Sunday, September 05, 1999
I want my, I want my E-S-P-N
BY PAUL DAUGHERTY
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Twenty years later, ESPN is as big a part of the American male culture as fast cars and swimsuit issues. The 20th century time capsule will include telephones, rocket ships, polio vaccine and an autographed picture of Dan Patrick. Or an audiotape of Dick Vitale, whom ESPN loosed on an unsuspecting world like a plague of Japanese beetles.
Before ESPN, sports on TV was a reason to blow off a few hours on a Monday night. Now, sports on TV is mandatory and ceaseless. Sports on TV is life.
ESPN is 20 on Tuesday. Happy birthday. Boo-yahs all around. I'll celebrate by listening to the Reds on the radio.
Heaven help me, I don't have ESPN. I don't have cable. It's an empty life without Stuart Scott, I know. I'm coping.
I won't pretend I'm too good for ESPN. (Even though I probably am.) I'm not one going to smugly say that sports is just something I write about, not something I live. Though if you've seen one Chicken Dance, you've pretty much exhausted the catalog.
The ESPN factor
ESPN has changed everything. For fans, broadcasters, coaches and players. Especially players. Being on TV never gets old. Being on TV makes us do strange things.
Before ESPN, basketball players didn't dwell on dunks. Before ESPN, only Billy White Shoes Johnson did end-zone dances. Before ESPN, high school basketball studs from California would not ponder attending Xavier, mainly because they couldn't find Xavier with a road atlas.
Before ESPN, basketball players were caught performing antique acts such as “boxing out” and throwing “bounce passes” and making “free throws” with regularity. These were known as “fundamentals.”
Before ESPN SportsCenter, baseballs hit over a fence or a wall were called “home runs.” The people who read the scores on TV were not “talent” or “personalities” or “experts.”
They weren't self-professed comedians, quipsters, controversialists and bigmouths. They were “announcers.”
“They all want to be Dan Patrick,” says WCPO-TV's John Popovich. Popo has hired two sports reporters in the past six or seven years. He went through at least 150 audition tapes. There was a smirky SportsCenter sameness to a lot of them.
“Everybody has their shtick,” Popovich says. In describing homeruns, two or three would-be personalities offered, “Goodbye, Mr. Spaulding!” Oh, shut up.
“It takes me awhile to figure out what they're saying,” says Popovich, who nonetheless admits having three ESPN channels on his TV at home. Mel Kiper, in triplicate.
Dunk-a-thon, highlights
You see the ESPN Effect more on players, who grew up watching highlights and practicing highlights and believing highlights were the way to play the game.
“It's a dunk-a-thon,” said Xavier coach Skip Prosser. SportsCenter “trivializes the mundane,” said Prosser, “but the mundane is what wins you games.”
The flip side is the national exposure schools get. Torraye Braggs of Fresno, Calif., went to Xavier because he saw the Muskies lose in overtime to then-unbeaten and No. 1 UMass. Braggs liked Xavier's breakneck style. He told Prosser, “With me, you'd have won that game.”
For the rest of us, ESPN has added to the legend of suds-swilling, ballcap-wearing, Bill Murray-inspired Barcalounger Man.
I'm a little jealous of the people with ESPN, which is to say everyone but me. When John Popovich says, “I love it when there's a game on at 10:30, when my kids are in bed and my wife is asleep,” I want to break down and nail that little satellite dish to the aluminum siding and point it toward Chris Berman.
But the truth is, if I had ESPN, my wife would kick me out. I'd be divorced, living in my little studio apartment, watching SportsCenter. Domestic peace? Or Kenny Mayne? Tough call.
Paul Daugherty welcomes your comments at 768-8454.
DAUGHERTY ARCHIVE