More fallout from the launch of WJFK as a sports station: Dan Snyder’s WTEM will give Joe Theismann a show starting next week, after the Redskins first preseason game. The new program will air Mondays at 8 a.m., meaning it’ll pre-empt the syndicated “Mike and Mike Show.” That move is surely Snyder’s attempt to match WJFK’s emphasis on local local local sportstalk.
Theismann can talk, though not everything he says is intentionally brilliant.
His most famous quote: “Nobody in the game of football should be called a genius. A genius is somebody like Norman Einstein.”
Man, that never gets old.
But the most interesting thing about Snyder’s hiring of Theismann is: What will it do to the station’s rumored addition of Tony Kornheiser? Theismann’s gotta loathe Kornheiser, since Kornheiser got him kicked out of the ESPN’s “Monday Night Football” booth.
Can they share call letters after that?
(AFTER THE JUMP: People are still willing to show up at FedExField? Has Michael Vick renewed his subscription to cockfighting mags? John Scheinman and Rachel Alexandra, summering together? AAU really is crushing DC high school summer leagues? Nats win AGAIN?)
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Sunday’s D.C. United/Real Madrid game will put another test to Dan Snyder’s latest traffic/parking scheme. The stadium failed a test during the Paul McCartney show last weekend.
And about 20,000 more fans than showed up for McCartney could show up for the soccer game. Should be fun!
Over at Snyder’s message board, extremeskins.com, the fans have been worrying about traffic for the 2009 football season already for a while now, though the Redskins opener against St. Louis is still more than a month away.
Faith in Snyder is such that NOBODY thinks the new game-day rules he put in for the upcoming season, which include Lexus lanes for high-rollers and tailgating restrictions on commoners, coupled with a new parking lot layout, will produce anything less than a disaster.
“Oh, christ, I may attend the opening game just to see this play out,” wrote the always wise poster Lombardi’s Kid Brother. “It’s going to be ‘Escape from New York’ in the parking lot.”
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The U.S. Postal Service has proposed banning cockfighting advertising from the mails. That would kill off magazines dedicated to lovers of watching drugged up and bladed chickens slash each other up. (The big mags in the trade are Gamecock and Grit & Steel, neither of which my dentist gets.)
If this proposal goes through, how long before the Man takes on “human cockfighting“?
And what will Michael Vick read while he’s waiting for his phone to ring?
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I recently wrote about the decline of summer league high school basketball in DC. There was a time when it ruled, as illustrated in all the attention paid a game in late June 1970 between John Thompson’s St. Anthony’s squad and Morgan Wootten’s DeMatha at Jelleff’s boys club off Wisconsin Avenue. Throw in Adrian Dantley, then a sophomore at DeMatha, and you’ve got three future members of the basketball Hall of Fame in one high school summer league matchup.
Those days are long gone, however. Eddie Saah, longtime Wilson AD and a guy who ran several successful high school summer leagues around town since the 1970s, told me that the drop off in interest is in proportion to the increase in importance of AAU and travel teams, which suck the talent out of town over the break.
Well, let’s look at how some players on late-model DeMatha squad spent their summers: James Robinson, who’ll be a sophomore this fall, was a member of the Team Takeover squad that just won first place in the 16&Under division of the Super Showcase AAU national tournament. Quinn Cook, an upcoming DeMatha junior and member of the USA junior national squad, went with his DC Assault team to the semifinals of the AAU National championships in Las Vegas. Rising junior Mikael Hopkins and senior Stags teammates Victor Oladipo and Jerian Grant played for 17 & Under Team Takeover squad that won their division of the Super Showcase championships in Orlando. Grant was named MVP of the tournament.
If Dantley were playing high school ball today, he’d have spent most of his summer out of town, also.
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At the beginning of the year, John Scheinman lost his regular freelance gig covering horse racing for the Washington Post when the newspaper became like all but a few papers and stopped regarding racing as newsworthy.
Scheinman was bummed at the time.
But these days, getting canned by the Post seems like the greatest thing that ever happened to Scheinman.
He’s spending the rest of the summer working for the New York Racing Association in the press office at Saratoga, living in a rented carriage house by a lake and watching the best racing the game still has to offer. And getting paid!
That’s a good gig.
And, of course, there’s the gambling.
“I haven’t cashed a ticket yet,” Scheinman wrote me from the great track last weekend, “but dying here, O is a sweet death.”
If he still had the Post duties, Scheinman would be spending hot August days at Laurel Park. Poor, pitiful, Laurel Park. Instead, he’s rubbing shoulders with Rachel Alexandra, who is also summering in Saratoga.
Good on you, JS!
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The Nats come back again! From Six Runs Down to a 12-8 win! They’re the ones doing the brooming! With the win, they’re only 14-and-a-half games out of second-to-last place! You gotta believe!
This team is AMAZING lately! And not “amazing” like the Amazin’ Mets or the Amazing Randy, where “amazing” really means “suck-ass”!
Irony-free amazing! This is getting exciting!
Aw, damn. Forgot. It’s football season…
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