If you haven't already, I urge you to read the John Sterling profile in last Sunday's New York Times. Sterling, for the uninitiated, is the Yankees' godawful radio play-by-play guy—"Thuuuuuuh Yankees win!"—for whom some people have developed an unaccountable hipster taste, like moose antlers. (Back in my ESPN days, I worked with a handful Yankees fans who would crowd around a computer during games, giggling over Sterling's home run calls.) As Bill Pennington's story makes clear in its primly snarky way, Sterling represents a vanishing breed of New Yorker—the old-showbiz cornball who probably thinks culture ended after the third revival of Finian's Rainbow and who now seems to exist in a perpetual 1970s game show of the soul. You probably saw his photo in a New York deli once, somewhere between Rita Rudner and Bob from Sesame Street.
Anyway, the whole story is worth a read—how often do you get to see the Gray Lady handling its parasol like a shiv?—but here's the part that kills me:
Within 90 minutes of the final out, Sterling is usually at home in his apartment in Edgewater, N.J., where he lives alone. In public, he always seems undeniably on display, a tall man stalking through hallways with a booming voice that precedes him. Late at night, he mixes a drink, revs up the DVR and reclines in the quiet of his living room to watch the soap operas he missed earlier in the day.
This is, quite possibly, the saddest paragraph I've ever read. John Sterling is your maiden aunt.