Poker goes from painted dogs to TV dorks

Somebody should say this, so it might as well be said here: Televised poker is a plague on our society. It is a canker sore on the lips of our culture. It is akin to smoking unfiltered cigarettes, in that it's bad for the body and mind, an insidious habit gone epidemic.

Poker is not a sport, but it's all over the sports pages. It's all over ESPN. It's all over Bravo and Fox - and even the pages of my own paper.

All of a sudden, at all hours of the day and night, we're seeing corpulent, pasty guys with bad skin and bad attitudes hunched around sleazy tables like derby-wearing mutts in a dime- store painting.

Who are these people? Better yet, who cares? Why are they on my TV screen? Why are they in my paper? What does it say when poker ratings on ESPN are almost as high at 3 a.m. as they are during waking hours? That's right, poker is watched by the thousands across America in the dead of night.

Some might call that a fetish. And if not that, what does one call playing poker for hours on a computer? A new opiate for the masses? A prelude to downloading porn? Obviously, it's called a sign of the times.

"I think (poker) has all the elements of what it takes to be a big deal," ESPN spokeswoman Keri Potts said..

Potts and ESPN would know. Poker now draws more than 1 million households per viewing, a staggering achievement of programming muscle, considering it is a sedentary game played at a table - like Parcheesi.

This revolution apparently started two years ago, when the World Series of Poker on ESPN tapped America's vein of addiction, elevating anonymous schmoes such as Chris Moneymaker (yes, his real name) into supposed cult figures.

Moneymaker, you see, turned a $40 tournament entry fee into a $2.5 million payday when he prevailed over more than 800 players.

This is, of course, the heartbeat fueling games of chance: the Hail Mary hope of the big score for the dog-faced Everyman. It's the bedrock upon which Las Vegas - and ESPN poker ratings - are built.

Steve Lipscomb, creator of the World Poker Tour, described the bonanza this way last year: "Even if you have the desire and resources, you can't go play in any other major sports like the NFL or the NBA. . . . But with poker, you can. It's a televised sport that anybody at home, on any given day, could have a chance to play for a major title with the top players."

Fine. You want to play online poker until your corneas bleed, go ahead. You want to gamble away your mortgage, that's up to you.

There is no problem as long as you call it what it is - a hobby, a way to blow off steam, the vice of a free society.

But that's not how poker is being sold now. It's being jammed down our throats by the pimps of popular culture, crafted as thrilling competition when it's really not.

Go to a tournament and you'll see.

"It's like watching paint dry," Lipscomb told The Sacramento Bee last year.

But it works because ESPN filmmakers skillfully manipulate hours of nothing - madly cutting and pasting - to produce "great television." In truth, it's just as phony as the And1 Mixtape basketball tour, which is a collection of bricks and bumbling passes distilled into heavily edited dunks and "street-ball attitude" for television.

It's not real, it's Memorex.

Such fakery was bad enough when ESPN cameras turned publicity-hungry bowlers into trash-talking bozos, but now we're supposed to be impressed by a poker-playing doofus with wraparound sunglasses? Seriously.

Modern-day court jesters are being elevated alongside the Miguel Tejadas of the world by the likes of The New York Times, which, on Friday, described poker players this way: "Among the game's breakout stars are Men "The Master" Nguyen, who often sips beer at the table in a pose of nonchalance; and Chris "Jesus" Ferguson, whose long locks and dark beard help him resemble the popular depiction of Christ."

Boy, is that this week's sign of the coming of the apocalypse or what?

So let's review: Televised poker stinks because a game requiring no athletic ability, tied to gambling and played by chain-smoking, booze-swilling louts is being sold as culturally important. It stinks because it's a game manipulated by TV to seem more interesting than it is. It stinks because it appeals to our worst instincts.

OK. This is America, people watch poker; the rest of us always can change the channel. No problem.

But keep poker off my sports page. And while I'm happy for the Elk Grove, Calif., guy who took home seven figures in Las Vegas on Saturday, don't tell me his win is important.

By Marcos Breton

News Added: 19 July, 2005

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