American TV sportscasting is full of factoids, full of graphics, full of breakaways from the midst of play for prerecorded human-interest backgrounders, full of color analysts overexplaining what happened a couple of minutes ago even as new, more urgent things are happening in front of our eyes, full of overpacked broadcast booths with three-man teams, sideline reporters, spotters, graphics people and telestrators, all breathlessly jostling for air time. Goals are scored in hockey games, and instead of showing the players celebrating, hyperactive producers cut away to show coaches, random crowd shots, the empty net, the goalie whose expression is hidden behind his mask. A single football play cannot pass without two instant replays; lineups cannot be given without film clips of the players saying their own names. At any given moment in a baseball game, what you’ll hear is the studied casualness of the down-home, nothing-really-exciting-going-on-here play-calling tradition that O’Brien personifies.
All these strands together add up to the crisis in American sportscasting that is made evident at every World Cup, when English-speaking fans flee in enormous numbers to listen to commentary in a language they don’t even understand. It’s not just soccer, of course — for many U.S. sports fans, it has long been impossible to listen to the type of football telecasts epitomized by Al Michaels, John Madden and the overproduced Monday Night Football franchise. John Davidson’s interruptions wherever there is an American hockey telecast has driven those few fans who care about them to the Internet for local radio connections. And so on down the line. The common denominator in the way American TV covers any sport is the absence of the simple, urgent description of what is happening on the field, the court or the ice — the single most visceral thing for any fan watching any sport he or she cares about.
That is the very experience the Spanish-language World Cup telecasts give English-language viewers: the sense of urgency, of excitement, of drama. There are no departures to explain what the rules are, no fancy graphics to present statistical factoids, no interruptions to show personal profiles. In Spanish, the narrative is the thing, and even though anglophones may not be able to follow that narrative perfectly, its primacy is so compelling as to be prefereable to the ESPN/ABC model.
Jeff Z. Klein World Cup ’06, from a longer commentary on World Cup coverage
Amen! Given the choice, NewMexiKen would choose to watch most sports on TV with just the players, crowd and public address sound.
The reason for all of this is that American TV suppliers assume the audience is stupid and will not pay attention unless the program continually demands it. (I think this is because TV producers themselves tend to be easily bored and hyperactive.) So they pack their production with all kinds of frenetic “eye candy” that will continually disrupt any thought process that might lead someone away from the TV.
Setting up a network sports broadcast takes an enormous amount of equipment, and woe be unto the producer who doesn’t use it all. If you’ve got a “telestrator,” you’d damned well better diagram some plays. If you’ve got five isolated replays on every play, you’d better show lots of angles. If you don’t, you’re not using what the network is paying for, and you’re going to be looking for a job soon.
And, since sports are in many ways a commodity product, they encourage their announcers to develop personalities above and beyond what is called for to present the game. Madden becomes as much a brand as are the Dallas Cowboys, and trying to tone that brand down would not be something the marketers would encourage. Look at how ridiculous the NFL Today show is; it’s got more to do with the hosts than it does with the games.
I saw Vin Scully’s great call of Kirk Gibson’s 1988 World Series Home run the other day, and what stood out is how little Scully talked. His gift has always been a sense of story, and he knew as it was happening that all he could possibly do was get in the way. So he stepped back and let the action speak for itself. Which it did, eloquently.
Tom, you reminded me of Scully’s great call of the ninth inning of Koufax’s perfect game in 1965. Salon has it online.
As Charles Einstein notes in his introduction to the Scully call in The Baseball Reader, “As you read Scully’s spontaneous description, it will become hard to believe that this wasn’t written, but is indeed the unrehearsed spoken word instead.”
i agree with that commentary on the NY Times website. Instead of telling you whats going on in the plays, they tell you what high school they went too. Most people would get much more out of the game if they stuck to describing and giving us only the facts we need.