Write On Sports LLC - "ESPN, What Have You Done?" by Andrew Berg

ESPN, What Have You Done?

2006-09-27 23:13:04 | By: Andrew Berg

I remember when I was in elementary school and my family first subscribed to basic cable. Even though I was young at the time, I properly understood the paradigm shift that watching ESPN would ultimately cause in my life. I vividly recall being elated that ESPN was channel 3 in our cable package, an important fact because our kitchen TV’s knob only went up to channel 13, and breakfast con-Sportscenter was priority number one. Since then, my preoccupation with the network and all of its wide-reaching capillaries has grown, but with a sense of ambivalence. The irreverent highlight narration of my youth fell by the wayside as Keith Olberman, Charlie Steiner, and Craig Kilborn fled for greener pastures. But the degeneration of Sportscenter itself has merely been a symptom of ESPN’s larger devolution into over-produced corporate pastiche. Now, ESPN is a nearly unwatchable self-parody, obscuring sports rather than reporting or enhancing them.

It has not always been this way for the Worldwide Leader. They once presented sports cleanly and unpretentiously. The format was never perfect; there will always be sub-optimal commentators and a limited quantity of interesting sports. Still, the network managed to find a good balance of obscure events--World’s Strongest Man, the early X-Games, and my personal favorite, the Great Outdoor Games--with big-time sports that kept their importance--Sunday Night Baseball, Big Monday college hoops, college football on the weekends. More importantly, Sportscenter functioned as a magnificent flagship, truly one of the best sports programs I have ever seen, lasting for nearly a decade. They delivered stats, but only the ones that were either especially interesting or important. They had plenty of highlights, but kept a good pace through the show while screening all of the big plays. They even found a way to integrate expert analysis into an all-sports show, with John Clayton going Inside the Huddle, and Peter Gammons’ Diamond Notes.

Heaps of praise, and I have not even mentioned the two most endearing aspects of the era: catchphrases and commercials. Olberman was probably the most famous, contributing, “From way downtown… Bang,” “It’s deep, and I don’t think it’s playable,” and the immortal, “NGGGH!” Even Craig Kilborn (“Jumanji!”), Dan Patrick (“The Whiff”), and Kenny Mayne (“We will feast on the finest meats and cheeses in the land!”) came up with some memorable lines that made everyday sporting events seem more exciting. The important aspect of the catch phrase at its pinnacle was that it did not stand in the way of the sport. The catchphrase buoyed the less interesting events rather than crowding out the big ones, and while sports-casters will never be considered understated, the anchors of old did a much better job letting games speak for themselves.

The “This is Sportscenter” commercials have never technically stopped, although it has been years since there was a decent ad. Those old commercials were miniature comedy sketches more than they were sports advertisements. Unlike today’s ESPN, these ads helped keep the atmosphere light, reminding us that we were watching sports, that there are more important things, and that everyone at the network was well aware of that perspective. More than that, though, the commercials were just plain funny, another quality sorely lacking today. I am convinced that Grant Hill’s spot playing piano in the lobby made him a much bigger star than he would have been without it. The child prodigy anchor simultaneously made fun of the sports world’s preoccupation with phenoms, and the show’s own layout. And trading Charlie Steiner to Melrose Place for Andrew Shue is good for a laugh, even on the 700th viewing.

For several reasons, I do not think that the current iteration could produce memories like these for a new generation of sports fans. Perhaps the decline of the network was inevitable, since they could never maintain a monopoly on good sports programming once the 24-hour network proved to have an audience. Their executives are hardly absolved of all of the blame, since they have done just about everything in their power to make ESPN painful to watch. Instead of responding to competition in all-sports programming by deepening their own coverage and using their resources to make more informative and insightful shows, they chose to follow the cable news strategy of constantly streaming split screens of two old men yelling clichés, insults, and canned arguments at one another. The infiltration of these types has been so extensive that even the decent programming has come to revolve around that sort of mindless banter.

Although not offensive in itself, Pardon the Interruption is a big part of the problem with today’s ESPN, because its success precipitated dozens of rip-off shows with less talented, charismatic, and intelligent hosts. As a result, shows like Cold Pizza, First and Ten, Rome is Burning, and Around the Horn revolve around dumb and abrasive sports journalists yelling at one another about issues that are usually entirely irrelevant. Even the shows that do not require this painful format have started allowing it to creep onto their idea boards. The disease has gone so far into the system that the programmers occasionally see fit to disrupt actual sporting events to let the broadcasters or journalists argue with one another instead of reporting on the event itself, such as the travesty once known as the NBA Draft. When we do get a brief respite from the loud-mouth journalists, it is usually only to hear from a loud-mouth former athlete who is less interesting and articulate, but gets airtime because he used to be able to run fast or throw far. Would anyone want to hear anything that Sean Salisbury has to say if he had not flailed through a few miserable season in the NFL? Does anyone want to hear what he has to say anyway?

