Mr. Tony's Bubble, Popping

Watch now as I wave my hands and the guy behind me... DISAPPEARS!

Update 12 Sept am: hat tip to FishbowlDC via College Hoops for this one, there is a story hitting now that Mr. Tony's car was stolen out of an ESPN parking garage in downtown Washington DC last week and that he is blaming it on a quote stalker unquote and is now demanding extra security. One little detail not to be overlooked here, Mr. Tony admits dropping the keys so it could have been a stalker yes I suppose or any sketchezoid that picked up the keyring and walked around the garage clicking the keyfob until he found the car belonging to it then got in and left. Yes the walls are starting to close in on Washington's own Howard Hughes.

Wow just week one into the 2008 Monday Night Football schedule and the conventional wisdom on Tony Kornheiser is turning, and rapidly. But first some background...

Curly R thought this was a bad idea from the start, putting Mr. Tony in the MNF booth for the big move from ABC to ESPN, replacing Al Michaels and John Madden with Mike Tirico, Joe Theismann and Mr. Tony. The Washington Post's Paul Farhi reviewed Mr. Tony's first MNF performance in the 2006 preseason and Mr. Tony was not gracious in acknowledging Paul's critique, even taking the matter to the friendly confines of ESPN radio to attack Paul, yep Mr. self deprecating Tony look at me I'm a big schmo how did I get so successful actually took it personally and went out of his way both to insult Paul Farhi and to admit that he expected his own employer (the Washington Post) quote would be kinder unquote in coverage.

Talk about a guy on the inside too long, built so many relationships in the media and when he is critiqued not as the idea of Mr. Tony but rather as a TV broadcasting newcomer reveals skin so thin that he still cannot let it go eight months later.

Two months after that I was blown away when ESPN booted Joe Theismann off the MNF broadcast before the 2007 season in favor of Mr. Tony, replacing Joe with Ron Jaworski who for all intents and purposes is the same guy in the booth. If you watched MNF at all in 2006 then you knew that there was tension in the booth between Joe and Mr. Tony, I attributed it to two things, Mr. Tony's fundamental unseriousness about anything contrasting with Joe's egotistical seriousness about football, and maybe to some still simmering raw feelings from when Mr. Tony was a reporter then a columnist covering Joe back in his playing days. Mr. Tony's effusive praise of Joe the day after he was cashiered seems to me to be very doth protest too muchy to me, I stand by my reporting at the time that ESPN actually made a clear headed decision that Mr. Tony was more important than Joe Theismann.

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Well the NFL season is back on and Mr. Tony is as Mr. Tony would say, less popular than Mel Gibson at temple, in two full seasons in the MNF booth Mr. Tony's er charm is wearing off.

Yesterday the guys at Cold Hard Football Facts laid out about the worst thing you can say about a guy whose sole existence is to broadcast a game, that he doesn't know anything about the game:

...Kornheiser doesn’t know that the Packers existed for three quarters of a century before Brett Favre arrived; he doesn't know that the greatest QB in history once played on this very same field; he doesn't know that the great Bart Starr once ran in for a score that looked a lot like Rodgers' game-winning plunge Monday night; he doesn't know that it happened right there in the very same end zone.

Go read it, it is beautiful, love the part about Mr. Tony bitching about the local wine. Talk about the caricature of an out of touch wealthy coastal elite.

Yesterday I also found King Kaufman at Salon praising ESPN's newly rediscovered focus on the football games themselves and not so much on the window dressing like eye candy sideline reporters, incessant and vapid guests in the booth robotically pimping movies and TV shows while I am shouting at the screen shut the fuck up so I can watch the goddamn play. King's criticism of this renewed embrace of the artful simplicity of football? Mr. Tony:

Kornheiser can be an entertaining guy. Love him on "Pardon the Interruption" and on the radio. But ESPN should have swept him off of the "MNF" set along with the sideline reports and the obtrusive graphics. Kornheiser is not "the basics."

Hilar, check the piece out, even Mr. Tony's booth mates were sick of Mr. Tony's Brett Favre references by the end of the game. More for your whine and cheese tasting:

Jim Buzinski at Outsports (Monday): [Mr. Tony] is simply the worst NFL announcer I have ever heard.

Bob Wolfley at the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel (Monday): Near the beginning of the telecast, Kornheiser rolled out a spectacularly excessive and inappropriate comparison to describe [Aaron] Rodgers’ circumstance [in replacing Brett Favre].

Saul Relative (lol) at Associated Content (Monday): What makes Kornheiser so awful? He's exuberantly pointless. He's extremely opinionated. And he just talks and talks and talks and...

Will Brinson at Raiders AOL Fanhouse writing about reasons to enjoy the Broncos - Raiders (Monday): And more importantly, no Tony Kornheiser. Seriously, I've never been so disappointed to dislike someone so much since, well, Dennis Miller.

Ed Berthiaume at the Appleton Post-Crescent on the lead up to Aaron Rodger's first start as a Packer (Sunday): If you can accurately predict the number of times Kornheiser will depict Packers fans as weeping-one-dimensional-Favre-worshipping-imps in the opening five minutes of the telecast, you can collect 14 tokens.

StreetCred at Fox Sports, on the Aaron Rodgers - Brett Favre story (Monday): ...Tony Kornheiser needs to be taken out of the booth when the Packers play. I like him on PTI and I like his radio show. But in the booth it is all he wants to talk about. Favre would have done this. People are now breathing easier because he did that. He can’t make a mistake here. He is under scrutiny….ENOUGH!!!.

Jeffrey Flanagan at the Kansas City Star, on MNF coverage during the preseason: ...the real problem, I thought, was Tony Kornheiser, who knows a lot about football story lines, not so much about football. (Of course, at least that made him an upgrade from Dennis Miller.)


Ahh Mr. Tony, from winging it to the top to annoying every ESPN viewer in two seasons.



Mike Tirico, Tony Kornheiser and Joe Theismann: Rich Riggins / USA Today from here.