Hold on, Honey, I'll Take You to the Hospital at Half-Time: 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.

Publishers Weekly

Chad is a hilariously funny TV sports critic whose philosophy is that if something is worth doing, it's worth doing to excess. And clearly the opportunities for excess in his chosen field are enormous, what with ESPN, the World League of American Football, remote control and VCRs. Between sharp barbs at sports bars, New York City fans and his own tiny attention span--the fact that there are 44 chapters in his book, half of the pieces original and half reprinted from Sports Illustrated and elsewhere, supports his claim--Chad takes on chatty sportscasters and analysts, his bete noir being shrill basketball announcer Dick Vitale. But the bulk of the book combines delightfully self-deprecating observations about the failure of Chad's marriage as a result of his addiction to the tube with perceptive comments about the suitability of some sports to TV, reserving his most scathing remarks for golf (``the greatest thing for sleep since the invention of the coil-spring mattress'') and hockey (``the puck looks like a runaway bread crumb''). (Dec.)