Hold On, Honey, I’ll Take You to the Hospital at Halftime: Confessions of a TV Sports Junkie

It started fifty years ago with a couple of baseball games. Then came pro football, basketball, hockey, more baseball, the Olympics, golf, bowling, stock car racing, skiing, tennis, volleyball, badminton, darts, and anything else producers could find to sell a few beers. Every man who hasn’t gone out into the woods to find his wild man is plunked down on the living room sofa in front of the twenty-seven-inch-diagonal screen.

Marriages crumble, family time disappears, hardbodies go to flab-TV sports are taking over the world.

Now, just in the nick of time, Norman Chad offers a hilarious, biting, and incisive look at television sports. First he takes to task the excesses of sports TV: too much viewing (and its effect on the home), too much college basketball, too much talk from announcers, too much figure skating, too many replays, and too many jock analysts-not to mention the biggest, loudest personalities bringing us the games: Dick Vitale, Chris Berman, Tim McCarver, and John Madden. Next, he poses some questions: What’s wrong with ‘monday Night Football, and how can we fix it? What’s it like to watch twenty-four consecutive hours of ESPN? What’s with the explosion of all-sports radio, and how can we stop it? Does golf really need to be televised? Finally, Chad offers a few radical solutions-eliminating all jock analysts, for instance, or simply announcing games yourself from the home-and then concludes that the only answer just may be complete abstinence from all sports viewing.

Hold On, Honey, I’ll Take You to the Hospital at Halftime is the first book to take a humorous look at the hugely popular phenomenon of TV sports and is certain to appeal to all armchair quarterbacks-as well as to all wives who would like to turn off the tube and get their husbands to rake the yard.