Posted on 07/19/2002 5:24:41 PM PDT by Pokey78
The Sit-Down Comic
6:28 p.m. (32 minutes to game time) Rich Eisen, ESPN ''SportsCenter'' anchor and ESPN2 play-by-play novitiate, looks out at some of the 12,402 San Diego Padres fans settling into their seats on an unseasonably cool May evening and informs Chili Davis, his partner in the booth: ''The crowd is gathering. The crowd is congealing. The crowd is coagulating.''
Davis, a 19-year major-league veteran with a shaved head and a World Series ring, is too nervous to do anything more than spit a sluice of smokeless tobacco into an empty water bottle.
6:42 p.m. (18 minutes to game time) The heroic P.A. system pumps out a sublimely dinky five-note disco intro from 1980. Eisen turns to his partner again and says, ''Chili, I believe we're about to get taken to Funkytown.''
6:48 p.m. (12 minutes) Eisen to Davis: ''Is this Qualcomm Field or Qualcomm Stadium?''
''Stadium,'' Davis says.
6:59 p.m. Eisen to Davis: ''We are two handsome men.''
The 33-year-old Eisen, whose plump, reddish cheeks and audacious self-confidence recall a young Orson Welles, is a sports announcer for the new millennium. Al Michaels, the suave dean of network play-by-play men, called 200 college games at Arizona State University and another couple hundred high-school, college and minor-league baseball and football games in Hawaii before returning to the mainland to call his first major-league game for the Cincinnati Reds. Tonight is Eisen's seventh baseball game at any level, and beyond the relevant snippets from the six years of footage that have passed before his eyes at ESPN headquarters in Bristol, Conn., Eisen has no expertise about either team. He didn't even know he would be doing this game until yesterday morning. Yet, with minutes to go, he is still calmly fielding calls on his cellphone.
Our most revered play-by-play men have traditionally been pathologically precocious sports prodigies so determined to glom onto any fragment of athletic action, they turned their childhoods into announcing apprenticeships. By 5, Michaels was turning down the sound on his parents' TV and supplying his own calls and as a kid began lugging a tape recorder into the upper reaches of Ebbets Field to make his first demos.
If you've ever wondered why so many play-by-play announcers sound like children impersonating adults, it's because as kids they spent years sitting on their beds talking into a microphone straining to sound 20 years older. Keith Olbermann sent his first audition tape off to the Pittsburgh Penguins when he was 14. In eighth grade, Marv Albert ran an imaginary radio station ''complete with commercials, interviews, sports updates and game coverage,'' according to his memoir ''I'd Love to, But I Have a Game: 27 Years Without a Life.'' As a teenager, he had a regular gig on Howard Cosell's radio show, and Olbermann was the first caller when Albert later got his own show, precious airtime passed down like a torch from generation to generation of sports geek.
Eisen, on the other hand, was well past his teens before he saw the inside of a broadcast booth. He earned his live-performing chops doing three years of stand-up as an undergraduate at the University of Michigan. Starting as a freshman, he wrote new material every six weeks and took it to an Ann Arbor comedy club. He seriously considered pursuing it as a career, but he gave up after less than two weeks on the road when he performed to an audience of three for 10 bucks and a cheeseburger. Because he now works for Disney, Eisen was unwilling to rummage too deeply into his old joke bag, though he did reveal that his signature bit, the one he claims never failed to bring down the house, was reading Penthouse letters in the depraved, biting cadences of Howard Cosell.
Eisen's skills, it turned out, were in demand, because by the time he got to ESPN, the highlight show had become a highly refined form of male comedy. The television writer Aaron Sorkin, creator of ''The West Wing,'' has called ''SportsCenter'' one of the funniest and best-written shows on the air. So although Eisen's audience got a lot bigger when he got to ESPN, he was still doing what for him had become a very familiar ritual: telling jokes to frat brothers.
