The New York Post‘s Phil Mushnick has a pretty interesting job; he berates the sports media establishment for a living. Although always sanctimonious, his articles are sporadically entertaining. However, if one makes a career of ripping others in one’s profession, one must be extra careful not to invite similar scrutiny. In today’s column, Mushnick takes ESPN’s Matt Winer to task for mispronouncing “Wheeling.” (And we all know from that Al Jaffe is not particularly tolerant of mispronunciations.)
After leveling his criticism, Mushnick follows with this sentence:
While we understand that the NHL is in no position to push any TV network around, this latest deal, with the Outdoor Life Network, ain’t gonna make the NHL rich yet gives OLN a lot of exclusivity, the kind that will shut fans who care most out of games they most want to watch.
Wow! That’s an impressive exercise in obfuscation. I had to re-read that one sentence four times just to understand it.
Finally, Mushnick veers off course and offers a compliment:
Adam Shein, who talks football on Sirius and is fluent in several sports when weekending on WFAN, Saturday was chatting with White Sox GM Ken Williams when Williams said he’d been ripped for trading Carlos Lee to Milwaukee for Scott Podsednik. Shein told him that he was among those who had ripped him. Not that Williams knew or cared, but that kind of honesty is rarely heard on FAN.
That seems nice enough. The problem is that the broadcaster he mentions doesn’t exist…at least not with that spelling. The person who merited what practically amounts to effusive praise is not Adam Shein, but rather Adam Schein.
Phil Mushnick is the best!