be dancing around a negotiation, not an actual negotiation process.
With the premiere of Bao Nguyen’s Bruce Lee documentary, Be Water, on Sunday (as part of ESPN’s 30 for 30 series), I thought it would be worth revisiting 1993’s Lee biopic Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story.
I’ve always been a Lee fan, though couldn’t call myself a diehard. But I certainly remember watching his movies on TV as a kid and marveling at an Asian guy kicking everybody’s ass (including Chuck Norris). Even my mother sat down to watch with me, and she never had much interest in the stuff I enjoyed.
However, my memory of Dragon — which I saw in theaters when it was released in 1993 — is that it wasn’t very good. My rewatch confirmed that opinion, maybe even more so now that I often watch movies with a more discerning eye.
I wrote about rewatching Dragon for Awful Announcing. An excerpt:
Continue readingThe kindest description of Dragon is that it’s a fairy tale telling of Lee’s story which takes significant dramatic license with real-life events and essentially turns his biography into a Bruce Lee action movie. That’s not to say that the film isn’t entertaining. But it strains believability to think that Lee (played by Jason Scott Lee) engaged in major action set pieces throughout his life.
Ian Casselberry 