They wanted accountability! They wanted accuracy! They wanted proper spelling! They wanted real names!
Well, they came to the wrong people!
Here's a name for you, moralistic editors of the Alternative Gray Lady Weekly:
First name: Ham. Second name...... SLAM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Like Abe Pollin they hired us, they fired us, they gave some computers to a poor kid.
They got gun shy when we brought it strong to the mike, like Rakim on "Follow the Leader"!!!
Thanks to Sonic Tom at Bossman Graphics for the excellent drawing!! Major props to Tom Socca as well for loving us enough to risk his credibility and hire us!!!
The Brothers Grimm
The Wizards have found new enthusiasm. Why are their TV announcers so depressed?
By the WizzNutzz
The new-look, young, and energetic Wizards look fab tonight at the MCI Center against the Dallas Mavericks.
Free-agent signee Gilbert Arenas is playing with lawless abandon. Jarvis Hayes is finding his spots on the floor like a dog on a city sidewalk. The Manchild, Kwame Brown, his crown of thorns left behind in the locker room, is playing with perfectly unfocused flash, his legs and arms akimbo at every opportunity. And Etan Thomas is making better use of his left hand than a seventh-year boarding schooler.
The Wiz drive down the court, Arenas tosses the rock up to the machosensuous Christian Laettner, who, with his long hair and beard, looks every bit the friendly dorm RA, teaching the kids about Michael McDonald and where to get a good fake ID. Laettner makes a touch pass to the poetry-loving Etan Thomas, who completes a wicked-hard slam-dunk.
Washington fans are going wild, the Mavs look stunned, and the Wizards look fired up.
You'd expect the team's TV announcers, Steve Buckhantz and Phil Chenier, to be screaming positives about such a potentially tide-turning play.
Instead, Chenier merely says, "Now, now, Etan, don't hang on that rim."
The Mavs, perhaps subconsciously sensing the depression that shrouds the MCI Center like so much cold mist, ignore Thomas' dunk, start a fast break, and score an easy basket. Buckhantz immediately yells one of his signature lines--"Dagger!"--with such clinical purpose it sends shivers down your spine.
Meanwhile, it's a 12 to 10 game and we're four minutes into the first quarter.
But to Buckhantz it looks like the game's over. When the dagger is drawn, life is snuffed out. "Forget it, stop dreaming," he seems to be saying.
You immediately start to think, "Do my kids respect me? Would anyone even notice if I fell off the face of the earth? Is that pain in my side maybe a tumor?"
Darkness rises from deep inside Buckhantz's call. The stars are not wanted now; put out every one. Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun.
All hope is quashed. Hope is humbug.
Ball game!
The preceding may not have happened exactly as we wrote it--we tend to have dramatic memories, and severe mental blackouts are common among our crew--but it is a spiritually accurate account of a typical Washington Wizards game as called by Steve Buckhantz and Phil Chenier, who have been paired together since 1997. Buck has 25 years of broadcasting experience; Chenier, the color man with fewer hues than an Ansel Adams retrospective, has been broadcasting for 18 years and was a member of Washington's last championship team--in 1978.
Together they make up the Basketball Brothers Grimm, a broadcast duo cloaked in a deep existential pall from viewing so many Wizards losses over the past 25 years that they cannot get excited about this year's nubile, pliant, and some might say moist Washington hoops club.
For example, take the November 19 game versus the Cleveland Cavaliers, which the Wiz won 106 to 95. Arenas scored 25 points, hitting four of eight three pointers. Instead of praising Arenas' touch behind the arc, all Buckhantz could muster was: "It's good to see those three-pointers falling for Gilbert. Lets just hope he doesn't fall in love with that shot."
The Wiz were leading!
