I Want to Fight a Man Named Norby

Norby Williamson is the name of the gentleman at ESPN who confirmed that Tony Kornheiser will be returning for another season of Monday Night Football next year, and thus, Norby and I have issues. If I ever meet a man named Norby, and he introduces himself and says, "Hello, I'm Norby--", he will get punched in the mouth before he's finished pronouncing his last name.

That is how much I hate the decision to bring Kornheiser back.

I don't get it, ESPN. You tried it, and it was a miserable, miserable, failure ... why do it again? I understand you want to try something new, and that's fine. But it didn't work. Why seek to punish your audience like this? Hell, if you're going to bring Kornheiser back, why not just take the extra step and pair him with Fran Drescher and Gilbert Gottfried?

If I just said that Kornheiser brought nothing to the table, that would be too high of a compliment. It's not that he didn't bring anything to the table, but he showed up at the table and started stabbing people. He wasn't just bad, he was aggressively bad. It was as if he sought to inflict pain on the audience.

He asked Joe Theismann questions, he sucked up to celebrities, and he whined about his fantasy team (while not actually knowing the definition of a fantasy team). In about 40 total hours of airtime, he said maybe two funny things. The other 38 hours, 59 minutes and 45 seconds were openly irritating. If he was going to get better at this, I think he might have shown maybe one little sign of improvement over 16 weeks of doing it. He didn't.

Those of you who have followed my work here at the FanHouse may think that that means there will be another season of The Kornheiser Chronicles. There won't be. I'm not doing that to myself again, for much the same reasons that I'll never voluntarily ram my face through a microwave door.