The thrill this night at Qualcomm is certainly not based on the matchup between the Montreal Expos and the San Diego Padres, or his considerable affection for the game of baseball, or even about sports at all. Rather, it is the daunting challenge of pulling off three hours of live television with little more than quick wits and a couple of media guides.
In a subdued, windswept stadium, the game congeals and coagulates into a lethargic pitchers' duel. But Eisen keeps things percolating, briskly calling the action, loosening up Davis, staying in the moment, enjoying himself.
Davis had a substantial career, hitting 350 home runs, and looks sharp in a broad-shouldered suit. But in the booth, Eisen is the stud and Davis, despite a sly, melancholy wit, is the bullet-sweating neophyte. Eisen loosens him up like a first date, and Davis rewards him with a charming story about facing a young hard-throwing Expos pitcher named Floyd Youmans. ''It was a day game after a night game,'' Davis says, ''and I swear I could hear the ball hiss as it flew by.''
''Day game after a night game,'' Eisen says, staying right with him, his voice full of mocking suspicion. ''I guess the Quebec nightlife beckoned.''
Earlier, Eisen told me: ''You watch a game at home, a guy steps out of the box, scratches himself, stares at the sign, spits, scratches himself again. You nod off on the couch. But if it's your job to move things along, it's actually an amazingly fast-paced game. A three-hour game feels like 10 minutes. You blink and it's over.''
This one doesn't feel like 10 minutes. Going into the eighth inning, the game is tied at 1 and, after both sides botch scoring chances, crawls into extra innings. Exhausted by the tension of doing only his second game, Davis fades badly, confiding in me, ''I never liked extra-inning games even when I was a player, unless I was like 4 for 5 or something.''
But even as groans go up all around the booth every time yet another rally fizzles, Eisen displays the indefatigable zip of an Avon Lady. ''We go to 11!'' he says, as if it were cause for celebration. ''Ten was insufficient!''
Like any employee, there are all kinds of things a sports announcer must feign -- authority, sincerity, bonhomie -- and Eisen aces all three. But what makes his future limitless is that even at nearly 1 o'clock in the morning, with a bladder about to burst and the most compelling action the hot-dog wrappers swirling in the wind, he can still muster that little pinch-me-I-must-be-dreaming-but-I-actually-get-paid-to-do-this catch in his throat.
As the innings pile on, Eisen's verbal facility becomes farcical. Nothing the director in the truck outside puts on the screen gives him an instant's pause, and when he follows his tongue into what seems like a certain trap, he pulls off an escape worthy of Spiderman. The camera goes tight on the bat rack and Eisen promises, ''As long as there are bats in the rack, we'll show you the action.'' The camera sweeps over the thinning crowd and alights on a comatose blond woman and her fleshy-faced companion, and Eisen salutes ''Shelley Long and Depardieu.'' When a Montreal catcher makes no attempt to throw out a runner stealing second, Eisen calls him ''the personification of catcher indifference.'' The game mercifully ends, after a second seventh-inning stretch, in the 14th.
No one would be watching this game on national television between two teams to which they have no allegiance if there were anything better to do or the hotel had porn. But sometimes you don't, and sometimes it doesn't. On those nights, all you're hoping for is to be transported from one moment to the next as painlessly as possible until, like the cavalry, blessed unconsciousness arrives.
Televised sports is a vast repository of male loneliness. For four hours and 14 innings on a Wednesday night in May, Eisen did everything he could to help. He was a bright, buoyant, amusing voice in the room. He was real good company.
The Primordial Pun
Like many revolutions, it started in the hours before dawn with a single man trapped in an underventilated room, surrendering to the wanton urges of his febrile brain. It was the spring of 1980, the room an ESPN studio in Bristol, and the urges belonged to Chris Berman, a lumpy 24-year-old son of the suburbs, hired the previous fall because this start-up 24-hour sports channel was looking ''for a couple guys who could speak in complete sentences and wouldn't embarrass them.''
