Hold On, Honey, I'll Take You to the Hospital at Halftime: Confessions of a TV Sports Junkie - Softcover

Chad is a hilariously funny TV sports critic whose philosophy is that if something is worth doing, it's worth doing to excess. And clearly the opportunities for excess in his chosen field are enormous, what with ESPN, the World League of American Football, remote control and VCRs. Between sharp barbs at sports bars, New York City fans and his own tiny attention span--the fact that there are 44 chapters in his book, half of the pieces original and half reprinted from Sports Illustrated and elsewhere, supports his claim--Chad takes on chatty sportscasters and analysts, his bete noir being shrill basketball announcer Dick Vitale. But the bulk of the book combines delightfully self-deprecating observations about the failure of Chad's marriage as a result of his addiction to the tube with perceptive comments about the suitability of some sports to TV, reserving his most scathing remarks for golf ("the greatest thing for sleep since the invention of the coil-spring mattress") and hockey ("the puck looks like a runaway bread crumb").
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Chad has written about sports on TV for both Sports Illustrated and the now-defunct National sports daily. He uses the same technique to skewer TV sports as Ross Perot uses on politicians: offer a little praise to let folks know you're objective, then slap the snot out of the suckers. The spread of cable has spawned a nation of TV sports junkies, but what they watch is, frankly, often crap. Sometimes the sports themselves are at fault--truck pulls and celebrity competitions, for example--and sometimes it's announcers. Chad spends most of his time on the announcers who talk but have nothing to say, justifying their existence with endless banalities, non sequiturs, self-serving statistics, and trivia. Despite his constant stretch for laughs and one-liners, Chad exhibits a keen sense of televised sports-- what works, what doesn't, and how to correct it. Funny, provocative, and certain to be read. Wes Lukowsky