Jim Donovan once seemed like a promising broadcaster, if you ignore the fact that he's from Boston or some such damn place. Boston is a place where roads wander around through the city without signs and where it takes 205 years to repave a highway. The only positive thing I've ever seen about Bostonians are that they get rid of Kennedys by making them go to Washington DC and fall asleep in long boring meetings about trade quotas so that they stay the hell out of the local liquor stores. If we could have done that with Tim Hagan, it would have solved a lot of freaking problems.
Donovan showed up in Cleveland about 30 years ago and moved into nifty Channel 3 studios to do those four-minute sportscasts where they talk about the Brownns for 45 seconds, Indians for 30 seconds and use the leftover time to make lame jokes with the female co-anchor. Channel 3 is pretty savvy because their news sets always look like bowling alleys, and that goes over well in Cleveland.
He was pretty good at this gig, so after a while he managed to convince Carmen Policy that he should be the Browns play-by-play guy because he used the same sort of viscous paste to grease his hair back as Carmen learned to use in San Francisco. That, and a shared love of using unemployed autoworkers as footstools endeared Donovan to Policy, so the play-by-play job was as good as his.
This was all well-and-good until recently, when Donovan in quick succession reported a series of clearly made-up stories, either out of boredom or because he lives in some sort of alternate reality.
- First Donovan reports that the Browns are all set to trade down with the Houston Texans, giving up their precious #3 draft pick to the Team-That-Bush-Forgot in exchange for a human tackling dummy calling himself David Carr and a handful of lug nuts, or something similar. There's no way Phil Savage deals for Tim Couch, Junior and everyone knows it, but we all just sort of look at each other nervously and hope Donovan is making a joke.
- Then Donovan reports that Ratbird running back Jamal Lewis showed up in town late in the day and was going to visit the Browns the next day. About an hour later, Lewis signed a deal after visiting the team, so either Donovan was making crap up again or Lewis just popped into Berea to use the men's room and found himself, like a lot of people, signing various things that gave him huge amounts of Randy Lerner's money.
- Finally, Donovan reports that the Browns have signed some journeyman stiff cornerback named Kenny Wright to a three-year contract, which is ridiculous, because Phil Savage isn't going to sign a guy who sucks so bad he's been kicked out of three cities the last three years.
Put this all together and either Donovan has lost it after 43 years of accurate reporting in Cleveland or he's just gone completely batshit crazy.
Since it's clear that it's the latter, all we have to do is figure out why. Here are some possible reasons:
- Seven years of having Dick Goddard standing behind you pretending to do
stats while he stares at you with those crazed, beady little eyes of
his.
- Too much Dieken musk
- The cumulative mind-destroying impact of having to describe the athletic endeavours of Doug Pederson, Everitt Lindsay, Steve Rehberg, Chad Beasley and Anthony Malborough
- Three inches of accumulated hair product caved in his skull
- Realizing that Al frigging Roker has hit the big time and is doing game shows out of New York while he has to stay in Cleveland and act excited while breathlessly recounting the latest basketball game between Cleveland State and Northeast Montana School of Mime.
All I know is that the dude has gone completely batshit, and there's no telling what sort of crap he's going to say next, which is entertaining to watch. It's fun like watching lions eat rodeo clowns is fun.