This column initially ran on August 7, 2006
Shut the door to your office, you can’t let your coworkers see you cry. Get the box of tissues and place it alongside your keyboard. If you’re at home, make sure your wife is watching DVR’ed episodes of Grey’s Anatomy before you read any further. Put the kids to bed, they don’t need to see you like this. They’re too young to know the pain of loss. Just to be safe go ahead and pull up and minimize that website that features scantily clad women that always makes you feel better. It’s going to be that painful. Ok, deep breath, deep breath. Focus on the ceiling, ok, here it comes: Jefferson Pilot’s SEC sports telecasts are no more.
It got you didn’t it, right in the solar plexus? Your wind is gone. I know, think Drew Barrymore in Ever After and just breathe. (Not that you or I have ever seen that movie.). Easy there hombre, the world as you know it has not ended. You’re still here, not gone. The sun is going to rise and set, the world will still spin, Pluto may or may not still be a planet and JP Sports is gone. Sometimes you have to ache just to know you’re alive.
Ok, two paragraphs of false pain is about as much as I can stomach. Let’s be honest, there has never been a worse American produced sports telecast than Jefferson-Pilot’s coverage of SEC Sports. JP Sports’ SEC coverage answered the question what would happen if you gave the guys who never left the audio-visual room at your high school the production rights to a major college telecast and approximately three cameras. Except JP was not as good as those guys would have been. How bad? JP is the only sports production company whose name is preceded at least 80% of the time by an expletive. F’in JP should have been the company’s slogan. It would have had total recall in the south.