About a year ago, I came across an blog called The Road From Bristol. It was a bracketed, 64-person tournament in which participants could vote for their choice for the most annoying ESPN personality. Before this site, I knew there were lots of obnoxious people with jobs that they did not deserve with the network, but never did I understand the enormous volume. I defy you to read through this list without wincing or laughing awkwardly out of discomfort. In no particular order: Woody Paige, Tom Tolbert, Joe Theismann, Mike Golic, Jason Whitlock (departed), Joe Morgan, Jim Rome, Mike Greenberg, Paul MacGuire, J.A. Adande, Stephen A. Smith, Bill Curry, Merrill Hoge, Jay Bilas, Michael Irvin, Steve Phillips, Dan Lebatard, Sean Salisbury, Harold Reynolds (departed), Chris Berman, Digger Phelps, Beano Cook, Brent Musberger, Tony Reali, Michelle Tafoya, Bob Ryan, Mike Tirico, Tim Legler, Lee Corso, Greg Anthony, Jay Mariotti, Buster Olney, Dick Vitale, Linda Cohn, Skip Bayless, Kirk Herbstreit, Lary Bowa (departed), Scoop Jackson, Jim Gray, Jeff Brantley, John Kruk, Stu Scott.

I left out Bill Walton because I still think his persona is a big joke, and he goes home every night and laughs maniacally at the fact that he is allowed to go on TV in spite of his absurd behavior. Setting him aside, consider what the following few have brought to ESPN: Dick Vitale, Stephen A. Smith, Skip Bayless, Jay Mariotti, Stu Scott. Has a single member of this group ever said anything insightful? Has any one of them written anything worth reading? Only Vitale has any professional accomplishments outside of ESPN, and a big part of his shtick is making fun of his own failings as a coach. Collectively, they share one skill: the ability to rant. They also share the aptitude to induce headaches, dry out their own mouths, and encourage a lower TV-volume level, but I think those are redundant skills. Oh, and Stu Scott notably ruined the Sportscenter catch phrase tradition through gratuitous overuse and lack of humor--not to mention that he uses his thick-rimmed glasses to draw a big circle around his lazy eye (if I sound bitter, it is because this man massacred something I once loved).

As an extension of the horrible and higher-profile personalities, the production at ESPN has gone from kitschy to glam. Everything from the on-screen graphics to the Sportscenter set is the biggest, highest-tech, and most fancy in the sports, but in a business where the sports ought to take center stage, those characteristics are hardly virtues. The Onion once published a story titled something like, “On-Screen Graphics Completely Obscure Sporting Event,” which ESPN took not as a hint, but as a suggestion. Today, instead of presenting the sights and sounds of the stadium, ESPN seems to be intentionally compromising every aspect of the live sporting event in order to reinforce their brand name and pound the viewer’s head repeatedly against the giant, Disney-reinforced wall.

Ultimately, I think ESPN’s greatest flaw is the fact that they have gone from reporting sports news from a decidedly irreverent, outsider’s position, to actually making the sports news. The proliferation of journalistic-banter shows stretches the subject-matter a little too thin. That’s not to say that there is not enough happening in sports to keep the public’s interest in a 24-hour sports network--clearly, they have continually proven that hypothesis false. But there is an important difference between quality sports programming and garbage sports journalism. Finding material for morons like Skip Bayless and Woody Paige every day requires some serious digging, and sometimes bringing items to the front of a news cycle that simply do not belong there, or even creating news that never existed. Would Terrell Owens be a household name without ESPN? And why do he and Bonds have their own personal ESPN correspondents? Because you have to feed the monkey, and the more time spent on worthless sports banter, the worse the material has to get. So we end up feeding stupider and stupider questions to stupider and stupider analysts, and the answers predictably get stupider and stupider. This is where the empire falls.

When it comes down to it, I would much rather have the niche programming like Great Outdoor Games and the Spelling Bee, since it makes no bones about its intentions. If I turn on the TV and see X-Games, I know immediately to change the channel. When I turn on Around the Horn, on the other hand, I see people talking about sports and think that I might be interested, but it is all a big lie. These shows are debate shows, and really bad ones. We should not watch dumb people arguing with each other--it’s a nonsensical proposition; we wouldn’t even do it with our friends--but the façade of interesting topics ropes us in and steals our time.

About a year ago, I tried to wash my hands of ESPN, abandoning all of their platforms, except for live sporting events. I found it difficult to rely on FoxSports.com and the like, but with every new article I read, or show I watch, ESPN brings me closer giving that cleansing another shot. As long as the memory of the good times persists, I want to keep it as fresh in my mind as possible without marginalizing the pleasure of watching the old Sportscenter, or enjoying the network in general.