Have you ever played that “game” where you sit around with a bunch of friends and talk about who you’d kill if you could get away with it? OK, so it’s more “drunken rambling” than an actual game… but still, I think every group of friends has, one boozy night in a bar, sat around and talked about people they’d shoot in the head if they knew they could get away with it. And last night, my friends, I found the person I’d kill: Tony Kornheiser.
Tony Kornheiser (detractors predictably call him Tony Kornhole) is a sportswriter and ESPN talk show host. Worse yet, he’s been a member of the Monday Night Football crew since 2006. And he’s one of the most annoying people on the face of the earth.
I was watching the Steelers squeak by the Ravens on MNF last night. Mike Tirico was doing his usual great job calling the game. Jaws occasionally hit us up with his incredible football wisdom. And Tony was there with his lame non sequitors and random “observations”.
Who the hell is this guy, really? And how does he have a job on Monday Night Football? I mean, I never ever thought I’d ever utter the phrase “Bring back Dan Dierdorf!”, but here we are. Tony has made me that way. Tony Kornhole is so fucking annoying that I don’t want him fired from MNF… I don’t want his vocal cords removed and his hands chopped off so he can longer communicate with the outside world… no, I want him dead, so he a) cannot create little Kornholes that might one day follow in his father’s annoying footsteps; and b) Kornhole would not be able to communicate using a complex system of foot taps or eye blinks.
Now, you might be saying to yourself, “gee, that’s kind of harsh. I mean, with all the strife in the world, why not kill someone more meaningful, like Richard Gere or our current president?”. Well, you’d have a point. In the greater scheme of things, Tony Kornhole is pretty insignificant. And he really doesn’t ever say anything controversial, like “I don’t think Michael Vick did anything wrong”. It’s not like he’s the Rush Limbaugh of the sports world or anything. He’s just… annoying. I don’t know how much ESPN is paying Kornhole, but if all they wanted was someone to say inane things like “The Bears treat offense as if it’s bubonic plague”, they coulda hired me for far less money!
Amusingly, for someone that’s gone through life as a critic, Kornhole just can’t seem to take any criticism himself. When Stephen Rodrick wrote an article for Slate asking why Tony was allowed to argue aimlessly on television, and also asking why Kornhole’s Washington Post column “was being used to plug side projects rather than gather news from cited sources”, Kornhole called on Slate, and The Washington Post, to fire him. When Paul Farhi wrote in The Washington Post that Kornheiser had “emphasized the obvious, played third fiddle, and was reminiscent of Dennis Miller ‘in a bad way'”, Kornheiser called Farhi a “two-bit weasel slug”. Nice! So you can sit there an criticise others, but not take it yourself, Tony? What a jackass!
Enough rambling for today… I just… hate Tony Kornheiser in a way that I’ve never hated a broadcaster before. Well, any human being, really. Tony must die!
