One of the first things I had to do on moving to Australia was to catch up on a lifetime's worth of missed sports: cricket; rugby; Australian rules football (though I did get to watch at least a little bit of the latter on tv in SoCal in the 80s). If I hadn't done that, my ability to enter into basic conversation with other men would have been stifled. Interestingly enough, though, sport is just as much a topic for women here as it is for men. Maybe we need a PhD to do a study on why that is.

I guess that I shouldn't care that I don't have a working radio in my car. I'd be willing to believe that it's slightly better than most political talk radio (I guess), but that's a low hurdle. The outright rejection of evidence (and the privileging of impression, anecdote, and the supernatural) in forums for discussing sports (radio, message boards, comments to online articles) is a frequent and bewildering feature of fandom. I don't want to pick on anyone here, but we basically had an argument about Ken Griffey Jr. in the comments to King's column on Monday that boiled down to "Griffey's the best because I like him the best," despite a preponderance to evidence to contrary.

Often, after a bizarre and strained argument about something on a message board, I leave thinking of Monty Python's "Argument Sketch": Listen, I came here for a good argument.

No you didn't. No, you came here for an argument.

If anyone wants to see some real stupid, check out firejoemorgan's colin cowherd tag.

Americans grow up hearing their coaches talk dumb. Even if the coaches are not dumb, they talk dumb. My football coaches sounded okay in class, but out on the field, most of them said, "Trow dee fuhbaw," and such. And they make bad grammar a point of pride.

One exception was my head coach in ninth grade, Craig Bester, at Lutheran East in Cleveland Heights! He taught Latin in addition to coaching football. He occasionally quoted Caesar in Latin, and Xenophon in Greek, on the sideline, to the bewilderment and admiration of his players.

Anyway... American athletes grow up talking as their coaches talk, and American sports fans who never actually have played sports try to talk as the athletes talk... So that dumb talk, including dopey accents, prounciation, grammar, cliches, and tone, has become cool.

That is the real problem with sports dialogue. The content is not so bad; it's how they say it.

I wonder how different the demographics are between the readers of King Kaufman's columns at the listeners to KNBR 680?

Much like sports talk radio, the quality of internet writing on sports varies considerably (as does the quality of the posters on the discussion threads). Most of the columns on ESPN are pure junk, while Deadspin has a distinctly tongue-in-cheek sexism to many of its posts.

By contrast, quality sports sites such as King Kaufman, Football Outsiders, Fire Joe Morgan and others are not afraid to discuss complicated issues of race and class in pro-sports.

I too live in Philly and have some thoughts on the previous LW's stance plus some observations on National vs local sports talk. First off, anonymous' complaint is about one set of hosts, the morning "crew" and Cataldi, which deliberately plays to outsized adolescent male fantasies around women (babes galore) intertwined with sophomoric banter. I always thought this was a specific decision to recreate the successful "morning zoo" pattern of FM radio jocks to a sports format. Apparently it is wildly successful which unfortunately sas something unbecoming about much of male consiousness in the area. The "Wing Bowl" of which he speaks has gone beyond anyone's wildest dreams, filling the 21,000 seat basketball-hockey arena for an eating event that comes off like a Roman gala.

But in counter stance, most of the other hosts are highly intelligent, know their sports well and often are exceptional in handling the political issues that not only arise from sports but sometimes are brought up independently as well. I find it fascinating that on Sports talk radio many issues get discussed where cultural shifting is occuring through the dialogue. Michael Vick was a prime example of what no longer would be tolerated. And as opposed to Rome, many come down as extremely progressive on most issues, race, fairness, equality, dignity of women. They do not play to any base or bottom feeding natures of thier audience. And although I agree with James Levy's observations about facts in discussion, I find their intelligence and what they will tolerate galaxies beyond what one would find from conservative TV or talk radio.

In this respect, then, the hosts and level of discussion bode well for male intelligence and sensitivity, but then we do live in a BLUE STATE and a very BLUE CITY.

"It's disgusting. That these cretins are allowed to influence the way that Eagles and Phillies are run could be a very good reason we are without a Champion since 1983. But that's another letter."

LW has it backwards. The intelligence, sports wise of the fans has been very astute and way ahead of the ownership and one of the reasons I am not listening as much is the talk has settled into a diatribe and talmudic analysis day after day of how greedy ownership is and how badly the teams, (principally Phillies and Eagles) have been managed to meet the bottom line, not winning.

Sociologically I agree with the author in that there is a sense of community. Perhaps too much. Here the addiction to the teams literally parallels almost all aspects of a relationship, which then can significantly affect your life if you let it. Right now, betrayal is the word, and people are INCENSED. The boundaries over what is important and what isn't get blurred.

One last point. A competing station has opened up for about two years and I notice that WIP remains completely parochial, they will only concentrate on the local teams whereas WPEN will open to national subjects and a variety of topics. So its kind of like choosing to hang out in two very different communities at times in terms of focus, although the local issues always dominate.

BTW, Dan Patrick is on late at night nationally and David Simon very late. Simon's motto is "a celebration of life as seen through sports". Neither of these national hosts, as well as the late nite locals fits the paradigm suggested by the author. No babes, no booze and definitely a very high degree of both sensitivity and intelligence.

There is hope for the species yet.