The Passing of a True Legend

There was a lot of death in the news last week, and by the title of my post, you would probably assume that I am going to be talking about Michael Jackson, Farrah Fawcett, or Ed McMahon. But it wouldn't make a whole lot of sense to talk about any of those 3 on a sports blog. We lost another not quite as big name that recently had some ties to the world of sports, loud-mouthed TV pitchman Billy Mays. I never really quite understood how someone like him got on TV, with his style of shouting to sell cleaning products, but I guess his voice definitely got everyone's attention....

I would say that I was probably in the boat of never wanting to buy any of his products because of his pitch style and general cheesy feeling to his commercials. That was the case until a few months ago, when he started to appear in the absolutely hilarious ESPN 360 commercials, where he basically was mocking his own style. Those commercials and his goofy antics on the sidelines during the bowl games gave me a different impression of the guy....that he understood his style was annoying but must have been effective. I started to watch his Pitchmen show on Discovery mostly because it came on after Mythbusters, and I never knew how involved he was in actually meeting with inventors and doing the market research to make sure the products worked. In the end, he wound up making a lot of people with great ideas (and himself) millions of dollars, and from the show it seemed like he was a really great guy.

So R.I.P Billy. I'm not going to miss you waking me up at 1 AM to buy OxiClean when I fall asleep with the TV on, but I'll definitely miss the ESPN 360 commercials and the Pitchmen show.