Celebrating G4 Part 11: Sweat!

First off, I want to apologize for falling behind big time on this one but to be honest it is pretty daunting. With the previous entries focusing on Pulse and Game On, I didn’t have a lot to go off of in terms of research. Well, this entry focusing on Sweat is going to be either the tipping point or an unmitigated disaster. So now join me on this trip through my knowledge of Sweat.

In the G4 Demo Reel that I watch every morning while brushing my teeth there was a show that was featured in the video focusing on Sports games aptly named “Sweat”. In the G4 Demo Reel, everything related to the show back in 2002 was either spoken by its host Ronnie Lewis or different sports personalities including Jimmy “Superfly” Snuka and Jonny Moseley just to name a couple. Ronnie then speaks about the Madden Bowl which is a tournament that has been running for nearly thirty years as of 2021 but only several when the G4 Demo Reel was put out. They then transition to NBA 2k2 for the Dreamcast and Rasheed Wallace who was playing for the Trail Blazers at this point in time sung the game’s praises. As things are moving on from Sweat, Ronnie Lewis touts Sweat as the show that “walks, talks, and stalks sports”.

This is where the strands get pretty hard to put together as at some point between 2002 and 2003. Ronnie Lewis is replaced as host of Sweat by Rossi Morreale while Cobi Jones and Bobbito Garcia are listed on the shows IMDb page. I will say this about just looking at the set in the Demo Reel: it looks very well put together and despite it being the early aughts I am jealous that Ronnie got to hang out in that section of the studio. I didn’t say this for Blister or Cheat but they also had sets that were absolute bangers.

Going back to Sweat though, I have only seen two episodes and I have seen more episodes of Game On and it lasted quicker than Sweat. But from the two episodes I did watch, I know that I would have enjoyed the show as one episode dealt with WWE Smackdown Shut Your Mouth! from 2003 (around the time of WrestleMania 19) while the other was focused on Baseball video games and Rossi was interviewing members of the 2002 World Series champions, the Anaheim Angels. Soon to be Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim.

I was re-floored that one of the greatest players to put on a uniform and the ownership face of the Miami Marlins, Derek Jeter was featured on G4. Also, on said episode was Trip Hawkins who was the founder of Electronic Arts and 3DO. Sadly, 3DO would go under a few months after the episode but Hawkins has been busy since then.

While I would have liked the show had it launched when I was more aware of things, I really don’t like Rossi. In the few minutes I had seen of Ronnie I would’ve preferred to have seen him host the show. Unfortunately, after the G4TechTV merger finished and things went back to G4 Media, Sweat was one of the many shows that were canceled. Rossi would go on to host two more shows for G4 after the cancelation of Sweat; G4 Sports, and Formula Drift, a racing show for G4 while the former was about and you guessed correctly sports.

Some of the games that have the honor to have been featured on Sweat were the previously mentioned WWE Smackdown Shut Your Mouth, NBA Inside Drive, NHL Rivals 2004, All-Star Baseball 2004 (which I mentioned on the most recent Player’s Club podcast), and High Heat Baseball 2004.

And with that, I am finally done with the partial story of Sweat, or at least everything I know about Sweat. Check out Part 10 on Pulse, and check out G4’s official YouTube channel for their B4G4 content. Next up is the finale to this series where I go through one of the greatest G4 shows to have been broadcast: Portal.