Having just finished watching the Giants-49ers game, I have some questions regarding the modern sports broadcast. This was the only NFL game I watched this season, and I managed to avoid it entirely all last season. It was my little protest about how irredeemably bad the Browns have been. Any league that would allow a team to suck as bad as the Browns for this long should fire the entire top brass and start over. Anyway, having been away from the NFL for two seasons made some elements of this game seem really strange.
Here are some observations.
1) Football announcing is terrible.
Seriously. If you closed your eyes, you'd have no idea that there was even a football game going on at all. The announcers' job appears to be: 1) bring in the "human interest" angle by describing each play not in technical details or the actual action on the ground but by describing the lives and attitudes of the players involved; 2) invent and maintain a running narrative that describes each play in terms of silly platitudes like "overcoming adversity" or whatever; and finally 3) maintain that narrative within a larger one that includes the whole season.
That this can lead to some extreme silliness is evident. In this game, the announcers' desperate attempt to prosecute duty #2 took the form of explaining everything in terms of Eli Manning's "leadership," etc. These banalities were unfortunately refuted rather clearly when the game was rather won and lost by the special teams outfits. As good as Eli Manning is, he had nothing to do with the two special teams fumbles that won the game.
I am continually surprised that sports broadcasters refuse to discuss, you know, the actual game taking place. When you do, seemingly by accident, watch a commentator that actually knows and talks about football, it's surprising and enlightening. Who could forget Bernie Kosar's epic preseason calls, as Cleveland's erstwhile hero talked some unvarnished football, waxing catatonic on what sounded like a soporific mixture of booze, marijuana, and back pain medication, while a mortified Jim Donovan tried to contain his obvious annoyance. Now that's some good television.
This whole aesthetic of human interest narrative announcing bears some obvious similarities to reality television: the trumping up, through fairly obvious narrative and emotional manipulation, of quotidian events into high tragedy. That is, the same narrative targets, if not the same techniques, are used to make both Eli Manning and Snookie captivating to the bored and tired audience. Meanwhile, football fans that enjoy that apparently inconsequential sideshow, namely the sport itself, are left wondering what happened to John Madden. SNL may have lampooned the guy, but he was a damnably fine announcer that wasn't afraid to pick apart a play or call out some lousy coaching. (Honorable mention: Tony Dungy’s totally creepy but amazingly informative play breakdowns on ESPN or something.)
2) Immediately after the Giant's kicker Lawrence Tynes won the game, he was approached by a female sideline reporter who asked him: "You just kicked the game-winning field goal. How do you feel right now?"
I wonder if I need to point out the prima facie absurdity of the question. Funnily enough, immediately before his interrogation, FOX had shown him running down the field in slow motion, the phrase "We're going to the fucking Super Bowl" clearly visible on his lips, a look of unrestrained revelry in his eyes.
Clearly, he could not answer the question truthfully, even if he wanted to. If he had grabbed the poor reporter by the shoulders and shouted obscenities in her face through a deranged grimace (the honest answer), surely the 10-second live broadcast delay would have cut away, or he would at least have been bleeped. So he was in a double-bind: the truth would have been censored, and the forgettable lie he told barely registered as he vainly groped for words that would mean something, anything.
It's ridiculous to ask someone that is actually feeling something extremely powerful to put it into words (and non-psychopathic humans have enough empathy to glean what they need to anyway). But it's not just insulting to Tynes, it's also insulting to the audience. The question implies that the only way fans can enjoy the game is to directly identify with the emotions of the individual players, as evidenced through inquisition-like testimonials. That there was a female asking the "emotional" question speaks to some sort of gendering of this information that I don't know enough about to comment on (do male reporters ever ask football players how they feel?).
But I submit that the enjoyment of the fan is rather a separate and distinct thing from the excitement of the player on the field, and asking me to vicariously identify with the kicker in his moment of ecstasy seems inappropriate somehow, maybe even pornographic. The fan gets her kicks from identifying with a team, and sharing wins and losses alike with a more or less adopted community of fans (what Vonnegut called a "granfalloon"), while sharing in the hatred of the rival (which actually is fun, and way less harmful than its analogues in racism and war). The fan also gets enjoyment out of the skill and craft of a well-played game. The fan, I think, should not also be asked to directly share in the private ecstasies and pain of the players on the field.
3) All this leads me to believe that, like many modern television programs, the actual events taking place have little to do with the broadcast in general. There's a different economy of desire taking place that I haven't fully parsed yet.
Great examples are those cooking contest shows that you see on the Food Network. All these poor chefs, who really just want their own damned restaurant with a good wine list and servers who aren’t going to steal booze, competing in front of hammy, irritable judges in patently absurd scenarios.
But the point is that the viewer has no possible way to subjectively experience the product being judged. When you’re watching a sports event, for instance, you can clearly see and objectively measure which sprinter crossed the line first or which football player came up with the fumble. The viewer gets to vicariously participate in the objective measurement of the athletes’ performance. When you’re watching American Idol or a figure skating competition, the judging is clearly more subjective. However, the viewer can at least aesthetically evaluate the performances along with the judges and freely agree or disagree with the results.
The cooking show is not of either of these types. Not only is the judging totally subjective, but the viewer has no access at all to the food being judged, save its picture. How could you possibly be in a position to evaluate the final product? Sure, they tell you the ingredients, and the judges describe it, but basically you have to totally imagine the taste, texture, consistency, and smell of the food. Clearly the food is not the issue here. People are watching pure contest, pure judging, without being able to take part in any subjective or objective judgment of the product or event presented.
Now, the problem isn’t just the total passivity of the process (and I get creeped out by the idea that here’s a whole genre of shows whose enjoyment is predicated on passively accepting the whims of clearly irrational judges). The problem is that the only thing happening here is the narrative, the judging, the silly music that overhypes the stakes of the enterprise, the focus on personality and competition rather than learning to appreciate either objective or subjective measures of performance.
Similar techniques are used to lend gravity to the banal and boring arguments that provide grist for vapid fare like Jersey Shore or whatever. The substance stopped being the point a long time ago: it’s the rather obviously manufactured drama that matters now. [fn1]
4) Anyway, I hope my point is obvious: the lesson of reality television is that you don’t need anything to really happen at all. A cooking show can operate even in the total absence of access to the judged product, and apparently so can football. That football announcing, editing, and broadcasting can so completely ignore the game that’s going on at all isn’t an accident, it’s rather an attempt to shoehorn football itself into the same banal genre as the rest of reality television. And I think that while this is probably a good thing for the average bored channel-surfer who can’t be bothered to learn anything at all about anything, it certainly is bad for sports fans who, maybe, still care about, you know, sports. Perhaps sports fans could band together and demand intelligent, focused announcing, camera angles that actually let you see the safeties (“All-22”), and less hyper-kinetic editing that threatens to induce seizures.
But maybe I’m just too old!
[fn1] I am here ignoring the role that ironic enjoyment plays in these scenarios because it’s not really to the point. Suffice it to say that most watchers, I think, of the bottom of the barrel of reality shows, maintain an ironic distance to the material, knowing full well that it’s manipulative manufactured trash but enjoying being in the know about that, etc.