Twenty-two years later, Berman can't pin it down it exactly, but at about 3:15 a.m., while plowing through that evening's baseball highlights, either ''Frank Tanana Daiquiri'' or ''John Mayberry R.F.D.'' plopped out of his mouth. After these words, whichever ones they were, had gone out over the airwaves, Berman shuddered and thought, ''Oh, my God, what have I done?''
Berman knew that anyone watching ESPN at 3:15 a.m. in 1980 was, to put it charitably, a highly committed sports fan, and by augmenting those names in such a punch-drunk way, Berman was revealing himself to be just as far gone. Instead of another talking hairdo dumping scores into the void, he was a junkie communing with fellow addicts. He was sowing the first seeds of a new community.
The charm of Berman's early-morning indiscretion was that it conceded the point that there was something absurd and even a wee bit pathetic about earning a living sitting in an empty room at that hour in Bristol, Conn., reading scores into a lens, not to mention sitting alone in some other room in some other town ingesting them. And while Berman was at it, he was also acknowledging that there was something absurd and pathetic in having such an exaggerated interest in the outcome of this endless succession of essentially identical encounters and of the people who participate in them or, in other words, in being a man. But rather than alienating his audience, it forged a bond. It was like bumping into an acquaintance in the waiting room of your college mental-health center, and from that shared nadir being pals for life. Now instead of being just another lonely guy watching a highlight show at 3 in the morning, you were part of a nervy underground of like-minded and wittily self-disparaging, self-aware lonely guys watching a highlight show at 3 in the morning.
And as was obvious to Disney when it bought ESPN in 1995 and to anyone who has been to Bristol and has seen the Pentagonian girth of its headquarters, hard-core sports fans are not a fringe cult. With the odd allowance for extreme mathematical or artistic ability and eccentric parenting, they include pretty much every heterosexual male in America.
When I asked Keith Olbermann why, despite the mind-numbing monotony, he kept returning to sports, he said, ''It's my first language.'' It's true for all of us. Sports is the first thing we were good or bad at, the first event we watched rapt, the first thing we ever read we didn't have to. Our first strongly held opinions were about players or teams, and the way in which they differed from those of our friends were among our earliest intimations of a self.
It took programmers 30 years to appreciate how thoroughly our brains have been pickled in the brine. Through the 60's, TV sports was limited to the weekend, and when in the early 70's it slipped over to Monday night, it was such a national thrill that ABC has spent the last 32 years trying to recapture it, mistakenly believing it was all about the magic of Cosell, Don Meredith and Frank Gifford.
Now sporting events, and the vast array of TV programming that is derived from them, are transmitted every second. Shows like ''Pardon the Interruption,'' ''The Best Damn Sports Show Period'' and ''The Last Word with Jim Rome'' are ubiquitous. And the reason they find an audience is that we still have stronger opinions about sports than anything else, we still read the sports page more closely than any other part of the paper and it's still the only thing the average American man comes close to caring about with any regularity.
And with the floor of the world falling out from under us, it's comforting to turn on a show that uses the one language in which we're fluent, that never makes us feel ignorant, apathetic and disconnected. Plus it's heartwarming listening to people who actually care enough about something to get exercised, even if it's whether Shaq is better than Kobe or whether or not Pete Rose belongs in the Hall of Fame.
For this community, sports is, more than it has ever been, a refuge from the real world. When I asked Eisen if he could imagine a major sports broadcaster today taking a stand as heroically unpopular as Cosell's support of Muhammad Ali, he said: ''The days of the heavyweight champion as civil rights leader are long gone. You think you'd see Ali rolling around on the floor of an ESPN Zone? I don't think so. The days of a tennis champion as a gender rights leader are over. Anybody expecting that now will be sadly disappointed.''
As televised sports withdraws from the world, it gets more and more masculine, which is reflected and expressed by its top announcers. The 66-year-old John Madden, having quickly found that the company of his wife and children was ''overrated,'' has spent much of the last 21 years cruising the country without them on a customized bus. Sixty-year-old Tim McCarver lives alone on the beach on the Gulf of Mexico.
