You Are Looking Live at Cards from Angus

Today, living sportsbook legend Brent Musburger decided to call it a career in broadcasting today. Musburger, 77, basically announced, "yes, next Tuesday, I'm done." His last game will be to call the Georgia Bulldogs basketball game at Kentucky. Musburger supposedly is going to help family members with their new venture in sports handicapping.

For me, it's not soon enough. Musburger's last season was spent paired with Jesse Palmer calling games on the SEC Network. Between Palmer's inability to stop talking whenever any possibility of dead air approached and with Musburger usually -- and tellingly, it seems -- more focused on whether the teams would cover the spread and whether the teams would get over the over/under number, it got to the point where I literally could not listen to them.

Still, Musburger had some memorable calls in his life, what with being around sports for as long as he has. And what better way to thank Angus from Dawg Day Cards for his Christmas card and the gifts that came with it than to start "looking live."

1. Brent Musburger Introduces America to Jenn Sterger

Without Brent Musburger, Jenn Sterger would have never become known to America. Without Brent Musburger, that means, perhaps Brett Favre's little Brett never gets to the Internet. Maybe, just maybe, without Brent Musburger, new Brewer minor leaguer Cody Decker would never have met Jennifer Sterger and gotten engaged to her.

It's always about Wisconsin sports, right?



Starting off the envelope from Angus, we have a Ryan Braun Chrome 1989 Topps refractor from the 2014 Chrome set and a 1997 Dave Nilsson card from the Donruss Limited set -- a "counterparts" card with Jim Thome on the back. I definitely needed the Nilsson, and the Braun scanned so beautifully that I had to share it even though it may be my second or third or fourth copy of that card.

2. Brent Musburger perving on an orange Iowa State fan

This apparently was a couple of years ago at the Big 12 basketball tournament. I guess it was because it was so par for the course for Brent Musburger to get all excited when women were on screen that no one mentioned anything. That, or no one cares enough about the Big 12 basketball tournament to notice...or maybe that's just me.

I'm much more likely to exclaim "Oh, Yeah" when I see 1973 O-Pee-Chee cards than I am about that Oompa-Loompa girl who looks like a bad cross between Donald Trump and Katy Perry, but only if Trump just put on extra spray tan in an effort to try to look orange. Okay, so maybe that's harsh on the girl, and the problem is the color on the video, but man, that is not attracive.

Not like these cards are. Well, except the electric blue Don Money hat in the pinstriped Phillies jersey (n.b. The Brewers did not wear pinstripes until they changed logos in 1978).

3.  Brent Musburger Gets Katherine Webb Airtime

Are you seeing a trend? Over at least the final 10 to 15 years of his career, Brent Musburger started paying less attention to the game and more attention to the girls in the crowd. To be fair, when you see someone as stunning as Katherine Webb, it might be difficult to look away if you are a heterosexual male.

As was the case for Sterger, Katherine Webb parlayed her 15 seconds of fame into about 15 minutes of fame by doing the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue in 2013 and then going on this weird show on ABC called "Splash", which featured D list celebrities jumping off diving boards. I mean, hell, Louie Anderson was on the show, I think.  

Hey, anything to get her on TV in a swimsuit, I suppose. Here's a link to a video from that show. In fairness to her, she already was Miss Alabama, and she had her man A.J. McCarron already (who is now her husband). But still -- no one would recall her today without Brent Musburger.

On the other hand, everyone would know who these two players are whether Brent Musburger called one of their games or not. As best I can tell, Brent did, indeed call baseball games on CBS radio. He was slated to call games in 1990 on TV, but CBS fired him effective the day after he called the NCAA Men's Basketball Final on April 2, 1990 and replaced him with Jack Buck. 

But I can't find any video of him doing it.

4.  Brent Musburger Loses It over "Busty Heart"

Watch the video to about the 1:20 mark to hear about Tree Rollins and Danny Ainge hating each other and about Rollins taking a bite out of Ainge's hand during a scuffle. Stay to see John Salley in the crown seated next to a blond woman who decides to shake her breasts for the camera. That was Susan Sykes a/k/a Busty Heart.

Sykes took her two seconds of infamy and Musburger's inability to stop laughing and has turned it into a life's work. At the age of 55, now, Busty Heart has her own website -- at, of course, www.bustyheart.com -- and you can see videos of her using her 44H breasts to smash bricks, crush cans, and bust watermelons. 

No kidding.

That's disturbing. Go to the website, though, to see video from Today where Kathie Lee Gifford can't stop laughing either.

Something less disturbing...please:

It's Scooter Gennett as a child, looking like someone you'd call Scooter. The Brewers almost certainly tried to find a trade partner willing to take Scooter on as a bench part this offseason since they have said already that Jonathan Villar will be their starting second baseman this year. 

Having found no takers as of this writing, Gennett is still on the Brewers. I'm not quite sure why the team did not decide simply to non-tender him, but I guess they have hope that he either will bring something in trade during the season or that he could develop further. My guess is that he will no longer be a Brewer in the very near future, one way or the other.

5. Brent Musburger Forlorn over UGA TD

So, I can't get a video of just this play to embed, so here's a 12-minute highlight package. You honestly had to hear more than just one play, though, to get the feel. Last fall, Georgia and South Carolina pushed their game in Columbia to Sunday from Saturday due to Hurricane Matthew. It was an entirely out of sync game. Watching college football on a Sunday afternoon felt weird.

Listening to Brent Musburger and Jesse Palmer making mistakes all day -- things like Musburger calling UGA quarterback Jacob Eason by the name "Jason", or pronouncing Quincy Mauger's name wrong after Mauger made a huge deal about it being Haitian and pronounced "Mo-zhay" even after Jesse Palmer corrected him.

More annoyingly, though, Musburger spent more of the game worried about the spread -- South Carolina was a 7-1/2 to 8-1/2 point underdog -- than anything else. This was especially shown to be true near the end of the game. Go to the 11-minute mark of the video. South Carolina scored a TD to pull within 7 with a minute-and-a-half to go -- and Brent was excited for that. He must have had money on Carolina to cover. At any rate, South Carolina kicked an onside kick, and Terry Godwin ran it back for a TD.

Brent sounded like someone had run over his puppy. I wasn't the only one to notice.

Something that is the opposite of dejected was me when I got this package and found an awesome poster book from 1985 looking up at me.

$3.75 was big money in 1985! I remember those "Scholastic Book Club" order forms from that time, and getting something that was $3.75 was a major investment. I'd usually bottom feed or try to find something for a dollar or less -- mainly because I couldn't afford such frivolities as books at that point. If I wanted to read, I needed to go to the library and find something to read. I did that often, to be fair.

Anyway, getting back to this poster book, inside was a great Cecil Cooper "poster"

Coooooooop!

Coop's swing was smooth and as silky as they came. He was not a patient hitter, to be fair, but damn he could hit.

Many thanks go to Angus for the great cards and, legitimately, to Brent Musburger for his lifetime of commentating. When he was on top of his game back in the 1980s and 1990s, he was one of the best.