Scorehead wrote:
I don't know how old you are, or is you attended any Score remotes in the early to mid 1990's, but they were unbelievable, with guys coming in from out of town, I remember going to a HFC remote at Ron Santos old restaurant...the place was huge. I cant remember where it was or what it is now, but the entire bar was jammed with Scoreheads...completely packed. They did a live WYC with all the regulars at the time like Cleveland Mike, Cheesehead Scott, Raffy from Berwyn (RIP), & Bob somebody I forgot his moniker, he sounded like a south sider with a heavy Chicago accent. Anyway, these events were out of control & an absolute riot.
I would pay good money to be able to see an archive & video of events from the early days.
I've never been to a remote, but you bring up some great memories for me, Scorehead. Some of those guys--especially Rafael from Berwyn and Cleveland Mike--were fantastic callers. In the first 5-10 years of the Score, there were so many guys like that. Callers were treated with respect and were given ample time to speak. As a result a whole roster of "stars" were born. The station embraced this system because it was "the voice of the fan" speaking out against a "sports establishment" dominated by a soft print media that coddled irresponsible and apathetic sports ownership.
With the corporate consolidation of radio and the ascent of Bernstein at the station, that dynamic rapidly changed. Internalizing the aesthetic of reality television (which itself is a cultural expression of social darwinism and a rejection of the concept of a common good), Bernstein quickly turned sports talk into a mechanism for questioning the behavior of relatively powerless sports fans rather than a tool for criticizing the most powerful figures on the sports landscape. Effectively, Bernstein waged an ideological war on sports fandom by attempting to discredit its foundational concepts, the idea of collective experience and the common good. Bernstein believes in neither and as such is perfectly aligned with the reigning free market/privatization/austerity-driven orthodoxy of the contemporary moment. This value system explains his valorization of white collar identity and his dismissal of blue collar culture. Bernstein's hatred of the working class isn't based on class prejudice alone; rather, it penetrates much deeper--he is revolted by an entire type of experience (collective joy, pain, happiness and sorrow) and a way of looking at that experience (that big problems can be resolved by regular people if they band together) that together form the basis for a social category known as the working class.
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Antonio Gramsci wrote:
The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.