There has been, in recent years, a surge in women's sports, even in formerly all-male preserves like soccer and basketball, and many of these games, professional and college, are shown on cable television. But the overwhelming bulk of TV sports, particularly the highlight shows, the talk shows and the call-in shows, are stag parties. Watching ''The Best Damn Sports Show Period,'' in which the host, Tom Arnold, gabs mindlessly with a circle of marginally famous pals, feels like sitting in a booth at a topless club, with the dancers just offscreen.
''SportsCenter'' may be brought to you by Disney, but tuning into ESPN's highlight centerpiece late on a Sunday night, with the footage flashing and the acid-house beats throbbing underneath, the only pause in the frenzy the raucous, strategically blacked out 90-second commercials for the latest ''Girls Gone Wild'' video, is to all but taste the sweaty male residue of a long, hot weekend.
Near the end of the N.B.A. regular season, in the midst of ''SportsCenter,'' there was video of Dallas Mavericks guard Steve Nash letting go a 48-foot shot just before halftime of an inconsequential game. As the ball fell through the twine, the ''SportsCenter'' anchor Dan Patrick emitted the gut-shot squeal, ''nothing but net!'' that was both stirring and self-mocking, and all over the country thousands of guys chuckled and sighed and shook their heads and thrilled to it together.
Living Extra-Large
Of all our major sports announcers, John Madden best understands his job is less about providing expert analysis than it is about creating a comfy, all-male clubhouse of the air. That his membership policy is lax enough to include the widest swath of male humanity, and yet exclusive enough to have a dollop of aspirational cachet, is why he earns four times his nearest rival in the booth (including endorsements for companies like Ace Hardware and Outback Steakhouse).
When I go to talk with him, it's not in the den of his suburban home in Pleasanton, Calif., but in a sprawling office, with the requisite retro pinball machine in one corner, in an anonymous corporate park. With his real-estate and film-production companies and the millions rolling in every year from his partnership in ''EA Sports Madden NFL,'' the most popular sports video game ever, Madden is an empire unto himself, and at least as big a cultural icon as Howard Cosell, whose old spot Madden is filling on ''Monday Night Football'' in the fall.
Madden, who became head coach of the Oakland Raiders at 33 and retired from the team at 43 with the best winning percentage in N.F.L. history, is a genius masquerading as a meathead. From his perch in the back of the booth, Madden can see what all 22 players are doing on every play, and he has an ex-teacher's ability to make sense of the mayhem. But his far more crucial TV talent is as a populist. When it comes to making the average citizen feel a little better about himself, he's as good as Oprah. Somehow in the course of a football game, Madden lets you know it's O.K. to be fat, even borderline obese, no big deal to be ugly, bearable to be lonely. Madden's every unslick flailing gesture and blurted syllable is a source of comfort to the unsexy, unripped, underpaid and underappreciated lonely American man.
Madden's virtual club is the fraternity of the American big guy, and both ''big'' and ''guy'' are important. For Madden the word ''guy'' is the cornerstone of his worldview and saturated with affection and respect. ''Football,'' says Madden, ''is 22 guys, 11 guys on offense and 11 guys on defense,'' his ex-players are ''my guys'' and when I ask him if he sees himself as a journalist, he succinctly disabuses me. ''No,'' he says. ''I'm just a football guy.''
Madden's overriding thesis is that football (and perhaps also heaven) is about big guys shoving around other big guys. Games aren't won and lost by the attention-seeking pyrotechnics of neurotic quarterbacks, running backs, receivers and other former high-school homecoming kings, but by the grunt labor of the less conspicuously talented everymen in the middle.
For 21 years, Madden, an all-conference lineman in college who suffered a career-ending injury before playing a down of pro ball, has been educating football fans about the value and charms of these unpretty behemoths who never get the girls, the publicity or the money. ''The only time they ever used to mention offensive linemen was when they got holding penalties,'' he says. ''But I always knew that if they didn't do their job everything else offensively was academic. And that's not just some theory. That's what the deal is. And if you believe that's true, why keep it a secret?''
