My biggest problem with Rome, the few times I’ve listened to him, is the amount of dead air on his radio show. He’ll make a statement and let it just sit there for 5 or 10 seconds and, with his inflections, it seems like the signal was somehow dropped.
JR monologue:
*We’re going to have David Stern on the show later on this morning. Big things going on right now in the NBA…
(5 seconds of silence…is he covering the mic and talking to the producer?)
There’s the Finals, of course. Durrant…awesome. Lebron…going for his first championship. The Draft.
(Another 10 second gap.)
Not a surprise at all that the NBA-owned Hornets got the first pick, right? No, nothing fishy about that.
(Another gap.)*
And so on, but with his sense of humor, which I obviously can’t convey. It’s been a while since I’ve heard him, so maybe it’s changed. But it was like Chinese water torture for me to actually listen to his show, so that’s why I’m not a fan.
I don’t dislike him for any particular incident. I dislike him entirely based on his own public personality, his chosen manner of addressing issues, and the like. He’s a fucking gabber who speaks with the brash confidence of a jackass. I hate all people who do shows like that. I hate the topics he chooses to talk about, what he says on those topics, how he says it, and the accent he says it in. I hate the way he talks to other people. I hate the way he pronounces his own stupid Jim Rooom name. If I knew someone like him in real life, I’d do my best to avoid him like the plague just to avoid hearing him speak.
Meh, I generally don’t buy the “see it a lot out there” trope.
Reading Zach Lowe’s column, I was surprised he wasn’t familiar with the ol’ “Have you stopped beating your wife?” rhetorical device. I thought that one had been around forever.
I don’t think the NBA draft has ever been fixed. I do think David Stern is a greedy arrogant asshole who has pushed NBA referees into an untenable corner by demanding ‘star treatment’ of certain players.
Has Rome or anybody else ever found any evidence that the 1985 lottery (the first conducted with more than two teams so they used envelopes) was fixed? Any witnesses or participants ever come forward? Or explained how it was done?It’s been 27 years and you would think someone would have come forward by now if it was fixed. The Knicks had a one in seven chance of getting Patrick Ewing. Maybe, just maybe, they got honestly lucky. A more accurate explanation was that since it was the first, they didn’t think the ramifications through enough to give worse teams a greater chance of getting the pick. But that doesn’t fill talk radio or message boards.
Of course not. As far as I know, the evidence is as follows: people say the Knicks’ envelope looks hard (“frozen”) in YouTube videos of the drawing, and the Knicks got the first pick.
Is there even a plausible method for fixing the NBA draft lottery? There aren’t team balls anymore in the ping-pong machine, so you can’t rig it by having one team’s balls be heavier or lighter (or whatever causes the machine to select it). There are numbers 1 through 14, and you draw four of them, for a total of 1001 combinations. One combination is blank, and the other 1000 are assigned to the teams. AFAIK the teams are assigned numbers randomly, so you would expect any given number (say, 8) to be present in the winning formula for most or all teams.
If teams can verify that the number distribution is indeed random and/or distributed evenly, then how do you rig the lottery? Basically, all the teams, journalists and accountants in the room would have to be “in” on it. I can’t conceive of a physical way to rig the system.
Yeah, I was specifically referring to the current lottery system, not the previous ones (in addition, it used to be “team balls” so in theory you could weight one team’s balls to make them more likely to be drawn).
Yeah, my conspiracy theory about the draft lottery is that Stern secretly hires people to make lots of complaints and noise about it being fixed (when there’s very little evidence and some clear and open procedures for fairness), in order to distract everyone from the incompetent/personally biased/star treatment/I’m not saying for sure it’s fixed but inexplicably one-sided in key games/arrogantly opaque refereeing, for which there is so much evidence that I only wonder about the kind of pressure put on ESPN, etc. by the league to not talk about it.
I live in hope that one day one of Stern’s minions accidentally gets Bennett Salvatore or someone so mad that they publicly spill the beans about where exactly all the NBA refereeing bodies are buried (I assume that blackmail is the only reason he’s still employed by the league).
I had a roommate a few years back who was really into Jim Rome and played him all the time. The guy is an insufferable cocknugget; a tough-talking, alpha-posing, metrosexual narcissist, with all the wit, grace and joie de vivre of a rotting mackerel.
Rome, that is. Though the roommate was no jewel, either.
I’m not interested in “converting” people to Jim Rome fans. You like (or don’t like) what you like. But I am curious regarding the Rome haters… who do you listen to? furt’s description is partly hyperbolic and partly the domain of all sports radio. Very few are shrinking violets. Sports radio guys tend to talk tough.
What I like about Rome is what he’s not. He doesn’t pretend to know or like every sports personality out there, like Dan Patrick. He has a hard line against homophobia and sexism. Those two, especially the latter, are hard to find in sports talk. When our local guys come on in the afternoon and they banter about hot chicks and the like, it’s so regressed compared to how Rome deals with women and women athletes. The guests he brings on are genuinely funny, and he usually can extract good interviews from them. (There are some legendary bad interviews that he references, like Alonzo Mourning - so he’s not afraid to mock himself.)
He generally carries the show himself - he doesn’t need a sidekick or annoying sycophants (Dan Patrick again). I guess the drops are an acquired taste - either you like soundbites from Allen Iverson or Mike Gundy, or you don’t. But I think the callers tend to be really funny and interesting. Or so bad, they’re funny and interesting.
Last, I think he’s been very impressive in how he dealt with Stern. It’s pretty clear they’re not going to be talking anytime soon. When Stern took a run at Rome and said he was a hack, essentially, Rome called him out. He didn’t laugh it off, or change the subject. He didn’t pout. I think he handled it about as well as someone could when they decide to go dick during a live interview. People have called in decrying Stern for the “beating your wife” comment and Rome’s been very adamant in educating the audience what that idiomatic expression means. If he was a dick he could have claimed sexism and demanded an apology from Stern for insulting him or his wife. He also made a great point about Stern’s sudden disdain for Rome - if he’s such a hack, why has he been on the show so many times?
When I think of the sports radio personalities out there - Patrick, Mike & Mike, Cowherd, Smith - I generally can’t stand to hear them for more than a few minutes at a time. Actually, I don’t mind Mike & Mike, but I’m not trying to find them on the radio, either.
And 90% of them are assholes, in one way or another.
90% of them are assholes, too.
Mike and Mike is harmless fun. Most of the rest of sports radio is Budweiser for your mind: flavorless adolescent crap that actively kills your brain cells. Saying Rome is not as big an asshole as the rest of the cretins (Cowherd, etc) is pretty damn faint praise.
