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Tuesday, August 15, 2006

Good news? The concept. Bad news? The practice.

As a person who will outright cheer for the announcement at the beginning of sporting events that says, "Please refrain from using foul language", I was thrilled to see this story:

The Bengals want to know who's a jerk

My first reaction was that this is desperately needed. It's already a little straining to go to a game. Between the crowds and the prices, you're already flirting with an uncomfortable time. But if you add in the element of possibly getting in a fight or having someone screaming, "Strike out the f****** hick!" every time Lance Berkman comes up to bat, and a supposedly fun night can go south really fast. So it's good to see that stadiums are making it easier to report people who are causing trouble.

But then you read the detail. The short of it is that they don't really have enough people available to field the calls, they aren't going to hire any more people to do that, and they don't seem too optimistic about the whole thing working out:

"'If 90 percent of the calls we're getting are prank calls,' he said, 'we need to re-evaluate this.'"

Translation: this is a short-term publicity stunt to try and get more families to come to the game.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

It's somewhat ironic that this plan is being launched by the most arrested team in pro sports, isn't it? The jerk store called, and they're out of Bengals!

Reid said...

HA! Though...maybe they need it the most? I wonder if, when you call the number, you get a computer voice that says, "If you are being harassed by a fellow fan, press one. If you are being assaulted by a Bengal, press two."

doug said...

I wonder if it's for a little more of a selfish reason such as this:

titans fans rip radio delay of game

of course, the announcers could always be the one that points out the jerk who just yelled "you !#$@#% suck ref!!" over the radio I guess.

Incidentally, this radio delay is really annoying - because if you are driving by the stadium on the bridge while listening to the broadcast on the radio, and you look on the big screen and see Vince Young throw a completion 12 seconds before it's broadcast, you really feel like you've been robbed.