Madden hung just as tough on this point when in 1982 a young stranger named Trip Hawkins petitioned him in a parking lot about a possible computer football game, and Madden decided that anyone who could persuade Harvard to let them major in games was worth hearing out. (Actually, it was ''game theory,'' but close enough.) ''The first thing I said was, 'O.K., if we're going to have a game, we have to have all 22 players -- you can't just have 3 on 3 or 5 on 5,''' he recalls. '''And if we're going to do it, we need offensive linemen and defensive linemen.''' Madden's stubbornness on this point delayed the debut of the game by three years and resulted in the violent verisimilitude that has made Madden a cult hero with both gangster rappers and the preteen suburbanites who buy their CD's -- and that has made both him and Hawkins extravagantly rich. In fact, it's the popularity of ''Madden NFL'' more than anything that gives ABC executives hope that Madden will be able to lure more of those young male viewers that are the object and desire of all TV programmers.
''We never promise numbers,'' Madden says, ''but I've got great demographics.''
Madden's celebration of lumbering linemen goes beyond giving them their football due to arguing their moral superiority. Even though he concedes that half his favorite gridiron characters would be unemployable or possibly incarcerated if not for pro football, he believes they're less vain, warmer, kinder and more spontaneous than their smaller counterparts. In fact, for Madden, the most crucial perquisite of his broadcasting career isn't the money or the ego stroke or the luxuriously tricked-out bus; it's that he gets to keep his membership in this Brobdingnagian society of pro football. For Madden, who 20 years ago suffered a series of extreme panic attacks on airplanes, it's the only world in which he feels comfortable, the only place he can breathe.
That's why Madden is devastated when a player on any team gets seriously hurt, as he was when the New England Patriots' Daryl Stingley was paralyzed after a ferocious hit by one of Madden's Oakland players, in what would be the last year of his coaching career. After the game Madden went to the hospital to check up on Stingley and to his horror found that he was the only person there, not just from the Raiders but from Stingley's own team. Madden called the airport and stopped the Patriots' charter from taking off until they promised to send someone to the hospital, although the best they could eventually muster was to send the business manager. ''To me, football is a brotherhood,'' Madden says. ''We're all in this together.''
In the booth, Madden fetishizes lack of physical definition the way Calvin Klein underwear ads fetishize a six-pack. During the Super Bowl Madden veered into an extended riff about St. Louis Rams fullback James Hodgins simply because he weighed 270 pounds and was nicknamed Meat.
''All fullbacks should be called Meat,'' Madden told 86 million Americans. ''Better tackle him low.'' And when he started reeling off the weights of the Rams' sumo offensive linemen, it was apparent that just mouthing the huge numbers -- 300, 310, 320 -- made him happy, the way a kid gets a kick out of reciting the horsepower of a muscle car.
By his own reckoning, Madden's emotional development halted at 16: ''I've never been an adult. Adult things that people do, I've never enjoyed. I've always liked kid things.'' But sometimes when Madden starts talking happily about big guys colliding and grinding each other into the mud he evokes an even earlier presexual stage. It's as if he's describing the halcyon days of toddlers rolling around in a sandbox.
The solace Madden offers the lonely is the happy example of himself. When Madden retired as the Raiders head coach, he planned on doing nothing for a year but hang out at home and reacquaint himself with his wife and two sons. ''When you're gone all the time, like I was, you get these guilty feelings. 'Oh, geez, you don't spend any time with your family.' Hey, they didn't want me. My wife had gotten used to life without me. My sons didn't want to play catch with me. They had other kids to play catch with.''
For the last two decades, Madden has found he is far happier spending his days and nights in the fancy tour bus, alone or with a couple of pals, crisscrossing the country from game to game. Some might find this womanless nomadic existence a bit lacking if not desolate, but to Madden, life on the bus is the finally realized ideal of pure, unfettered freedom.
