Sometimes you'd just like to be in the room.
Sometimes you'd like to be sitting at that shiny table with the panoramic view of the great metropolis on the other side of the windows, and hear how the Big People make Big Decisions. How they get granular. How they circle back around. How they run it up the flagpole and see who salutes.
And so here is how I imagine it went when ESPN's Big People decided to give America another splendid documentary to lift its spirits in the time of the Bastard Plague, following up the critically acclaimed "Last Dance":
BIG PERSON NO. 1: Well, boys, what do we do for an encore? America still needs to be uplifted in this time of plague and madness, and we're just the ones to do it! Thoughts?
BIG PERSON NO. 2: How about Tom Brady?
NO, 1: Already in the pipeline.
NO. 2: Oh, yeah. Forgot.
BRATTY JUNIOR BIG PERSON: Tom Brady? Borrrr-ing.
NO. 1 (ignoring the Brat): Other thoughts?
(A cascade of voices, all talking over one another. "Tiger Woods!" "Peyton Manning!" "Brett Farv-ra!" "Big'un Darly!")
NO. 1: Who the hell is Big'un Darly?
UNIDENTIFIED BIG PERSON: Sorry. I forgot. He was just a character in a Dan Jenkins novel.
NO. 2: How about Lance Armstrong?
NO. 1 (rolling his eyes): Gee, I don't know. How about Al Capone?
NO. 2: I'm serious! Hey, the man's a straight-up sociopath! America loves sociopaths! We put one in the White House didn't we?
NO. 1: Yeah, but we're supposed to be uplifting America, not reminding it of how it got taken for a ride by a cheating, lying, wanna-be mafia don. Forget Capone. Why don't we do a 30-for-30 on Luca Brasi?
UNIDENTIFIED BIG PERSON: You know, he was just a charac-
NO. 1: Shut up.
(Brief silence around the table)
NO. 1: Although ...
And here we will leave the Big People to their ruminating, because, really? Lance Armstrong?
Look, I suppose America will watch anything now, because they watched hillbillies with tigers. And I suppose Lance Armstrong is interesting in a slowing-down-to-look-at-car-wrecks sort of way. He's fascinating. He's disturbed. He's fascinating because he is disturbed.
But this is not exactly what America has an appetite for right now, because it gets its recommended daily requirement of disturbed from the White House every day. And so no surprise that the two-part Lance-umentary sank like a stone, at least compared to "The Last Dance." The latter drew ten times the viewers nightly.
Me, I didn't watch. I had my fill of Lance Armstrong back in the days when I was getting bashed by the cycling community for merely suggesting it wasn't unreasonable to wonder how he was doing what he was doing. It was as if I'd pushed down the Pope and taken his lunch money.
Any thinking individual should have looked at Armstrong's narrative and had questions, if not doubts. But even having questions was heresy in those days. And so I heard about it.
Not that I'm bitter or anything.
In any event, here's to ya, Big People. Nice call there.
Shoulda gone with Big'un Darly.
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