(This article originally appeared at Some Canadian Guys Writing About Soccer on March 21, 2010. Wondering what this is? Click here.)
While Saturday’s agreement between Major League Soccer and its players union on a new collective bargaining agreement was met with resounding relief from soccer fans across North America, there are some for whom the deal was a cruel and unexpected twist of fate.
“It really leaves us in the lurch,” said Pardon the Interruption co-host Michael Wilbon, of the deal which averted a planned strike by players on Monday. “That’s a whole segment we now need to re-evaluate and re-slot, on relatively short notice.”
According to Wilbon, Monday’s episode of the back-and-forth ESPN program was set to include a 45-second segment devoted to a discussion of the MLS strike, between Wilbon and co-host Tony Kornheiser.
The segment was set to begin with Wilbon summarizing the union’s grievances in a smug, dismissive manner, followed by a pronouncement that the strike was taking place (in a tone of voice conveying the idea that the entire matter was unworthy of his time), and concluding with a “throw” to Kornheiser, soliciting his opinions.
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Kornheiser was then scheduled to provide a brief, smarmy synopsis of the sport’s previous failures in America, followed by an increasingly loud and obnoxious string of five-to-nine-word statements expressing his sheer incredulity that anyone could possibly possess an ounce of interest in the strike, the league or the sport in general.
Kornheiser would then hit his crescendo, an explosion of agitation that Wilbon would even bother to waste his precious time raising an issue of such utter irrelevance, as soccer never has and absolutely, positively never will “catch on” in America.
Wilbon was then set to lazily and ineffectively play devil’s advocate, by reciting the names Landon Donovan and David Beckham — most likely without providing any variety of context — before referring to this summer’s upcoming World Cup.
As the time expired on the segment, Kornheiser would, in a bout of frustration, use the phrase “real sport” in such a manner as to suggest that soccer was not one, and that the subject of the next discussion was.
A preliminary script obtained by The Reserve Squad showed the initial phrasing to be: “I’m tired of talking about this (said in such a way as to lead viewers to believe that American sports shows were being insidiously overrun with discussions of soccer, whereas in reality, the 45 seconds devoted to the strike would have been the first mention of the sport on ESPN since last October), let’s move on to a real sport…”
With the strike averted, Wilbon said the PTI team briefly considered mentioning the new collective bargaining agreement, but have decided to instead replace the proposed MLS-related segment with a discussion of the jump-shot form of Murray State guard Isacc Miles.