ENOUGH ALREADY WITH ALL THE VACATION!

by WCT, The Ship of Fools

There is no shortage of completely horrible crap that ESPN is responsible for disseminating to the masses.

(Just for fun lets see if I can come up with 10 off the top of my head:

1. "First Take"
2. The X-games
3. Chris Berman
4. Stu Scott
5. Skip Bayless
6. "Around the Horn"
7. "Who's Now?"
8. The Winter X-games
9. Dick Vitale
10. Colin Cowherd

Wow, that was easy! Anyway, back to the post:)

But for all of the garbage that the ESPN outlets distribute, there is one thing that they get right: PTI. I am addicted - ADDICTED - to Pardon the Interruption. And I am not alone. Everyone I speak to loves the show. It is appointment television every night, and one of the only shows I TiVo every single episode of. But it true Worldwide Leader fashion, they have taken a good thing and ruined it.

Now, I do not make it a point to say how much vacation anyone should or should not get, but lets take a quick inventory of how much the show's normal hosts, Michael Wilbon & Tony Kornheiser, have been on the job:

- Tony is the third man in the Monday Night Football booth (which is a whole other story for a whole other post) and refuses to fly to the game venues, so he regularly takes days off during the week in the fall to recover from his long bus trips.

- During the football off-season, Tony (apparently) takes every Friday off, as Wilbon usually comes up with an excuse as to why he isn't there and his weekly absence has become a running gag on the show.

- The week of July 4th, both hosts took the week off, and we were left to suffer through Jay Mariotti co-hosting the show. Incidentally, Tony has passive-aggressively alluded to his disdain for Mariotti, leading many to believe that a feud exist between the two (who isn't Mariotti feuding with?) yet Jay is one of the first calls they make whenever they need a fill-in host. Odd.

- The following week Tony was still off, and Wilbon hosted with Dan LeBatard and Bob Ryan.

- The week after that (this week), the entire show is off the air for "summer vacation."

Again, I don't want to be that guy, calling these guys out for taking vacation. They have earned it. But is sitting in a studio and talking sports for 30 minutes a day really so tough that you have to be taking days off this often? I mean, if you got paid to sit around and talk about sports, how many days off would you take? If that were my job, I would be asking if they would let me come in on weekends and holidays.

Maybe I am being selfish because I love the show, and when I get home after work and see that the show did not air on a given day (or even worse, it aired, but with Jay F-ing Mariotti as the fill-in host) it pisses me off. But It seems to me that these guys are taking more and more days off and the show is airing with its normal hosts more infrequently. There is so little decent television these days - and even less decent television on any of the half-dozen ESPN channels - that when a great show like PTI shuts down for a week, or airs with awful fill-ins, viewers suffer. I'm sure I'm not alone, and I sincerely hope that the days off don't have anything to do with any health issues or family emergencies. I am just a loyal viewer who is hoping that this is not a precursor to either Tony or Mike leaving the show, or the show ending altogether.