Friday, February 1, 2013

Congratulations to X Games. You have completed your journey

Well, the X Games finally did it. They X'd a kid. Caleb Moore - at 25, an aging veteran - died yesterday, the result of attempting a back flip on a 500-pound snowmobile. What a tragedy! ESPN feels terrible. It's just so sad.

It's. Just. So. Sad.

Manslaughter. I say manslaughter. I say somebody in a suit needs to go to jail. If you fill a pool with sharks and assure kids they'll get on network TV if they jump in, you'll get takers. But make no mistake here: YOU are the shark. YOU are the one sniffing the blood.

Oh, my... How dare we speak such anger in this time of mourning? Can't we see how bad ESPN feels? Why... they've set up a web page to raise money for the family! What humanitarians! The quality of mercy hath not been strained. (And watch the ratings soar.) Obviously, they have a plan: Do to Caleb Moore what the NFL tried to do with Pat Tillman, that is - create a martyr, hold a memorial, donate books to the library, build a statue, create a savior for every kid who dreams of getting laid by doing somersaults off a cliff.

Listen: We all know that testosterone-pumped teens think they are invulnerable. In every group, there is a kid who is willing to drink piss or eat the light bulb. And ESPN was delighted to hand out its fruit jar full of urine. Year after year, you could bank on the X Games coming up with a new and more dangerous competition. They must have watched "Jackass" for inspiration. And everybody watching had the same sense: "Eventually, somebody's going to die here."

Yesterday, on YouTube, I watched the death of this kid.  You can, too.

What kind of industry exploits death? And about that fundraiser site for the family to pay its medical bills? WTF? A network beams his death on national TV, and the contestants have to scrounge donations to pay the medical bills? You gotta be kidding me.

Manslaughter. Somebody in a suit should go to prison.

2 comments:

Alphonso said...

Well the country doesn't want national health care. That's why they have a web site to pay the bills.

What bills? The kid died.

Gas for the ambulance?

Bye Bye Balboni said...

So it's come to this -- there's so little Yankees news that we've been forced to discuss the X Games.

This is a tragedy on more than one level.