Stutter
The channel is on Comcast Sports Net at the bar and we just heard The Other Adrian Peterson speak for the very first time. No one knew he had a speech impediment. The reporter asks Adrian if he's prepared to replace Cedric Benson at running back for the rest of the season and poor Adrian Peterson, he looks terrified to reply, not because he doesn't think he's up to the task, but because the first word he inevitably spits out is "Well," which results in him trying his damnedest to enunciate the "w" sound for an uncomfortable 20 seconds. We see him sweating and pinching his forearm. We all know he's going to cry himself to sleep tonight.
I'm telling everyone how it reminds me of former Chicago Bull Ron Harper, who once scored 22 points in a come-from-behind victory sometime during the mid-1990s, which made him the [insert random company here] Player of Game, so they stopped him for an interview right as the buzzer sounded. Like Adrian, Ron also had a crazy stuttering problem. I'm not sure what Ron was trying to say to the reporter, but I know it started with a "C" or a "K". He just stood there in the middle of the court, with the reporter's mic all up in his face, twitching and fluttering his eyelids repeatedly as he went, "K-k-k-k-k-k-k-k... K-k-k-k-k... I-I-I th-th-think that MOOP! Mmmmmmmmmuh-muh-muh moop! K-k-k-k-k..."
And the reporter just nodded and smiled in pity.
And Ron kept trying, HE TRIED OH SO HARD. As he attempted to finish his sentence you could see the mic get heavy in the reporter's hand. Finally, the reporter decided to just walk away. And while the theme music played as they prepared to cut to commercial break, we could briefly see Ron in the background, standing at center court, a twitching mess. We all knew that Ron remained there for the rest of the evening, stuttering to nothing but his own echo as the stadium emptied out and the janitor eventually turned off the lights to the building, slamming the double doors shut.
I remember rolling around on my living room floor when I saw that as a kid, laughing my happy ass off at Ron Harper, kind of like tonight at the bar during the Adrian Peterson interview.
Tonight, when it becomes very clear that Adrian won't be able to get through the interview, the reporter touches him on the arm to stop him and shrugs and turns to the camera and quickly says, "Back to you, Gail!" Everyone at the bar explodes into a giggle fit, followed by a chorus of impersonations. I look around with a grin on my face, and I think to myself, I'm going to hell, but at least I won't be the only one.
RSS
5 Comments
Bears are full of horrible speakers. You ever hear Devin Hester talk?
Oh boy, that's hilarious. I feel equally as bad for the reporter as I do for Adrian Peterson.
You ever wonder how real-time closed captioning works? I do, all the time. Who are these people that type what TV people say? How does one get a job like that? Are these people basically stenographers, only instead of prim old ladies it's fresh-out-of-college stoners typing furiously on laptops in darkened TV studio offices?
There's more to my visualization: these are guys who are so broke they still donate their plasma for gas money, but they were fortunate to have grown up chatting on AIM for half of their lives, so their one bread-making talent is typing at 80 wpm -- hence the gig doing real-time closed captioning.
Anyway, so I was thinking about that this morning, and really wished that the TVs at the bar I was at had real-time closed captioning, because that would have been amusing to see what was typed.
Probably something like this: "...????????????????????????"
That is all.
You can blog better than this, Pete.
Furthermore, your "real-time captioning" response/comment further proves my point. See that? See how that worked? I repeated the word "Further" twice. It really gets down into... something. :)