Chris Berman - Shut Up!

So, now that the 2010 baseball season is in the books, we can put to rest the world’s worst saying. (Well, okay, a lousy sports cliché at best.) As the San Francisco Giants are now World Series Champions, we can put the past behind us and move on.

Allow me to explain.

The San Francisco Giants originated in New York, a fact many readers may already know. They moved to California in 1957, a long time ago in terms of our contextual history. There was (and still is) a football team in New York also called the Giants. Perhaps you have heard of them.

It has long bothered me that Chris Berman (a man whose work and commentary I otherwise enjoy entirely) has referred to the American football franchise as “The New York Football Giants.” What makes the moniker worse is the voice he uses when saying this. He drops his vocal range into a deep and husky bass tone that reverberates with memories of long-dead announcers, namely those old school veterans who might have called a football game long before ESPN even existed.

The reference to the “football Giants” has been outdated for decades and can now be ceased entirely!

The beauty of comedy is knowing when to quit. Thus, a good joke is not supposed to be beaten to its untimely death. The beauty of a good radio (or in this case TV) bit should also be in knowing when to quit, knowing when to drop the gimmick and just call a team their name. Case in point, the late Steelers announcer, Myron Cope, always called the Cincinnati Bengals the “Bungles” because of their long history as a terrible team. It was unfair yet funny, but when the Bengals were 11-5 and had thumped the Steelers twice in the same season, it was time to give it up. He never did.

As well, Chris Berman needs to stop! And I have been saying this for about fifteen years.

The joke was old the very minute ESPN first aired as a full-time channel. By 1980, the Giants had been playing baseball in the Bay Area for over 20 years! Willie McCovey, arguably the greatest San Fran Giant of all time, played his entire career under the cool breeze of the Pacific, having never played at New York's Polo Grounds. Berman’s attempt at humor was dead a long time ago.
As we moved through the 90s and the 2000s, the joke became even further outdated. After a decade (1967), maybe it was still clever. But, after a half century, see 2007 has come and gone, the point is done, it’s over!

Half of the sports fans who know the baseball Giants once played in New York just don’t care. For anyone fifty and younger, the Giants have always been the San Francisco Giants, and the football team has always been in New York. My generation does not need to be reminded that there was once a distinction between the two Giants. Once they moved, the distinction was coastal, geographical, two-thousand-five-hundred-miles-apart-ical, to not quite coin a phrase. In short, we know!

Chris Berman does not need to remind me that Eli Manning and Lawrence Taylor share the same city as did Tom Landry, Frank Gifford and others who have played football under the blue and red Giants’ colors. We know! Heck, even the original Giants Stadium is gone, and the site where the 1956-1973 Giants played non-soccer-football (old Yankee Stadium) now sits empty. Maybe Chris can hold an old-timers reunion there, though the affair would have to be broadcast in black and white so that Chris feels more at home.

Hopefully, now that the past has evaporated and the “SAN FRANCISCO BASEBALL GIANTS” have won their first World Series ever on the Golden Coast and the franchise’s first since 1954, we can all go happily about our business as sports fans and root for teams in cities and not clarifiers in team and city names.

I mean, after all, it’s not like the New York Hockey Rangers lost the World Series to those same Giants. Hey, wait a minute…