When the football season begins anew, there are always a few tweaks that follow the first few weeks. Whether its Sunday afternoons or Tuesday nights at 9 p.m., serious tweakage needs to take place.
Kurt Warner went from the comfy confines of his starting position to the familiar surroundings of checkout lane nine. Hey Kurt, make it paper, and double-bag it, has-been!
The Giants are fooling around with Kerry Collins’ binge drinking schedule. Is it just me or does he always look like he walked into the locker room after taking off his mesh “wine ‘em, dine ‘em, 69 ‘em” hat following a three-day bender? But these changes pale in comparison to the change that needs to happen.
If you are a football junkie, like myself, then the odds are that you have watched ESPN’s new “dramatic series,” Playmakers. A gritty inside look at the world of professional football, Playmakers trods through its allotted hour. I mean, it’s not everyday that you get to see a star running back sneak into the bathroom of a crack house so he can freebase in peace, and blow lines off of his coffee table, in the same episode.
Playmakers attempts to take every sports clich? from the past few years and roll them into one. You’ve got your murderous-entourage subplot, the bothersome-steroid-testing subplot and the wife-beater subplot. Picture cellblock D of San Quentin in pads and you’ve got the three-ring circus that is Playmakers. The series derives its “drama” from the more compelling story lines such as quarterback Derek McConnell’s battle with an addiction to painkillers that leaves him with a kidney disease. I almost feel bad for him when the team doctor tells him with a wink that he can play because he was misdiagnosed. Almost. Because then I remember that in the episode before he was nailing some gorgeous groupie, yet couldn’t stop thinking about how much he sucked lately. Points to ESPN for tackling the topic with their gritty new show, but what’s so gritty about a player and some girl getting their freak on without showing us a little full frontal? HBO would have.
I watch Playmakers for the same reason I watch movies like The Program; the unintentional comedy rating is just off the charts. When Demetrius Harris, the running back, needs his crack-laced urine to be clean, he goes to a doctor for a little oil change via catheter. When the doctor grabs his junk, Harris flips out. This guy would blow a line off his car mat, but he flips when an MD tugs his third leg.
Thus far, Playmakers is the Ryan Leaf of television shows-lots of hype, but four games in and just a few ugly performances. So, ESPN, my advice to you is to take next episode’s script and throw it in a locker just like Leaf did with his piss-poor apology. At the very least, try and keep the freebasing down to a minimum so as not to become a how-to for aspiring athletes. Less drugs, more jugs!
