Norm Chad's "Actually, Sports Are Bad" Column Is The Worst Piece Of Writing In The History Of The Universe
This is a commentary on Norm Chads recent Washingotn Post article about why sports are actually bad (I think). If you've already reached your maximum free views of the washington Post you can sign up for ExpressVPN.com/PFT and get three free months on your first year if you'd like.
Norm Chad, whose name literaly translates to Basic Bro, is what you get if you made Rick Reilly draw a painting of a clown that had to spend 20 years in Outer Space with a margartiaville fleshlight who got brought back to earth by accident and was forced to receive a lobotamy. You may know him as being the guy from the World Series Of Poker who requires a tape delay so he can write 30 diffrent variations of "a Queen on the river- now thats what my ex-wife made me call her every 28 days!"
Well it will shock you to learn that hes a BIIIIG C Columnist who rolls out of his hammock every fortnight to write what can only be described as the worlds laziest columns. And honestley- repsect to him for cashing that check. Peter King is a bootlicker for his bosses writing 5000 words every Monday about the nuttiness of west coast NFL teams staynig for two consecutive weeks on the east coast to practice, but Norm will sit down and crank out 400 words about the smell of his dogs fart and keep it moving. King moves.
His most recent COLUMN caused quite the stir online, racking up 9,000 replys to 345 RTs at the time this was written. The Thesis: "The pandemic has reminded us: We don’t need more sports in our lives — we need less", filed under "Perspective." The PERSPECTIVE tag is such a great way to let the reader know that your smarter than they are, and that your values are actually not as important as you thought because your not a columnist.
Perspective is a word that either gets brought up after you've suffered a humilating defeat and your brain is trying to trick itself into not hating your body, or if someone is trying to fact-check a dick pick using contextual clues as to camera distance. This column falls into the latter decsription. Lets get to it, in a homage to the old "Fire Joe Morgan" blogs Im going to break this down line by line:
A while ago — the exact year escapes me — I determined that someway, somewhere, in some manner or some fashion, most of us in America had somehow lost our minds.
Starting off accusing everyone of having a stupid brain by admiting that you forgot something is putting your balls on the table from the get-go. It takes a comendable ammount of laziness to not bother looking up the exact date of your first paycheck you received for being annointed as one of our nations best thinkers.
The nation is on tilt of late because we must stay home for a long, long time because of the novel coronavirus pandemic, also known to Alabamians and Georgians as the Don’t Even Think of Messing With the SEC Football Schedule pandemic.
Norm is correct on this acount, this virus made Nick Saban learn how to use email, next thing you know Norm will be using a thesaurus. Holy shit i just realized Sabans wife is named "miss terry" or "mystery"- is she real, is she like Melissandre? I dont know but I will find out.
Anyway, apparently everyone — and when I say “everyone,” I mean anyone within shouting distance of Skip Bayless or Stephen. A Smith — wants sports back ASAP.
Incidentally, speaking of shouting distance, does Shannon Sharpe ever whisper?
So far our sentence to paragraph ratio is a mind-boggling 1:1. Hes pitching a perfect game. Too many authors put fancy things like exposition or analysis in their claims and end up making big chunks of text that dont even give the reader time to say "makes you think" after every period. This is a product of the binge-reading plague that has swept the nation- lets learn to slow things down a bit.
Lets also note, this is the first time Norm deploys this atomic weapon of a rhetorical device- the asterisks followed directly by the explanaton for the asterisks- because tying together two thoughts with a sentence or a clause is what you pay divorce attorneys to do- not editors.
As for the content itself, I will try to figure out exactly what hes getting at here. I actually dont know. I dont understand what this whole introduction means. His job is to write 400 words, of which "heck" must be at least 75 of them, and I couldnt in good conscious testify under oath that I have understood any of them. I think hes saying that people who watch sports television would like sports to be back on television soon, which is obviously huge, if true. He then goes on to imply through his knowlege of Shannon Sharpe's vocal resonance, that Norm himself watches sports television. So to wrap up this thought- if you watch sports, then you like watching sports, except for Norm who enjoys watching sports but also doesnt.
Last week, the ESPN Coronavirus Lockdown Fan Study — that is its actual title, I swear on Chris Berman’s bible of nicknames — surveyed 1,004 adult sports fans, and 76 percent were in favor of sports returning even if spectators cannot be in the stands.
Is Norm going to cut the shit and explain to me what the fuck hes talking about anytime soon? 76% of sports fans like sports and would perfer to have them exist again, the other 24% of people who repsonded to the survey were cats that accdentally knocked the phone off the hook.
My buddy, Houston sports media bon vivant Fred Faour, wrote that the 24 percent against sports without fans “are what we respectfully call ‘dumbs.’” Faour wants any action back, like, yesterday and said, “I truly miss being in the stands for Roughneck games.”
