I think it depends on the sport. Then again, I only watch 2 real sports and 1 fake one (wrestling).
Football: absolutely better without audio commentary.
Baseball: it depends. The local broadcast guys can be pretty good for a lot of regular season games.
Wrestling: commentary is part of the TV experience, but not every commentator can be Taz.
Deep Space Nine: “The Visitor”
Yes.
I was the director of a very small summer camp in a former career. For some background info, the camp mainly served kids from some rather infamous inner-city neighborhoods. This was one of the very few black owned summer camps in the country. 99% of these kids were black or brown; I am vampiricly pale white and ginger.
And so, I found myself at a conference representing this camp…. Mostly to beg, coerce, and shame wealthy people there into giving us money (we sure as shit weren’t making money off the families of our kids; most couldn’t pay, but going to camp was safer than any week at home in the city).
On day 2 of the conference I get a text. It’s from the secretary of some high powered individual from Focus on the Family whose name I have long forgotten. He wants to have lunch with me to discuss an “opportunity.”
What the hell, right? Their money’s just as green as everyone else’s. Maybe I can charm the guy into cutting us a check.
So, I say yes and we meet at the fanciest restaurant in the hotel this conference was in.
Friends, I’m not one to believe in possession but something was straight up evil about this man from the moment I sat down. I mean I felt like I was eating with a fucking demon.
The “opportunity,” by the way, was to essentially fuck over the community our camp was for and convince our board to sell the land to his organization. This land was the same space some of the families of our community had been enslaved on. It was hallowed ground.
I ordered the most expensive dish I could find, waited for the food to come, told him to go fuck himself, and then went back to my hotel room and took a shower to get the feeling of being around that…… Thing off me.
I really don’t know how to describe it. It was like sitting across from some kind of hungry emptiness in the form of an old man.
I don’t know what I talked to, but I do wonder if that mother fucker was human.
Someone for whom the normal and inevitable experiences of suffering (illness, death in the family, natural disaster, etc) have no real economic consequences.