By Scott Buckner
Back in the day – which in Internet time amounts to maybe two days ago – there was this neat little sports show called The Best Damn Sports Show Period. Granted, I’m not much of a sports freak – or even mildly dispassionate (or hell, even apolitical for Chrissakes) about any televised sports programming, for that matter. Unless maybe it involves race car crashes or women wearing really short uniforms.
At any rate, back in the day, the non-sports guy that I am actually liked Best Damn when Tom Arnold was left to bounce around all willy-nilly to wherever he ended up. And I was pretty enamored by the show in a month or three ago when Best Damn featured Thursday night chick boxing. This is why I was mystified at last night’s Best Damn show, which happened to be airing – without sound – on Comcast SportsNet on the TV sets of the two local gin mills I stopped into for a quick nip before going home at a sensible hour.
Simply put, it was an hour or so without mentioning a damn thing about sports. Instead, I saw Pamela Anderson and magician – oops, illusionist – Hans Klok promoting their Las Vegas show, The Beauty of Magic.
At first, I thought someone resurrected singer Rex Smith’s career, but that was just me being nearsighted. See what happens when Siegfried and Roy take a hike? Perfectly good American sports-talk TV shows get infiltrated by guys with windblown hair who can saw a chick in a box in half. Who knows? Maybe Hans is sensational enough to make something as massive as Pam’s tits disappear, because hear told, Hans is world-famous for being “the fastest magician on the planet.” He’s so fast, in fact, that his Wikipedia entry is the quickest read of the bunch, and still he’s managed to reach the status of being an international sensation in Europe.
Then again, so has David Hasselhoff, who has been quoted as saying, “Where’s Austria?”
So what the hell. Even for this non-sports fan, there was certainly no shortage last night of interesting sports topics to go around. Over the past week alone, Barry Bonds has been ready to bitch-slap Hank Aaron out of the Home Run Hall of Fame, steroids or not. TV wrestler Chris Benoit was chock full of steroids and pharmaceuticals when he killed his wife, son, and himself. Internet bazillionaire/Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban wants to buy the Cubs and give this city a bitchin’ circus bigger than Bill Veeck could ever dream of. It’s almost August and the Cubs are over .500. Tiger Woods has been looking awful tired as a new dad and couldn’t get it up at his own golf tournament. And the American Women’s National Team is kicking China’s ass in the KFC World Cup of Softball in Oklahoma City.
On top of that, just last weekend NASCAR ran the USG Sheetrock 400 in Joliet, which begs the question of whether NASCAR is anywhere near as good as Indy car racing if women don’t spend three days drinking like fish and flashing their tits in the infield like they showed up just a little too late for Mardi Gras.
Instead of healthy and manly sports-related debate like that, we get Hans and Pam lounging around a pool with a bunch of highly attractive bikini bunnies in the background who do little more than serve as silent background wallpaper for the magical couple. Pam spends a lot of time passing the microphone around to a circle of guys in poolside chaise lounges who look more at home in an MTV video. Are they sports guys? Rap guys? Homeless guys with baggy shorts? I’m not sure. But Pam’s laying all over them anyway, passing herself around like a big bag of Fritos and – strangely enough – looking rather repulsed any time someone other than Hans touches her. She’s clearly into Hans, which is where I guess you end up when even Kid Rock can’t shine up your star anymore. Kid Rock’s career was fine as it was without Pam Anderson; without Anderson, Hans Klok looks like just another hitchhiker along the Autobahn.
Hell, Hans doesn’t even bother trying the old Pull A Quarter Out Of Your Ear gag on anyone. And he calls himself a magician?
Take whatever side you want in the debate over whether Criss Angel really pulled a tourist’s rolled-up peso out of a banana on Mindfreak, he’s not wasting valuable sports-talk time – even for someone who pays as little attention to sports as I do.
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The What I Watched Last Night collection: No illusion.
Posted on July 18, 2007