I haven’t really followed the local sports media much over the past couple of years. The last time I regularly checked in, Wilbon was still handling quite a bit of the paper’s Redskins columns, and it was clear that he was intensely bored by it. A professional disdain for home team jingoism and fatigue from the formulaic but necessary cycle of columns that a bad local franchise necessitates combined to produce columns that were mostly about how much he hated writing them.
I figured the turnover since then would have improved things, but holy crap is today’s Mike Wise column a piece of garbage. It’s like he was having a competition with his colleagues to see how many sentence fragments he could get past their editor. Also, take a moment and contemplate the horror of the phrase “and who this team really cannot get the ball enough to”. Is it possible to write that clause any more awkwardly? Did anyone even read this before it went to the presses?
I realize that many sports reporters get bored with sports. That’s probably inevitable. But it’s still a pretty cushy job — show at least a little effort.
HMM: Charles tells me that he thinks Mike Wise ran a triathlon on the day that he had to write that column. If so, its quality is a bit more understandable. Presumably his editor was similarly indisposed (boxing match?).
Ha, read his column this morning and had pretty much the exact same reaction. I had to re-read every paragraph because I couldn’t understand what he was talking about. The whole thing reads like they accidentally published the outline to his column rather then the actual column itself.