ESPN Should’ve Hired a Gonzo Commentator

Training camp opens this week. Ah, yes. The sweet scent of freshly cut grass, intoxicating and invigorating, fills the nostrils and resuscitates the soul, awakening again to the splendor of the rich green that bounces with every rigorous stride as sweat-soaked muscles strain and grown men playing a child’s game pursue the dream that has consumed them since the first skinned-knee days of a long-ago summer, when all that mattered in the world were a ball and a game of catch and ...

Sorry. Wrong sport. Wrong training camp.

Footballs, not bad poetry, will be in the air this week as the NFL returns to the business of not being baseball, opening camps where the only thing over-inflated might be a lumpy practice ball, and no one cares at all whether the All-Star game counts. Quick: Who won the last Pro Bowl? Exactly. Somehow -- and you can hear Bud Selig scratching his head from New York -- the NFL continues to reign as the country’s leading leisure-time addiction.

And it is an addiction, as Hunter S. Thompson, an expert on the subject, once noted.

“It was Sunday, and Sunday is a good day for revenge,” Thompson wrote. “That is all I cared about, nothing more. Football was in my blood. I am a slave to it.”

I’ve been thinking about Thompson ever since the strangest and most controversial NFL roster move of the off-season was announced last week. The words still ring in my ears.

“We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.”

No, that wasn’t part of the official minutes from the ESPN executive meeting that produced the brainstorm to add Rush Limbaugh to the Sunday pregame studio lineup.

That is the most famous sentence written by someone now on the ESPN payroll. With those words, Thompson opened his gonzo masterpiece, “Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas,” three decades before he became a weekly columnist for ESPN’s Web site.

So where is Thompson on the “NFL Countdown” panel? If ESPN is going to turn its prize Sunday property into an all-comers meet for political pundits who fancy a little pigskin in between spleen ventings, why not go with someone in house, who has covered Super Bowls, who knows Al Davis, who argued football with Richard Nixon, who wrote this about the 2001 Baltimore Ravens for ESPN.com:

“Watching the Baltimore Ravens play football is like watching scum freeze on the eyeballs of a jackass, or being stuck for six hours in an elevator with Dick Cheney on speed. The Ravens will pounce on you and gnaw you to death, which can take eight or nine days.”

And wrote this, also for ESPN.com, about a particularly dreadful Monday night game:

“It will be many years before ‘Monday Night Football’ completely recovers from the stinking, wretched spectacle that ABC tried to pass off as a football game.... Both Dallas and Washington, D.C., should be banished from professional football, and both owners plunged into sheep-dip. All film of the game should be seized and destroyed, all references omitted, all memories scrubbed clean, and all profits confiscated. Showing that game on national TV was a crime against nature. I will hate the sight of Dennis Miller for the rest of my life.”

That might not be the kind of commentary the NFL wants voicing over its Sunday morning incense burnings, but ESPN says it is looking for “the voice of the fan.” Thompson bet the Raiders in the last Super Bowl. Watching them implode, Thompson wrote, felt “like being crushed by an airplane full of leeches.... It was the most horrible beating in the history of Raider football, possibly in the history of the Super Bowl....

“The 48-21 score was deceptively close; it might have been 111-6. Only a baffling rash of freak plays toward the end of the third quarter kept the game close enough to avoid a forfeiture by Oakland. They failed in every way, and so did I.”

You want the voice of the fan, there it is.

Some will say Thompson doesn’t translate to television, that he doesn’t have much of an on-camera presence. Have you seen “Around the Horn”? Occasionally, during talk show appearances, Thompson has been known to ramble incoherently. So does Chris Berman. Hunter would fit right in with the “Countdown” crew.

Limbaugh, meanwhile, was a candidate for the “Monday Night Football” job that eventually went to Miller. That, in the view of ABC/ESPN management, gives Limbaugh credibility as a potential football analyst, which, I suppose, is one way to spin it.

Another way: He was runner-up to Dennis Miller.

Speaking of fear and loathing, this year’s training camps open amid the gusting of the usual hot air -- which NFL franchise is going to move to Los Angeles, yada, yada -- along with a new visual aid -- the Chargers conducting summer workouts, and field testing, in Carson.

Charger rookies report today, and for the price of a $2 parking fee, L.A.-area families can come out and see for themselves what an NFL player looks like in person. For anyone under 10, this could be a first-time experience.

According to a survey on the Minneapolis Star Tribune’s Web site, the Chargers are favorites in the relocate-to-L.A. derby, garnering 30% of the vote to finish ahead of the Colts (25%), Vikings (24%) and Saints (8%).

But does Los Angeles really want its own NFL team?

During the 2001 season, Thompson wrote that Jack Nicholson told him, “Real football fans were happy when the Rams and Raiders left town. Now we can watch the games on TV, instead of driving all the way out to Anaheim, or down to that monstrous Coliseum. Nobody wants an NFL team in L.A., except maybe the networks.”

So here we sit in NFL limbo, not sure we want to get involved, but getting dragged through the rumor mill whether we like it or not.

Years ago, Thompson coined a phrase for the condition, back when Los Angeles was Ram country. Bad craziness.