CSotD: Get out your hankies: It’s time for sports!
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Tank McNamara on the transition from sports to soap opera. And we're not that many months away from the next Olympics, folks.
Many of you are old enough to remember when ESPN was a sports network and would show all sorts of odd and interesting events, most memorably Australian Rules Football, which became so popular that, when my parents went to Australia, they brought back footie jerseys for my young sons (Magpies and Tigers, for those with an interest in details).
The network still shows some minor sports, but it mostly fills the hours between college basketball and NFL games with talking heads and highlight clips.
With E:60, however, they go behind the sport to profile the athletes themselves, their triumphs and tragedies, in a heartwarming … Excuse me, I'm having a moment here … you'll have to go see for yourselves …
Don't get me wrong: I like to hear a little something about the athletes.
For instance, Mike Reid, an outstanding defensive tackle for the Cincinnati Bengals, had a degree in music and played piano with several symphonies in the off-season. That's pretty interesting, and the sportscasters would mention it after he'd ripped the head off a quarterback. I even saw a three-minute segment on it in the pregame once.
Once. And it might have been four minutes. But it was enough to show him playing the piano and talking about how he liked to play the piano. And then back to the game.
The game was the point of the broadcast. This was a long time ago.
A guy I knew in college went on to become a network sports executive, and one of his first rungs, in the early 70s, was doing stats on Monday Night Football.
When they were in town for a Denver game once, he came over to the house for a beer, and I complained to him that, every single time the Broncos got on national TV, the color commentator would observe that Calvin Jones, a cornerback, was only 5'9" but could stand flatfooted under the goalposts, jump up and touch the crossbar.
My friend explained that these small colorful facts were like slips of paper kept in a jar, and that there was a jar for each team, so that, when they came to Denver, the color commentator would open the jar, read "You know, Broncos cornerback Calvin Jones is only 5'9" tall, but he can stand flatfooted under the goalposts, jump up and touch the crossbar." Then he'd put the slip back in the jar and replace it in the refrigerator for the next time they came to town.
Or they could use it for some memorable, unintentional improvisation: During one of those games in the early 70s, CBS sportscaster Jane Chastain observed that Jones, though only 5'9" tall, could stand flatfooted under the goalposts, reach up and touch the crossbar.
There was a moment of stunned silence in the booth and then one of the other sportscasters said, "You must mean he can jump up and touch it," and she replied, "No, they tell me he can just reach up and touch it." Another moment of silence and then, "He'd have to have arms like an orangutan."
(That response wasn't cited as racism, but there remains a story of how male sportscasters were not respectful of women in the booth during this period. Those who can remember the actual input provided by Jayne Kennedy and Phyllis George are not expected to speak up during this discussion. It took awhile to develop the Suzy Colbers who actually knew sports. The question now is, can you fairly criticize Hannah Storm while giving Chris Collinsworth a pass?)
In any case, if you look in the refrigerator today, you'll find that that jar with the slip of paper now tells the score of the event, but is only ever pulled out and read when they need to break up the steady flow of stories of childhood poverty, family disease and plucky responses to tragedy.
And I say that as someone who remembers when the Olympics were a sporting event and not a soap opera in which the characters were all quite physically fit, especially considering the heartbreaking tragedies they had each endured with courage and determination, not to mention lifelong goals, in their personal lives.
My young memories of the Olympics include watching Karl Schranz and Jean-Claude Killy race through the snow in Grenoble on a TV in the lodge at a ski hill. When the race ended, we all went out and skiied. Ourselves. In the snow. I'm not making this up.
And I remember when the sportscasters in Montreal were caught completely off-guard by someone named Nadia COMM-a-NEECHY and it was a few events later before they could even pronounce her name. They never were able to find out anything about her cancerous siblings, dead parents or missing body parts.
But my more recent memories of the Olympics involve a party where all the women were bunched around the TV watching someone with a dread disease face off against someone who had overcome genocide or necrophilia or something or other, while the men were standing around wondering what the hell had happened to the party.
And the Olympics.
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