Blog - E3 Report: For Whom The ESPY’s Crowd Screams
July 17th, 2008, 1:08 pm by Scott Jones
(No Ratings Yet) 
Yesterday I wandered bleary-eyed from appointment to appointment, my energy reserves failing. I quaffed lukewarm Pepsis in an effort to keep going. Konami. Ubisoft. Valve.
Evan and I were going forth, propping one another up like two wounded solidiers trying to get off the battlefield. (Evan actually fell asleep during his LucasArts appointment.) (I was only going to wake him if he began to show signs of morning wood.) (He didn’t, so I let him doze. He’s so cute when he sleeps. Like a little, glasses-wearing elf in a woodland glade…)
As the day wound to a close, I suddenly found a ticket to ESPN’s annual awards show, a.k.a. the ESPYs, in my hand, and I was suddenly being hustled towards the nearby Nokia theater. (Thanks to EA’s very awesome Tyrone Miller.) Not only did I have an ESPYs ticket in hand, I also apparently had red carpet access. So if you see a guy in the background of several photos in next week’s US Weekly dressed like an out-of-work substitute teacher (tie, short-sleeved shirt, bag over his shoulder, etc.), that would be me.
I kept waiting for someone to tap me on the shoulder and say, “Sir, please get out of here because you are A. not famous and B. dressed like a substitute teacher.” But no one did.
People screamed as I made my way down the red carpet, and I very briefly thought the screams were directed at me. Why didn’t I get my hair done for this? I thought. I began to look around to see if there might be any breasts for me to perhaps sign. But then I realized that Michael Strahan was passing a few feet in front of me. And Samuel L. Jackson was behind me.
Feeling a whole lot like flotsam, I found my way to my seat. Justin Timberlake came out and told jokes and danced around. Then a bunch of athletes and celebrities came out. A bunch of ESPYs were handed out, an object that’s only slightly more valuable than a cigar-box banjo. Still, what I thought throughout the evening, you know, in addition to the fact that my life is really f***ing strange sometimes, is that this was a grand scale convergence of two major mediums—sports and entertainment. And it’s exactly the kind of convergence that our medium is in dire need of.
E3 could use some spectacle, some pomp and circumstance, some drama.
Instead, I get to spend one more day wandering through the near vacant L.A. Convention that this year has all the excitement of a closed shopping mall.
