The proverbial "they" like to say "timing is everything." Apparently that's a lesson ESPN never bothered to learn or care about.
Back in 2004, a time when "Friends" was in it's final season, a time when Kanye West was a hot new artist, and I myself was just beginning my journalism career a few thousand miles north in Fairbanks Alaska... A pretty hilarious movie called "Dodgeball" was released.
In that movie a running joke was made about the number of ESPN stations, they parodied the network with "The Ocho." Using the tag line "bringing you the finest in seldom seen sports." Which leads us to August 2017. A scant 13 years after the movies release, where, on the 8th of this month, ESPN will turn ESPN "U" into ESPN 8 "The Ocho" for one day. They're going to air Disc Golf and Roller Derby, Trampoline Dodgeball and Firefighters Challenges, even something called the Kabaddi World Cup. It's a great idea, or it would have been, about 10 to 12 years ago.
Now the joke will be lost on most the viewers. Dependent solely on people like myself with an inability to remember anything important while keeping useless pop culture references firmly in the frontal cortex of their brains. It could be fun, it may be worth wild, it could also tank miserably. It could leave the network a burning pile of sadness. So for my thoughts on this gamble I've got to quote the great Pepper Brooks "that's a bold strategy cotton lets see if it pays off" and that's today's take...
