Every year at my alma mater, Notre Dame, they host a little confab called the Red Smith Lecture Series. Then they’re kind enough to print up said lecture and send it out to those of us who couldn’t attend. This year, the speechifier was Frank Deford, whose talk was titled “Sportswriter Is One Word.” At length, I expect they’ll post the speech online, but it’s not there yet.
I thought I’d share one joke from Deford, who complained about how, as technology improves, people seem happier to watch sports on TV rather than go to the games in person. Which brought him to the following observation:
Jerry Jones bought the Dallas Cowboys a 100,000-seat palace [ed: with the help of Arlington taxpayers], and then put a monster HD screen up over a large part of the field., which most everybody watches instead of looking down at the real thing in miniature below. Jerry Jones didn’t build a stadium. He built the world’s largest sports bar.
