A Monkey Picks the Winners
April 10th, 2007, 1 Comment »
Maggie the macaque is the weirdest and my favourite aspect of TSN’s TV coverage of the playoffs. From Wikipedia:
Maggie was born and hand-raised at the Bowmanville Zoo in Bowmanville. At the zoo, she was trained to spin a wheel. In 2003, several executives and expert panelists from the Canadian sports broadcaster TSN decided that they would “do something random” with their show, and they ended up bringing Maggie onto their broadcasts to make predictions.
The absurdity of Maggie really appeals to me. Often times sports commentators take themselves a little too seriously, and the monkey really serves to undercut that. I wrote about her last year at this time, and she ran the table, beating the three sports pundits with a record of 9 and 6.
You can watch Maggie pick the first round winners online. Happily, this year she picked Vancouver to beat Dallas. Two of the pundits agreed with her, while the other three went with Dallas–it’s a split.