The Media Drop

This post comes courtesy of my pal Notorious MiG, who has a bone to pick with Sports Illustrated’s Jon Wertheim.

From the Sports Writers are Idiots File:

Notorious MiG was looking over the results from the Australian open when he came upon these comments from some fool named Jon Wertheim who has borrowed all of his Russian knowledge from a re-run of Rocky IV.

“Russian women: The Revolution is old news, but like those Marushka Dolls they just keeping coming. Seven Soviettes made it into the Round of 16.”

First off Jon boy — they’re not called “Marushka Dolls” they’re called “Matryoshka Dolls”. If you’re too stupid or too lazy to get the spelling correct, I’m sure there is some copy editor, fact checker or intern on the Sports Illustrated staff who can do your work of correctly spelling it for you.

“Soviettes”? — Yeah that’s original. About as original as everyone putting backwards “R”’s on their web sites to make them look Russian. The Soviet Union bit the dust a decade ago — time to get a new idea. While you’re at it you can also stop saying “The Russian Revolution” the “The Russians Are Coming” and “From Russia With Love” every time you want to write about Russian tennis players.

Also, calling a Russian a Soviet is like calling a guy from the Republic of Ireland “British.” You can wind up getting punched in the face as there are plenty of us from the former USSR (Russians, Lithuanians, etc.) who find the term “Soviet” offensive.

Seriously, any time sports writers attempt to show off how witty or profound or brilliant they are by injecting bits of history, culture or current events into their articles they only succeed in showing show profoundly ignorant they are of most things historical or cultural since they end up getting their facts all wrong.

Maybe if Jon Wertheim and all the other sports writers would stop drooling over Masha Sharapova and turn off the SportsCenter every so often and take the time to read something about Russia (or anything else for that matter) they wouldn’t come across as complete dolts. Provided they even know how to read.

Well, that wasn’t so bad, was it? Okay, it was. I’d also file this in the “just because they wrote it in a column doesn’t mean they have their facts straight” folder as well.