Why are there people playing poker on my TV?

Seriously.

No, don't give me that rhetorical "Why is anything on TV?" I know even "Three's Company" was on TV for nine years, but at least I know why: Suzanne Somers.

Suzanne Somers is not playing poker on my TV, but it seems like everyone else is. There is celebrity poker, but I haven't seen Suzanne Somers on that, either. I've seen Jerome Bettis. He lost, but it was nothing like what I lost -- two minutes of my life I'm never getting back.

Something like six weeks ago, I reminded myself that poker on TV might be a viable column topic and resolved to watch it. Here's the way a typical attempt at watching poker went for me.

OK, there's the deal and let's look at this guy's two hole cards via the ESPN Hole Card Cam. Hmmm. An 8 and a 9, both of hearts. How about that. I wonder what's on TV Land.

Click.

Hey, it's the "Green Acres" episode where Lisa Douglas gets Arnold Ziffel an audition with a Hollywood agent she knows. She climbs up the telephone in a dress from Saks to call California with a rave review of Arnold's stage debut with the Hooterville Players.

Sure, Arnold's actually a pig, but have you seen the guys sitting around the poker table?

To be clear, my objection isn't aesthetic, but rather dramatic. Poker is merely the next step down in the devolution of televised sports. When television was new, its sports offerings were mostly wrestling and boxing. No one ever had to ask themselves why they were watching wrestling or boxing. It was because two guys were trying to kill each other. If there's a fight on a PAT bus, people will watch it. If it were advertised, ridership would triple.

But then things started to deteriorate. Baseball, football, basketball, hockey, tennis, golf, hunting, fishing, and now poker. The World Series of Poker has apparently just ended, and to be perfectly candid, had I to choose among the World Series of Poker, the Super Bowl of Parcheesi and the Stanley Cup of Clue, I'd be at a loss.

I've got nothing against any of those games, poker in particular. Played it since I was about 7. Started at my grandmother's kitchen table. Pennies in the pot, quarter limit, five-card stud, sometimes five-card draw. Hours and hours. My grandfather, a miserable old goat, never seemed more alive than when he was beating my grandmother out of 13 cents.

She'd get mad. Clomp upstairs for more change. Clomp back down and get beat again. The rest of us knew he was about one pot away from an explosion in which years of simmering hostility would flow across the table in a toxic spew that made even 7-year-olds aware that there was more at stake than what was on the table.

"You cheap bastard!" she'd yip at him.

"Ah shaddap!"

Yeah, that was poker.

Maybe if the people playing poker on my TV had guns, that would change the dynamic. Old West poker. Out there, they didn't call aces and eights the dead man's hand for nothing. Maybe if I had a gun, I'd just kill myself, if all that was on TV was poker.

It's not like I've lost my attention span. I can still read for hours on end if people would let me, and I can still watch an entire American League baseball game (average length 6 hours, 14 minutes) with only one nap. But poker reminds me of George Costanza trying to sell Seinfeld's pilot to the network exec.

"What did you do today?"

"I got up and came to work."

"See, that's a show, right there."

"Where?"

"It's just what people do. You know, you get up. You read."

"You read on TV?"

"Well, no, you don't read."

No, and you don't play poker, which is reading, but in sunglasses. As an entertainment "innovation," this isn't pushing the envelope. This is pulling the envelope and ripping it to pieces.

In the sports TV continuum from wrestling to poker, we can only hope there is nowhere left to go.

Celebrity snoring, America's Funniest Comas, and Wake TV should be kept within the bounds of unstable imaginations.