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What: The ESPY Awards

And the 1997 ESPY for Longest-Running Commercial Plug for a Cable Network Shamelessly Cast as a “Legitimate” Sports Awards Show goes to . . . the 1997 ESPYs!

Now in its fifth year of overstaying its welcome, the ESPY show is so much a sham, ESPN doesn’t even pretend to take it seriously.

An ESPY “pregame” show, with breathlessly reported scoops about the green room not being green?

An ESPY “postgame” show, with Robin Roberts conducting her fourth interview of the night with host Jeff Foxworthy, Robert Wuhl doing a bad Foster Brooks imitation and Janine Turner revealing why she wore red to the gala event?

Keith Olbermann and Dan Patrick reminding all, in deadpan mock sincerity, to stay tuned to “the show that just won’t go away”?

Don’t you get it?

The ESPYs are a (nudge, nudge) sendup of the Emmys and the Grammys and all those people’s choice award shows so hopelessly unhip (wink, wink) that ESPN feels compelled to skewer them with ruthless parody so cutting edge that Tom Dreesen is trotted out to tell rip-snorting white-guy-plays-basketball-with-black-guys jokes (rim shot, please).

Yet, amid all the nonsense and gratuitous awards (in an upset, Heisman Trophy winner Danny Wuerffel was named college football performer of the year!), the ESPYs paid solemn tribute to Jackie Robinson and Muhammad Ali on Monday night. These were touching television moments--and they felt entirely out of place with ESPN’s self-styled comedians trying to out-glib each other.

Rule 1 of parody: It had better be funny.

Rule 2: If it isn’t, you’d better pull the plug long before the third hour.

Rule 3: Don’t even try it when your best “material” can’t hold a candle to a candy-bar commercial spoofing Michael Jordan’s Cologne. That Dan Patrick, he’s no Gheorghe Muresan.