For the past month, I’ve been watching a show that aims—as a voice-over during the opening credits puts it—to “make sports talk great again.” It streams daily on the fledgling digital-subscription network CRTV, which stands for Conservative Review Television. The hosts of the show, which is called “On the Clock,” are Steve Deace, an Iowa-based Christian-radio personality, and Curt Schilling, the retired major-league pitching ace turned ugly-meme enthusiast. The premise of “On the Clock” is that sports talk, as brought to you by the mainstream media—especially ESPN, Schilling’s former employer—has become tiresomely politicized, and restoring its greatness involves embracing the attitudes of a time “before everybody decided sports was boring and everything was racist,” as Deace says, when athletics themselves, and the silly obsessions and loyalties that attach to them, were enough to occupy our idle thoughts. On the show, a twenty-minute countdown clock looms above a split screen, while the co-hosts, more than a thousand miles apart, discuss a range of sports-world topics that are teased along the bottom: the Madden cover jinx, various Mount Rushmores, Mike Trout’s paltry Q rating, the moth that recently lodged in an umpire’s ear. It is not a debate show, because they seldom disagree. “Yes, we actually like sports,” Deace said the other day. “We’re going to talk about sports.”
Well, they like some sports. Introducing a segment about the opening of N.F.L. training camps, not long ago, Deace said, “I refuse to allow a handful of snowflakes to take this away from me. I need things to retreat to in the culture, and football is my sanctuary.” Soccer, on the other hand, was earlier described by Schilling as “arguably the most boring possible thing you could ever imagine to watch.” Both men noted that soccer’s ascendancy in this country has been prophesied, sometimes with crusading fervor, for decades, and they were pleased to highlight a Times story reporting that youth-soccer participation is, in fact, declining, speaking of the trend as though it were a Brexit-style ballot referendum. “Ever since Colonials were hiding out in trees to stab Redcoats in the back, rather than having gentlemanly shoots out on the field, Americans, it’s ingrained in our DNA—we love aggression!” Deace said. He added (incorrectly), of soccer, “You are literally offsides anytime on the field that you’re faster to the ball than the defender is, and that is an inherently socialistic ethic.”
Schilling replied, “No offense, but it’s boring to listen to you talk about it.”
Deace, who is forty-five, is an unlikely avatar for golden-era sports nostalgia. A self-proclaimed nerd, he both looks and sounds the part, sprinkling “Star Trek” references into the conversation, along with asides about the virtues of the free market and the untrustworthiness of anonymous sources. (So much for sticking to sports.) On the first episode, he wore a Superman T-shirt, along with what he calls “Clark Kent glasses,” and, on another episode, he boasted of the “throwback” Green Lantern shirt that he was wearing beneath a button-down. He evinces greater interest in sports video games and in fantasy leagues than in old-school live action, borrowing his macho cred from Schilling, whom he never fails to introduce as “my future Major League Baseball Hall of Fame co-host.” The descriptor is not just a bit of flattery but a wink: an allusion to the idea that Schilling has been denied induction into Cooperstown, thus far, by a liberal media establishment (the Baseball Writers’ Association of America), because of his Breitbart sensibility.
Schilling provides the more occasionally interesting voice, with personal experience to offer about the reality of locker-room talk (“You see, among the players, the use of incendiary language, from a racial standpoint, that wouldn’t be tolerated in any other forum in America”), and anecdotes that add context—say, about the game, in Houston, in 1991, when a moth burrowed into a batter’s ear. I say this as a Red Sox partisan who has watched with sadness and even disgust as the pitcher whom I once admired, not only for his postseason heroics but for his eloquence and extracurricular restlessness, descended into the Internet sewer, playing an endless-seeming game of #OwnTheLibs; it is nice to hear him sounding somewhat less aggrieved. Self-deprecating, too. When Deace recently brought up LeBron James—“I know you probably don’t agree with his politics, but you admire the kind of person he is off the field”—Schilling replied, “He just says dumb things. And, my God, if I’m guilty of one thing, that would be one thing I’m very guilty of.”
This isn’t great sports talk, to be sure. It’s also of a piece with Fox’s “fair and balanced” slogan in its attempt to frame as purely apolitical a view that the N.F.L. anthem protests, for instance, amount to “kneeling crap.” The co-hosts’ passing references to Omarosa, Peter Strzok, and the Mueller investigation are sometimes funny. They are also relentless. And, in spite of Deace’s frequent protestations about wishing to find, in sports media, an “escape,” the subject to which “On the Clock” has devoted the most recurring attention is the moral bankruptcy of big-time college sports. Chief among the recent examples they’ve highlighted is the scandal at Ohio State, where the head football coach, Urban Meyer, turns out to have known about, and failed to report, allegations against one of his assistants of domestic violence. “Why are we even talking about Ohio State’s record?” Schilling asked at one point, interrupting Deace, who speculated that “Urban Liar,” now on leave, pending an investigation, would already have been fired if the Buckeyes weren’t perennial contenders. “A woman was beaten, and people tried to cover it up!”
That conversation led to a discussion of another controversy, at the University of North Carolina, where thirteen football players have been suspended for selling their school-issued Nikes. Schilling, expressing sympathy for the young athletes, proposed that the greater problem was the N.C.A.A.’s outdated insistence on amateurism, in light of taxpayer-supported coaching salaries, like Meyer’s, that approach eight million dollars. “The two-hundred-thousand-dollar education they’re getting for free clearly isn’t enough,” he said. And then there was the death, from heatstroke, of the freshman football player Jordan McNair, at the University of Maryland. Deace credited the university for acknowledging, “probably in a way that made their lawyer cringe,” that mistakes were made by the training staff, and he also cited a complaint about “bullying tactics” by an N.F.L. safety who played for the current Maryland coach a few years ago, while enrolled at the University of Michigan. “That’s not coaching,” Schilling said. “Pushing your players to the point of exhaustion and death? That’s not coaching. It’s—well, it’s murder.” He added, “Maybe there’s going to be a slowdown, or a pause, or a reflection on where the priorities lie in college football.”
Domestic violence, fair compensation for college athletes, the abuse of power by hard-ass coaches: these were, indeed, subjects that you didn’t often hear discussed by sports nuts in the old days. As Andrew Cuomo might say, sports talk was never that great.
