ESPN
There have been a few sports miracles in my lifetime: the 1980 US hockey team, Doug Flutie’s hail mary, and Anna Kournikova’s first Maxim spread to name just a few. Well, I’m about to add one to the list: Kenny Mayne’s web-only series Mayne Street doesn’t suck. In fact, it doesn’t suck so much that one might actually use the word “good” to describe it.
This is huge news because on the face of it, this thing was positively drowning in suck potential. Whenever you combine a fading former ESPN anchor with a website whose history of web-only projects makes the Chocolate Rain guy look like Orson Welles (anyone else remember the Bill Simmons cartoons?), you’re basically cooking up a big fat suck brownie for the world to devour. I was so pleasantly surprised with what Mayne and ESPN came up with, however, I had to share it with you guys as fast as possible. It’s like August 2003 all over again.
The non-sucking video evidence after the jump…
For those of you who don’t remember Kenny Mayne, he was the SportsCenter anchor from the ’90s whose humor was so dry you could, at one point, actually use the 11PM airing of the show to dehumidify your basement. He all but disappeared from the anchor position during the early ’00s, however, to pursue a variety of projects for ESPN, none of which ever panned out. Mostly, this was due to the fact that Mayne’s brand of sarcasm was perfect for undermining the usual pomp that accompanied sports highlights, but just looked douchey whenever they freed him from the desk.
I was rooting for him, but it got so bad that whenever they would cut to a Mayne “comedy” piece on the Sunday SportsCenter, I found myself switching the channel as fast as I could. Faster even than when I saw a Jeremy Schaap narrated piece about a spunky one-legged autistic place-kicker whose “dreams of playing were realized one fateful Friday in Appaloosa…” That’s saying something.
So it was with lowered expectations that I found myself watching the 4 minute Mayne Street Episode 1: Fixes. Shockingly, instead of a mish-mash of half formed ideas, the show is infused with the same self-referential fun of the “This is SportsCenter” ad campaign. If you are, like me, a fan of those ads, you’ll be a fan of Mayne Street.
My only hope is that the rest of the episodes follow this formula: funny, skit-length vignettes in and around the Bristol campus. I’ll be disappointed if the rest of the Mayne Street episodes veer into the “found comedy” territory Mayne unsuccessfully tried to explore in his boring SportsCenter pieces.
Check it out for yourself and let me know in the comments what you think about it.
Clacked by Jay Black 
on Nov 13, 2008 @ 12:00 EST5EDT
Hm. That opening line could have been better. “There have been _several_ sports miracles…” is how it should have read. Bah on me for writing after spending 11 hours driving to Maine. That’s the FIRST RULE of elegant prose — don’t write after crossing more than four state lines in a single afternoon.