Four Hours, Thirty-Seven minutes and Twenty Two Seconds Until Len and Bob...

First Cubs game on TV today. Woo-hoo! I’m sure either Jason or I will have plenty to say about it (if it’s Jason, you can count on plenty of vaguely sexual references to Geovany Soto’s catching position), but since I haven’t posted in awhile, I thought I’d throw some thoughts down about my new kinda-sorta-favorite-no-not-really TV show.

While in Arizona, I watched at least four episodes of season three of “Pros versus Joes” on Spike TV. The premise is essentially that three washed up athletes get to beat the piss out of three wannabe athletes for a few hours in various sports. All of this is “narrated” by quite possibly the most annoying sports-related television personality I’ve ever seen. Yet the show is incredibly compelling, and it has a lot more to do with the “Joes” than with the “Pros.”

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Even though there are minimal interviews with each of the Joes, it becomes pretty obvious that these are the guys who take things a bit too seriously. They’re the guy who takes a walk in a co-ed softball game, or whines at the ref just long enough to make the rest of his teammates uncomfortable in the flag football game. Granted, this is coming from the guy who has been banned from commenting on any aspects of his wife’s softball performance within an hour before or after any weekend softball contest. However, there’s a recognition among even guys as borderline-too-intense as I am that, once the game is over, we’re not actual athletes, and we go back to being the semi-unathletic sarcastic observers of the real ones. Unfortunately, the Joes on this show have never given up the dream.

This is what makes the show so much fun. For an hour, you get to see the guy who takes his MVP of the rec league just a little too seriously get the shit beaten out of him by professional athletes who (a.) are old enough, and have had enough surgeries that they walk around like Forrest Gump before he got the braces off, and (b.) might as well end every contest by saying “so, when do I get paid for this crap?” The professional athletes (who clearly stopped caring about their physical well-being about 3 seconds after the retirement papers were signed) utterly destroy the Joes in every way imaginable, and barely break a sweat. This is exactly what everyone else in the softball or flag football league wants to see, and watching the archetype for every annoying wannabe I’ve ever encountered on a field (some of whom were on teams with me) get not only physically, but mentally destroyed by a real professional athlete makes us feel better than David Silver when he finally sealed the deal with Donna.

But I guess that’s all reality TV is: a chance for people to vicariously take out their frustrations on the people they dislike. From Puck to Johnny Fairplay to the Joes, we viewers get to slap around the archetype of the guy on the field or in our building who just utterly and completely annoys the crap out of us. Sure its nice when the million dollars gets paid out to the person who really played fair on Survivor or when Flavor really finds love (again), but we don’t watch for that reason. We watch to see that douchebag who calls charges in the pickup basketball game get speared by the steroid-riddled corpse of Bill Romanowski. Long live sports. And vindictiveness.