Sports Guy Intern Contest

Anyone a ESPN.com Page 2 Sports Guy reader? If you are, then you know he recently ran a contest looking for a new intern. The contest was an open application for people ages 18-25 (that's me, 24). All you had to do was write a 400 word application essay. I wrote one and tried to send it in, but for some reason, they used an aol address (I checked the java script submission form to get the email address) for the entries. As a result, the box was full and never emptied before I could get mine in.

Now, they've posted the 25 finalists and I am less than impressed (1). I really feel that mine is, if nothing else, at least funny; a trait which 90% of the finalists lack. Take a look for yourself and let me know what you think:

My name is decavent. I've been reading you since day 1 at Page 2. I’ve spent nearly four years trying to get one of my emails into your mailbag. I was raised on pop culture phenomenons like Knight Rider, John Travolta’s career resurrection in Pulp Fiction after playing Scott Baio’s mom in the waning years of “Charles in Charge” and Michelle Johnson’s pitch perfect combination of horrible acting and amazing breasts. My friends refer to me as a walking-talking IMDB. I'm from Connecticut, which I’m told is in New England...certainly a pre-requisite for the job. I have a bio-medical engineering degree from Harvard, but have spent the last 3 years answering phones, getting coffee and making no money in Hollywood so I could “pay my dues.” I already know what it's like to work for the Miserable Mouse. My Sports Gal is a two-sport college varsity athlete who likes watching SportsCenter and whose female roommate works for a professional baseball team. I will be unemployed as of the first week in April. I spend to first four hours of each work day browsing a list of highly respectable news websites including: gawker.com, defamer.com, collegehumor.com (I’m 25), gorrilamask.net and, of course, espn.com. I spend the next four hours of the work day emailing links from those sites out to my friends and family. I’m a fan of obscure sports. As a rower in college, I feel obligated to tell everyone what great athletes rowers are even though there wasn’t a poker player among us…oh wait. For four years in high school, I ran John Calipari’s “perfection” everyday in basketball practice, and we used the big balls. I click refresh on my email every 2 minutes, and even that’s not often enough. I wasn’t surprised when I saw you on “I love the 90’s” on VH1. Nor was I surprised that you look nothing like the picture on Page 2 or the guy on Sports Century. I was able to turn a Dreamcast from a completely useless video game console into a single disc Nintendo allowing me to play RBI Baseball and Super Tecmo Bowl on my plasma television (the way Al Padrique was meant to be seen). And most importantly, I'm one of five people on the planet to have read "The Jazz Factor." I even managed to make the essay exactly four hundred words, as the instructions specified…wait…and now.