Sports

This Story Is ¿Highly Questionable?

I knew I’d miss Dan Le Batard when he left ESPN, but I didn’t realize how much

¿Highly Questionable? was fresh, funny, irreverent and serious by turns, and completely unique. In other words, clearly destined for a short life and ignominious death.

For almost twenty years, the father of sports television’s panel talk shows has been ESPN’s Pardon The Interruption. It’s a Siskel and Ebert-style discussion program featuring an unlikely duo of grumpy old men: a goofy Jewish guy from Long Island and a gruff middle-aged Black man from Chicago’s South Side. Both were long-time sports columnists with The Washington Post.

That program has spawned countless knockoffs, but to me none live up to the original. Probably because the two men have been such good friends for so long that there’s something special in the air when they’re on together. It’s like watching a family arguing sports at the dinner table.

Sometimes one host or the other will be away, so the show has featured a parade of fill in hosts. One of the regulars was a loopy younger man known on the set as The Hatable Dan Le Batard, whose schtick was that his…