Chenier is no better than his black-hearted partner. In a November 23 game against the Seattle Supersonics, the Wiz fought back in the 4th quarter to pull ahead for a second. It was a remarkable comeback considering Washington had its lowest-scoring first half in team history! Instead of celebrating the team's fortitude and plywood mentality of toughness, Phil says, "Yes, but they have to finish it!" Chenier said it like he knew they wouldn't--and they didn't, losing 88 to 85.
For Buckhantz and Chenier, the end is always nigh.
No one ever said that being a Bullets/Wizards fan is easy. Hope has forsaken these lands long ago. For the story of the Wizards fan isn't one about glory; it isn't a story about triumph and trophies, ESPN highlights, pedestals and parades. It's a story about pushing open the very heavy, groaning doorway that is life, and for all your flaws and failings, once again throwing yourself back through it like a mating-season salmon.
It's a story about past-their-prime free agents, trading away the future, and 10-day contracts. It's a story about medical marijuana, plantar fasciitis, Rod Strickland, Chico DeBarge, and the redemptive power of the half-smoke.
It is a story about overcoming odds--but mostly, it's a story about not overcoming odds.
Two years ago Michael Jordan came to town, and that all threatened to change. But MJ played Salieri to young Kwame's Mozart. He brought in his yes-men--his "mules," as he liked to call them--and he brought the weight of his insufferable narcissism, and so Abe Pollin asked Michael to leave the circle of friendship.
But this year's team is unburdened and dynamic, filled with potential and personalities. They are incredibly easy to root for, unless you are in the woebegone backcourt of Sturm Buckhantz and Drang Chenier.
With their melancholy offerings, they wait out games like a prison sentence. Their dialog is like a failing libido, with its pseudo-climaxes and nonarrivals, and their broadcasts are the equivalent of Waiting for Godot--and waiting for him in bad suits! (But why wait for Godot, anyway, when you have a sweating Kwame Brown in a tank top not 10 feet from your eyes?)
For like Godot's, Vladimir and Estragon, Steve and Phil are nearly without attributes: aging tramps locked in an aimless relationship, full of uncertainty about the purpose of their existence.
Perhaps Buckhantz and Chenier have simply waited too long for the Bullets/Wizards to be good. Estragon complains, "Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it's awful."
So true, Comcast, so true!
So depressing are these broadcasts that you can image Buckhantz as poet Philip Larkin calling games:
"Etan grabs the rebound, though it means little. Phil, I work all day, and get half-drunk at night, waking at four to soundless dark, I stare. Rebounds? Pfft! Etan passes to Gilbert, who sets up the offense, but what will that mean in time, as the curtain edges will grow light? Till then I see what's really always there--Arenas shoots!--unresting death, a whole day nearer now, making all thought impossible but how and where and when I shall myself die, like that last shot: Arenas misses! Steve Nash grabs the rebound and passes up court to Antoine Walker who lays it in! Dagger!"
In English we have no single word to describe the mental state of these two sad sacks.
But foreign languages are better.
In Sweden they have a noun for the French word ennui that Buckhantz and Chenier embody: vemod, which means life in a chronic state of sadness. And no amount of Canadian Levitra can overcome the limp, burden-filled lives these two are half-living.
The fact is, we have the two most Swedish announcers in the entire league.
Our solution to fighting this chronic depression is to drink grain alcohol and wear headphones tuned to 980 AM while gathered around TVs at our local Circuit City. We love to listen to the radio broadcast by Dave Johnson, with his calls of "Ohhhhh, Rod, Rod, Rod, Rod, Rod!" and "Ham slam!" (which are odd because neither Rod Strickland nor Darvin Ham is with the team anymore).
Johnson has no place for dismal complaints, preferring to call the game with an unchecked homoerotic enthusiasm that rivals Tom of Finland. That's the way we run our Web site, wizznutzz.com.
And that's the way Buck and Phil should call Wizards games on TV. Because this is a game of heaving, athletically glorious younger men in shorts. How can you not want them to rise up and dominate?
So perk up, fellas. This is one arousing team.
