This is just, well, a bad column...

[Alma]

From a pretty damn great columnist...

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/commentary/news/story?page=wilbon/110112

And I'm not talking about the message, which a lot of columnists could make. I'm talking about the Godawful clunky style of it. The qualifiers. The lazy paragraphs that read like they were dictated into a recorder. A lot of overheated, political prose that serves no purpose than to write something nobody would particularly <i>want</i> to argue, the way it sits there on the page.

Here's the lede:

"It's been 42 years since Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, changing the course of every living person and even those born to the next generation or two, dramatically altering life in the United States from the delivery of long-delayed freedoms to the rearranging of the calendar."

So that's, hmm, passive voice to start, an overstatement of a fairly significant nature (every living person <i>everywhere</i> for the next two generations?) because he left out the word "American," a false "from-to" range and perhaps the most pedantic, bland reference to the Civil Rights movement ("the delivery of freedom") I can imagine.

And that's one sentence.

 

[holy bull]

You're being too harsh. "The rearranging of the calendar" sings.

 

[RickStain]

*whew, not mine*

 

[Mira]

Clunky ... I agree with Alma. Tough to finish, so clunky.

 

[spud]

Interesting that he used an MLK article to espouse the idea that we shouldn't rely on athletes to be role models.

Or not interesting at all, really, is where I was going with that.

 

[Versatile]

About one out of every three Wilbon columns from the last three or four years (whenever he signed on to work at ESPN as more than just PTI host) is exactly like this. Stubborn moralizing and hyperbolic emphasizing without much craft behind his writing.