BRISTOL, CONNECTICUT— 

In one of the strangest stories we have seen in a while here at Empire Sports, ESPN is crossing the line of good sense. One of their most popular and talented personalities, Bomani Jones, is being forced to drop some weight. Jones appears regularly on “Around The Horn” and is part of Dan LeBatard’s show on ESPN 2, called “Highly Questionable”. Jones learned of the contract stipulation this morning, then went on twitter to expose ESPN’s ridiculous stance on his body weight.

Jones apparently thought it was some kind of prank from one of his ESPN buddies. Those are some “zany” guys over there in Connecticut you know. But it was for real. The evil four letter network was serious about Bomani’s weight issues. Now if you have seen Mr. Jones in his various roles on the TV shows, you know is already pretty skinny. And by pretty skinny, I mean he is a twig-like man.

We had to dig deeper into this story, for no other reason than the fact that it made no sense. We all have read about female celebrities who must maintain an attractive body weight to keep a role on a television show. In this case it did not seem to fit the situation. If Jones lost anymore weight, he would run the risk of being virtually invisible. It took us a while to get anyone at the billion dollar network to talk to us about this ordeal.

Finally we got hold of Irma Wattz, a make up artist at ESPN, who was not afraid to speak out. Wattz told us that Bomani was being targeted to lose weight because of Dan Lebatard and his dad, Papi. The Lebatards were not the ones pushing the weight issue but were the cause of the problem, according to Wattz. “Those two fat asses from Miami are taking up so much room on camera that there is hardly room for BOJO. The network knows there is no way those two guys are going to lose any weight so they are going after Bomani. Dan and his daddy have gotten 22% larger since ‘Highly Questionable’ started, and they are showing no signs of slowing down”, Wattz said. She let us know that Lebatard & Papi are nice guys, but no contract stipulation on earth could stop them from eating their way to a TLC reality show about their 600 pound life.

We asked some camera techs at the network if they had considered a wider angle camera lens for the show, but they said it would take a NASA type camera for viewing distant stars. “ESPN just doesn’t have that kind of money”, they told us.