Baseball Musings
Baseball Musings
April 10, 2008
Mayne-ly Funny

In my time at ESPN, I don't remember working much with Kenny Mayne, but I remember liking him very much. Almost all the anchors I worked with were good people. They had the occasional conniption, as the videos of Chris Berman that popped up on YouTube can attest. I can't say I ever heard Kenny utter a mean word, or knew anyone who didn't love working with the man.

As you may or may not know, Kenny and his wife lost a set of twins. It was devastating for them, and Mayne took some time off after the tragedy. Eventually, the couple did have a child. To celebrate, Kenny bought ice cream for ESPN. He sent the owner of the local ice cream parlor to the Bristol studios with tubs of ice cream, and everyone got to make a sundae.

On top of everything else, Mayne is hilarious. So I was very happy to receive a copy of An Incomplete and Inaccurate History of Sport: . . . and Other Random Thoughts from Childhood to Fatherhood. By luck, I opened to the chapter on rowing. I was a coxswain in college, so I identified with this:

In rowing, a bunch of men or women sit in a boat and row as hard as they can while another person, the coxswain, yells at them to row even harder.

Continuing:

For some reason, it's a real big deal at prestigious colleges such as Harvard. Most of the kids who go to Harvard are really smart and will end up owning boats driven by other people, though no oars will be involved and there won't be that much yelling. You'd think, being so smart, all the people at Harvard who want to be on the rowing team would try out for the part where you get to yell at people to row harder than they already can. It's management training.

The book has a foreword, a backwords and a forward, all designed to frustrate delay Canadians from getting to the first chapter, Ice Hockey. Kenny, a former football player writes five chapters on tackle football, including indoor tackle football and electric tackle football.

It's a funny look at the sports we know well, and an even funnier look at the sports we don't know at all.


Posted by David Pinto at 04:43 PM | Books | TrackBack (0)
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