By Jeff Moss
DetroitSportsRag@GMail.com
June 8, 2016
On Monday, former local sports TV anchor Al Ackerman passed away at his Florida home at the age of 90. The cantankerous personality worked for both WXYZ-7 and WDIV-4 while I was growing up.
Considering many of my readers are millennials and would have no memory of Ackerman, I thought a quick blog post was in order because the sports TV anchor position has changed so dramatically in the last four decades some of you might not even believe it.
Before the talking head sports gig devolved into Bernie Smilovitz’s masturbatorial “Weekend at Bernie’s” blooper segment or a fanboy child like Brad Galli marveling at being in the same locker room as Calvin Johnson, sports anchors actually were professional journalists.
In an era when Bill Bonds was the king of the market, the sports anchors actually did more than slop up the local team’s jizzum. Ackerman would often rip the Detroit franchises during his broadcasts or offer an actual commentary on the Lions’ latest woes. (Some shit never changes.)
It wouldn’t be uncommon for Ackerman to absolutely trash Lions GM Russ Thomas on the air for his latest horrendous transaction or a prolonged rookie contract holdout. Something you would NEVER see today.
A guy like Ackerman didn’t worship Justin Timberlake or Taylor Swift like Brad “Shiny, Happy People” Galli, but instead came up through the ranks with the ambition of bringing Jim Murray or Dick Young-style verbiage to the idiot box.
Contemporaries of Howard Cosell like Ackerman didn’t wait outside the Townsend Hotel to take photographs with various celebrities.
Hell, even Ackerman’s most notable legacy, giving the 1984 Tigers the “Bless You Boys” tagline, started off as biting sarcasm.
My lasting memory was a seemingly miserable Ackerman using a cane to get to his Channel 4 perch and then bombing one of the local franchises. God damn, I miss that era.
But I could wax poetic until the cows come home about the unfortunate turn of events where actual criticism of the teams during the 70s and 80s has morphed into glorified propaganda this century and I couldn’t do as good a job of encapsulating it as the following two videos do.
The first is a clip of Galli interviewing Dick Vitale when Galli was in college at Marquette and probably about a year away from becoming a sports anchor at WXYZ.
And now here is Ackerman interviewing a much younger version of Vitale ….
That juxtaposition tells you everything you need to know about the current media.
And it ain’t good, folks.