He is referring to the Houston Roughnecks, an almost professional football team that played a total of five games in the late, unlamented second iteration of the XFL.
Thats the second asterisk followed in the very next sentence by a explanation of the asterisk. This is a And-1 mixtape of sportswriting. If he can weave in a Kardashian/Springstein comparison we have no choice but to stan.
If you dont parle le francais, "Houston sports media Bon Vivant" is french for "my friend I see at superbowls who shows up drunk to work and carved his own name on a papadeauxs barstool and has texted James Harden 499 consecutive times without a reply." I dont know Fred Faour, he might be a great guy but having Norm Chad describe your partying habits is like listening to Darren Rovell review pornography.
Seems as if this Fred fellow enjoys sports so much that he misses attending them. Quite the party animal. Norm on the other hand throws caution to the wind, and at risk of not being invited to the only party he goes to every year when Fred hypotheticaly gets his DUIs expunged, chooses to disagree smartly.
Im beginning to suspect this Fred Faour character might very well be a imaginary friend that Norm made up soley for the purpose of having someone to disagree with whimsically. I submit that Mr. Faour is a figment made up by Norm to be a buddy whose the only person drunk enough to laugh at his jokes. Like a mix of Dr. Vinny Boombatz and Hunter S Thompsons lawyer friend. The mind does funny things if your like Norm and you've alienated all your coworkers by constantly repeating your 1997 would-be smash hit headline of "Pig(skin) Latin: Lassie girl what is it? Little Timmy (Smith) fell down the El-way!" to any Jehovahs witness unlucky enough to knock on your door.
Meanwhile, former president Barack Obama, during a recent chat with former aides, said that the lack of sports is “driving me nuts.”
Now, Faour and Obama are two sharp guys — well, at least Obama is — but I am disappointed by their simplistic and shortsighted apocalyptic vision of a sports-free Sports Nation.
What a uncalled-for shot at our dear friend Fred Faour. Imagine you're Fred, just sitting at home inside Norms brain minding your own business trying to get drunk enough to die and Norm comes from the clouds to annhiliate you on a Sunday. Fred and Obama two peas in a pod sitting around wishing they had better things to do than be thought about by Mr. Chad.
The Sports worlds favorite Noted Chicago Resident has made his way into the discourse here, and its at this point that the column takes a very strange turn- likely because Norm typed the phrase "driving me nuts" and instantly called his agent to pitch a book title about how he dosen't watch NASCAR.
Believe it or not — and saying this might get me fired by the end of this sentence — we don’t need more sports in our lives; we need less.
Granted, I speak as someone less affected by the safer-at-home order than most; I went from self-isolation to self-isolation, so it’s no big deal.
Paraphrasing longtime sportswriter Kurt Vonnagut- usually semi-colons accomplish nothing except prove you went to college. But in Chad's case a semi-colon serves the valuable tool of letting you know Norm has checked out of his column mid-sentence again and is daydreaming about how much it would cost to patent a magic eye hawaiin shirt. Norm is like a guy who writes different parody versions of Weird Al songs and changes his vanity license plate 3 times a year to different catch-phrases from 20-year old beer commercials. With such a rich entertaining personalty like his, Norm is doing just fine without sports on his TV, thank you very much.
We've gotten to the crux of his argument here, Im sure there will be logic and reason to follow. Perhaps explaining how sports has cost him- marriages, relationships, nights spent in other types of media rooms that dont run out of diet coke. Lets see how he backs this up.
(Column Intermission: Late comedian George Carlin was born May 12, 1937; how is his birthday not a national holiday? Who spoke truth to power longer and funnier? His sports riffs were delightful. “Swimming is not a sport. Swimming is a way to keep from drowning. … Sailing is not a sport. Sailing is a way to get somewhere. Riding the bus isn’t a sport, so why the [expletive] should sailing be a sport?” George Carlin Day, my friends. Otherwise, I will settle for Don Rickles Day.)
Putting a genesis halftime show into your own column is such a good idea I wonder why no one esle thought of it before. If your reading this article in print form, this column intermission the only time you've been greatful that you get to take a break from the newspaper to stop taking a shit. If George Carlin knew that Norm Chad was writing less funny transrciptions of his jokes into columns about how a sportswriter enjoys spending all day on the phone with customer service agents from Etch-A-Sketch instead of watching basketball he would of made the 7 words you cant say on television Please stay tuned for more Norman Chad.
Actually, eating at home with family or friends is an uncomplicated, forgotten pleasure. In most of Europe for hundreds of years, entire evenings centered on the meal; food and conversation were entertainment enough. This worked quite well, spoiled only by World War I, World War II and Piers Morgan.
