February 21, 2006

Am I Wrong About Ralph?

After reading an article about Ralph Sheheen in the March Racer X Illustrated, I realize that I have been incorrect about his experience as a motocross announcer. In the article, which was a quickie interview by Davey Coombs, Sheheen claimed that he announced many races up in Northern California, including the USGP at Hollister, as well as a few supercross races for cable television.

And to think, I was CONVINCED that he had never called a race before. I was wrong.

So I went to the Speed Channel’s website and looked up Ralph’s biography, which you can peruse here. Looking through the brief write-up, the words “motocross” and “supercross” or even “United States Grand Prix” are all missing. In the interest of maybe saving valuable website bandwidth (?), the Speed Channel website content gurus apparently condensed all of Ralph’s experience into the sentence, “…has covered all forms of motor sports from swamp buggies to Formula One…”

Hmmm.

Now, I do not doubt for one minute the veracity of Ralph’s claims made in that interview in Racer X. Not one minute. But I am perplexed that Speed omitted some very important parts of Ralph’s resume. Not that it really matters, anyway… he, in my opinion, continues to be at best a mediocre supercross play-by-play announcer and while I admit I was wrong about his background, I still think he (and Krista Voda) should be replaced.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

If he has, he hasn't learned anything about it yet. It is racing! Again last night at the 2012 opener, he proclaimed stewart the fastest man on the planet even though he was roughly 20 seconds behind the leader BEFORE he crashed (again) with a couple laps to go. Then he acted shocked that stewart fell down. He's been announcing these races- hasn't he been watching them???