hometown-columnists Page index.xml - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
Why Your Hometown Columnist Sucks: Peter Vecsey
Forgive the analogy, but it occurred to us that a Peter Vecsey column is a lot like going hunting with Dick Cheney. If you're loud and obnoxious enough to scare the little critters out of hiding and keep loudly blasting away, you're bound to hit something eventually. And those innocent people who ...
Why Your Hometown Columnist Sucks: Steve Serby
Yes, he once wrote that "if Tom Brady were a politician, he'd be JFK." OK, he once, on assignment at the 2001 Super Bowl, wrote an entire column off of radio quotes. OK, sure, he's at times jingoistic, hackneyed and wishy-washy. Yeah, yeah, it's true that Jets' quarterback Richard Todd once smacke...
Why Your Hometown Columnist Sucks: Randy Galloway
Out on the plains of Texas, the setting for John Ford westerns and Cindy Sheehan protest vigils, there once lived a writer who had a lot of promise. He was the kind of a man who would look you square in the eye and tell you want he thought, and be damned entertaining about it in the process. But s...
Why Your Hometown Columnist Sucks: Steve Kelley
"Steve Kelley looked at his column. He had only one sentence so far, so he hit the "enter" key and described it. Then he did that for the second sentence, and he was three paragraphs in. Soon, his column-inch target would be met. But not soon enough for Kelley." Our thanks to DMZ at U.S.S.Mari...
Why Your Hometown Columnist Sucks: Dan Le Batard
We've never met Dan Le Batard, but this is how we picture him: green makeup, pointy hat, always carries a broom. He's looking into a crystal ball, wherein a typical Miami Herald reader is stuck, motioning helplessly, calling: "Dorothy? Where are you?" Le Batard cackles, and flying monkeys then fil...
Why Your Hometown Columnist Sucks: Roger Brown
OK, it's just time to say it: Roger Brown makes stuff up. That's the word on the street anyway. When a veteran Northeast Ohio sportswriter such as Hal Lebovitz (and when we say "veteran," we mean "was the last person to interview Custer") levels the charge, we tend to give it weight. Said the late...
Why Your Hometown Columnist Sucks: Skip Bayless
We've been doing this feature for a while now, but this is the first time we've dressed in a tux to write it. Featuring Skip Bayless on Why Your Hometown Columnist Sucks is like having a play open on Broadway. Which play? Springtime For Hitler comes to mind — a subject so rancid, it can't help but...
Give Us Your Best Skip Bayless Stories
We've received a lot of feedback about our selection of The Boston Globe's Bob Ryan as today's bad hometown columnist, which can be broken down into the following percentages:...
Why Your Hometown Columnist Sucks: Bob Ryan
By all accounts, Bob Ryan was once a good writer. But then something happened. The molten lava, burning his features. The painful reconstruction. The cryptic words: "Rise, Lord Vader." Yes, Bob Ryan's journey to the dark side is now complete. With his ubiquitous presence on Around the Horn and Par...
Why Your Hometown Columnist Sucks: Peter Kerasotis
It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. It was the age of wisdom. Yes, you read that correctly. Wisdom. How did Charles Dickens miss the boat on this whole one-sentence paragraph thing? Clearly today's breed of sportswriters are far better wordsmiths than the old quill pen-and-in...
Why Your Hometown Columnist Sucks: C.W. Nevius
And now it's time for a new category: columnists who left sports to write for the living section but still manage to write about sports most of the time. Frankly, we're not sure why C.W. Nevius left the sports pages of the San Francisco Chronicle to begin with, but one day we looked there and he w...
Why Your Hometown Columnist Sucks: Stephen A. Smith
We're not even going to get into his show on ESPN, which we've well-documented elsewhere. We are here to discuss the many sins of Stephen A. Smith the writer, the columnist. The man absolutely refuses to back up any of his written assertions with sources or facts. A guy who routinely sends in colu...
Why Your Hometown Columnist Sucks: Jim Souhan
OK, we surrender. The white flag you see waving above the rubble means that we're coming out peacefully, kicking several weeks worth of Jim Souhan columns ahead of us. That's it, you've taken all the fight out of us. We have freaking had it with writing like Souhan's — the tortured prose; the slop...
Why Your Hometown Columnist Sucks: Bob Kravitz
OK, our problem with Bob Kravitz isn't that he's a terrible writer. (He isn't.) It's that too often he phones it in. No, check that — he often doesn't even bother to phone, instead stuffing his column into the backpack of a mental patient, who then wanders in the general direction of the Indianapo...
Why Your Hometown Columnist Sucks: Bud Poliquin
There must be a school out there, some sort of Hogwarts-inspired academy where columnists go to learn the art of lousy column writing. It can't just be a coincidence that our worst sports columnists, people such as Woody Paige, Jay Mariotti and this week's featured guest, Bud Poliquin, are all see...
Why Your Hometown Columnist Sucks: Bill Plaschke
We have seen Bill Plaschke's desk. Well, to be more precise, we haven''t actually seen the surface of the desk — just the refuse piled on top. We doubt that anyone working at the Los Angeles Times since the early 1990s has seen what's underneath. To best describe it, think Dennis Nedry's work stat...
Why Your Hometown Columnist Sucks: Bill Conlin
It's not so much that American newspaper editors want to employ mean-spirited sports columnists such as Bill Conlin; we're pretty sure it's the law. How else would one explain it? Every large paper seems to have its resident sports bastard, and Conlin fills that role at the Philadelphia Daily News...
Why Your Hometown Columnist Sucks: Jay Mariotti
"Never dull and always armed with an opinion ..." Beware those eight little words. When you read them, it can only mean: A) Ann Coulter has escaped her zoo enclosure and has written another book; or B) Your paper is promoting its circus freak show sports columnist. Jay Mariotti is one of these. He...
Why Your Hometown Columnist Sucks: Woody Paige
We hate to frontload this feature with such an apt subject — it's only our second one — and after Woody Paige there's really no place else to go, is there? After spending the last hour reading his old Denver Post columns, we're really kicking ourselves: We could have saved a lot of time and effort...
Sorry. We're Not Done With Mitch Albom Yet
Even though we wrote about it recently, we still can't stop thinking about that time Mitch Albom made up a bunch of stuff and turned it in as a column. Like, we're still supposed to read him after that....