Hornkeister's Follies

Enforcedly-celibate sports opinionator Phony Hornkeister, formerly of the Washington Post and Monday Night Football, is apparently pursuing some vendetta against one of his respectable former colleagues (i.e. not from MNF.) As a result there is again some question of his sincerity, sanity and sobriety.

No writer who is incapable of seeing his own foibles as mirrored in others can possibly be any more than faintly amusing some of the time. Phony Hornkeister's manifest, repeated and unavoidable failures derive from that principle. He is merely a shtickmeister with the sensibilities of a frat boy. He sucks up to the popular and pisses down on the marginalized. He is a perfect example of Freud's theory of jokes as aggression, with the drawback that none of his jokes are funny.

His work is, at best, defensive. He seeks to inoculate himself against charges of nerdhood with pretenses to vast sports knowledge. But he only knows about two jokes, and he fits everything into those forms. The jokes are, "His dick is so small," (How small is it, Phony?) "he needs a magnifying glass to find the tweezers to hold it with." The other is, "His dick is so big," (How big is it, Phony?) "he needs to keep it strapped to his thigh during games."

Since Hornkeister works in mainstream media he, of course, has to translate these jokes into various other put-downs and glorifications. You might think this was a work of creativity until you notice that, if Hornkeister can ever substitute a shtick for a proper joke, he will do it every time. It is as the Englishman said of someone with extremely poor taste, "In lieu of an actual ornament, he placed a garden gnome beside the walk."

His popularity has nothing to do with his merit. They are not automatically opposed phenomena but neither are they inevitably allied.

I recall an instance where some hockey player had given Phony an opportunity to proclaim (which he thought was the same as demonstrating) his superiority. Being terminally insecure, he wanted to seem better not only than that hockey player in particular but than the game of hockey and hockey fans in general. I disremember the specifics but it involved Phony's questioning the player's mental capacity or masculinity or both. When he finished his rant, Phony said, with the happy sigh of a pervert who has just had sex with the head of a dead goat, "I just love doing that to guys."

That's the real Phony Hornkeister.