Changing of the Guard

I will miss you, O Orange One. So by now, if you care, you know that Mr Tony has opted to roll out from the Washington Post. After 29 years. Dag, some would say. He'll still be on PTI, and have his radio show five months every year, and do Monday Night Football, which are all good things, I guess, but I don't know that he can represent DC as well anymore.

The Post job, even with what it had become over the last five years, gave us credibility on the national sports reporting scene. Sounds weird, but sometimes we've been a little bitter about all sports programming coming from New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and sometimes Chicago or Los Angeles, although those last two aren't as irritating. When PTI hit the "airwaves" (it's a cable show, people) in 2001, DC became a sports news place. Around the Horn. The US studios of the NHL Network are here. The steroid hearings oddly helped this image. We're legit now. Yeah, Wilbon's half the equation, and national guys like Norman Chad and Richard Justice came from here and still recall those days fondly, but Mr Tony is an ambassador for DC in many ways. He gets a lot of crap from a lot of people, but he's genuine in celebrating his uncoolness, and he at least creates the illusion that he's a pretty regular guy. He's a rare celebrity who seems to care about his family and talk about them as much as normal people would around their office, but his fame is still enough that you would tell your friends about it if you saw him somewhere. And most would know who he is.

I don't know that I'll raise a toast to him or anything like that, but it'll be odd without him. Hopefully someone else will get a great start to a career out of this. But I don't think that's the way the world works anymore.