I got an e-mail the other day from my friend Jimmy. He wanted to know if I had ever seen “The Wally Hall Show.” He said that I should catch it sometime if I wanted to see something that was “completely surreal.” I was vaguely aware that Wally was on TV somewhere on the dial as has been the case off and on for the last 20 years or so. The last time I watched Wally was back when he had a show that came on late on Sunday nights. This was back when my youngest brother was in college. That’s how long ago it was.
It was also back before they had 5 second delay or before they screened calls. My brother and his buddies used to get drunk and call Wally to ask him how he thought the Hendrix Warriors were going to do, knowing full well that Wally knew absolutely nothing about basketball in the old Arkansas Intercollegiate College. Which, on any given night, was only marginally different from his working knowledge about any other subject that might come up.
I approached this task with only slight trepidation. Sure, Wally comes across as incoherent and uninformed in print. But, he is actually not too bad on his day gig with Tommy Smith and David Bazzel on KABZ. And even though Channel 18 is a public access channel and even though the star of the show is Wally Hall how bad could it be? I lived in New Orleans back in the early eighties. I used to watch Hap Glaudi and Buddy Diliberto for God’s sake. Those shows were crazy. I didn’t exactly expect MacNeil-Lehrer here or anything. How bad could a 30 minute sports show be?
While I have only watched 2 broadcasts of “The Wally Hall Show” I can say without reservation or fear of contradiction that the word “surreal” only scratches the surface of the 30 minutes of cognitive dissonance that obtains there.
The first show I watched was right after the Super Bowl. Wally started the broadcast by exclaiming “Yeah!” after the credits finished rolling. It would turn out that Wally starts every segment of the show with a “Yeah!” as in “Yeah! Welcome back” or whatever. It was as if the fact that the red “on-air” light comes on after every commercial was a source of continual surprise to him. He also was chewing gum which certainly I never saw Hap Glaudi do.
In this particular segment, Wally showed highlights from the Super Bowl and for the most part, he let co-host Anthony Lucas, a former star for the Razorbacks who played in the NFL, do most of the talking. One of the highlights showed was the 50 yard hope-to-Jesus throw by Rothlesberger to Hines Ward. Wally allowed as how that pass would have never been completed if Kenny Hamlin had been on the field for the Seahawks.
I thought the same thing at the time. Too bad Kenny wasn’t able to dress out after getting his ass kicked in a Seattle bar some three months earlier. At that point in the segment, it would have been a good time to turn to Lucas and ask, “Gee Anthony, aren’t you guys warned about stuff like that all the time?” Or “What would possess a young man to potentially throw his career away like that?”
But that would be journalism and that would be run the risk of sounding critical about a former Razorback. And this is the Wally Hall show.
There wasn’t much going on in last week’s show. Indeed, Lucas was caught stifling a yawn on camera. Anyway, Eddie Sutton had just got charged with DUI and Wally, who seemed a little defensive about it for some reason, reminded the viewers that there was no proof that Sutton had been drinking (that would come later). He showed some really cool footage of the 1949 Little Rock Junior College Trojans victory over the Santa Ana Junior College for the mythical National Championship. He discussed the upcoming Razorbacks’ upcoming game with Auburn as “pivotable.” Actually, the game they gagged away in Oxford the following Tuesday proved to be even more “pivotable.”
About that time, a cell phone could be heard. Wally stopped talking and looked sheepishly down toward the pocket of his windbreaker.
“No.” I said to myself.
Yes. Not only does Wally’s cell phone go off. He pulls it out. AND HE CHECKS THE CALLER ID! Only then, did he call for a break.
At that moment I was getting some sort of weird memory flash. Jimmy was right. “Surreal” was the word but where had I seen it before? Then it occurred to me.
In the movie “Being There” Peter Sellers plays a dimwitted gardener named Chauncey Gardiner who has never left his employer’s estate until his death. The only knowledge he has of the outside world is what he has seen on television. I forget exactly how fate propels him into the role of a White House economic adviser but eventually Chauncey’s simple aphorisms about gardening are taken as metaphors for economic policy until the White House physician, in a memorable scene, comes to the slow realization that Chauncey really is a simpleton who knows nothing about economics or anything else other than gardening.
Peter Sellers’ Chauncey bears the same sheepish countenance of perpetual surprise and confusion throughout the movie that Wally’s face betrayed when the cell phone went off on the air. Or whenever the camera goes on.
The difference is, of course, Sellers was acting. Wally’s “Damn, I’m on the teevee” countenance is the real deal.
I talked to Jimmy afterwards.
“You know,” he said. “Imagine that you are from out of town and you check into your room. You don’t know much about Little Rock and so you start flipping around on the television. You run across Wally. You are immediately drawn by this weird shit. It’s a sports show but nobody really seems to know much about sports. Lucas seems to be a fine young man but he really doesn't add much to it in the way of substance. “
He went on. “Assume that the businessman from out-of-town goes down to the bar for a drink before dinner. He strikes up a conversation with the bartender. He tells him that he just watched ‘some idiot named Wally Hall’ on TV and he asks what gives.”
“And he is told that ‘that idiot’ is the editor of the sports page of the largest paper in the damn state. How does that make us look? Doesn’t Walter Hussman know how bad Wally makes his paper look?”
Hell if I know. Surreal.
1 comment:
I loathed Little Wally until he started his radio gig, which has somehow humanized him. He's still a moron, however.
Everytime I hear him in the a.m., I wonder how those folks he worked with "stabbed him in the front" as Brummett called it, by detailing bits of his divorce in the D-G. It makes me hope there are a few folks overthere who haven't drunk from the punch that makes you forget about seatbelts or create reports about how 'others had it as bad as the LR 9.'
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