What the- where the fuck did this sentence come from? I had to check three times to make sure my browser didnt become self aware and destroy three paragraphs of terrible reasoning. Who is he debating with? I know the column intermission might make some people forget what they read on last weeks episode of the shittest words that ever fell out of a babboons butt, but I recall Norm leaving us with how he doesnt mind being alone all the time. Is going to continue that thought or is he setting it free like a dead firefly he accdentally smushed in his hand that he cant bring himself to acknowlege that he killed? The only reason families spent so much time at the dinner table with family in ancient europe is because they needed to decide which cousins to marry and spend time in prayer hoping their descendants wouldnt grow up to write disparaging remarks about a future magical box that sat in their living rooms playing competitions and reality shows.
Here in America, we have drifted. I saw a photo the other day of a fella in Raleigh, N.C., walking into Subway strapped with an M136 AT4 launcher.
What were the chances he ordered a veggie wrap?
Honestly floored by the fact he didnt devote a entire article to Meal Team Six just so he could use the headline
"Gyroic Effort."
What have we become?
I have no idea how we went from talking about less sports on television being a good thing, to a chicken-bacon-ranch hawk chowing down in a picture Norm saw on facebook but here we are I'm sure he'll stick the landing.
Naturally, we have become ESPN. But, honestly, though I try to blame ESPN for everything excessive and execrable, the boys in Bristol don’t shape our culture as much as they reflect it.
Alas, during this sports-dry pandemic, ESPN ranked the top 74 basketball sneakers ever worn by NBA players. I repeat — they ranked the top 74 sneakers ever. FYI: The Nike Foamposite Max, worn by Tim Duncan, was No. 47.
It must kill Norm to know that a million monkeys on a million typewriters for a million years will never be able to write anything worse then this column, or funnier than his name. I gotta be honest I have been lost for awhile here. Weve gone from Obama, to eating, to his made up friend hes not as cool as, to Scone Survivor, to shoes. I feel like if you write this column at any other point in history you would be arrested. Is this a Banksy? Am I being Banksied right now? It appears that Norm is upset that G.I. Dough is mad about public health and that correlates to ESPN programming but I know I must be missing something right? The sirens enticing song of irony has lured Norm into being mad that ESPN is airing sports adjacent programming during a period where there are no sports instead of replaying his late-summer World Series Of Poker Commentary.
I hate to admit it, but Norm has a point: He is probably not the intended audience for a show ranking the best shoes that dont honk when you sit down at your laptop ready to crank out some fire about how the worlds going to hell because your neighbors son isnt interested in your baseball card collection. When your right, your right.
Coming in June: the top 50 NFL pylons in history.
Elsewhere in ESPNdom, the Michael Jordan documentary “The Last Dance” has been a smash. Great TV, but it has been treated as a cross between “Hoop Dreams” and “The Last Waltz,” with various clips parsed endlessly like the Zapruder film.
You could make the same JFK analysis about this column: the bullet points he makes probly got ejected from a magazine at some point and theyre making me lose my mind. Also in true Zapruder fashion I am here to point out to you that if you accdentally clicked on his essay you can get out of it at the top corner of your browser by clicking back, and to the left.
Which brings us to binge-watching. I constantly get texts touting Netflix or Hulu shows. So I took in “Ozark.” “You like it?” a friend asked. “Looks pretty good,” I responded.
BTW Ozark is a great show- Marty Byrd literaly translates to "Rudy."
“How many seasons did you watch?” he inquired. When I told him I had only watched the first episode, I half-expected him to schedule an intervention because I had not binge-watched an entire season in just a night or two.
Here’s an interesting thought: How about binge-reading?
I'm really enjoying imagining Chad hitting control-s on microsoft paint after this walk-off ending and thinking to himself about how hes done it again.
This interesting thought is quite possibliy the loosest definition of an interesting thought in the history of brains. Heres a quick sample of more interesting thoughts than this off the bottom of my head:
-Whatever happened to that giant alligator that was spotted on that golf course every day two summers ago?
-Whats the word for that dark stripe down the center of an oat?
-When you're thinking about the color taupe
It is a hell of a way to end a hell of a column. "Oh you like television? You sound like my friend Fred who leads a depressing life of getting hammered and enjoying electronics. I perfer to engage in more academic pursuits like biting my hand off with my own teeth to prevent myself from making a Ozark money laundering joke about finding $20 in my jeans pocket out of the dryer."
In conclusion, Norm Chad has only watched one episode of Ozark because the Michael Jordan documentary is too long, and the idiots who get dressed up like the Bunisher like sports(?) and Norms alone all the time, which is actually good because it gives him more time to write his sports column about sports which you only watch if you dont understand midevil history. Hope that clears things up.
PS I may of been a little harsh on Norm so heres a nice quote from him along with a picture of him looking like Tony Kornheisers urologist to clean things up