Recounting his carefree routine on the road, he sounds like Huck Finn ticking off the finer points of floating downstream by raft.
''You can sleep and take a nap anytime you want,'' he says. ''I can watch tapes. I've got television. I've got a telephone. I've got a fax machine. And if I want to exercise or eat some food or take a walk, I pull over.''
Madden has some of Huck's solitary outsider's poetry in him too: ''I enjoy going across the country and pulling into a town and finding the local restaurant, although that's getting tougher to do. But you know, watching a high-school football game from the side of the road, just leaning on a fence, or taking in a minor-league baseball game in Omaha -- there's something about lights and fields and gyms at night that makes me pull in and stop and take a look.''
That Madden has opted for an overwhelmingly male life built almost totally around sports is not only a balm to the lonely guy; it's also a blanket endorsement. And this approval isn't coming from a pair of his fellow loser friends but from a Hall of Fame coach, a figure of towering popularity and authority, not just a big guy, but a molder and shaper of big guys.
Age and eminence have made Madden a figure beyond reproof. This was especially clear in how little was made of his highly questionable call in the closing moments of Super Bowl XXXVI. It was, of course, the St. Louis Rams versus the New England Patriots, and with the scored tied and 1 minute 21 seconds left on the clock, the Pats had the ball deep in their own territory. Without skipping a beat, Madden said that they ought to run out the clock and play for overtime.
This advice seemed dubious as soon as it came out of his mouth. St. Louis had taken over the game in the second half, and if the Patriots ran out the clock and then lost the overtime coin flip, they would probably have never touched the ball again. Instead, New England's stud quarterback, Tom Brady, the rookie who clearly has gotten the girls all his life, rallied his team to a spectacular game-winning drive.
Months later in his office, Madden was still defending the call, saying he had no way of knowing the Rams' porous prevent defense would allow New England to gain yardage and stop the clock again and again. But there was something else behind Madden's reasoning: by suggesting the Patriots play it safe, what he was really saying was: ''Rely on your big guys to grind it out. Don't count on the flashy quarterback.'' In those final seconds, as Tom Brady emerged a hero, the only consolation Madden could find was to point out how much weight the rookie had put on since he got out of college. It was at least a good 30 pounds, and that must have made the difference.
The I-Told-You-Soer
If John Madden is a big white male Oprah, Tim McCarver is a Tim Russert -- the insider who lives for minutiae, for calling our attention to inconsistencies and screw-ups that are about to happen. He is baseball's most gifted analyst, a precog so immersed in the warm pool of baseball data he can see the outcome of plays before they happen.
Unfortunately for him, however, insight and prescience are not that high on the list of what today's sports fans require from their virtual buddies on the tube.
An example of McCarver's almost freakish propensity for seeing the future was the way he called the final play of last year's World Series between the New York Yankees and Arizona Diamondbacks. In the ninth inning of Game 7, with the score tied at 2, the bases loaded and one out, Yankees manager Joe Torre waved his infielders in so that on any ground ball, his team could get the force at home.
As Mariano Rivera gathered himself to face Luis Gonzalez, McCarver noted that Rivera led the league in breaking bats. McCarver has no use for statistical abstracts. He says he tosses the latest Bill James into the trash as soon as it arrives. But based on 19 years of major-league experience and some aspects of bridge that he can't quite put his finger on, McCarver has developed his own set of probabilities. And one thing he has observed is that when an overpowering pitcher with a tendency to saw off bats like Rivera faces a powerful batter like Gonzalez, the result is often a weak flare into the shallowest part of the outfield. And in that case, he told viewers, bringing the infield in is exactly the wrong move.
McCarver stopped talking in time for Rivera to send a 95 mile-per-hour fastball bearing down on Gonzalez's wrists. The hitter was handcuffed but got the bat around with just enough power to lift a little no-account pop over Derek Jeter's glove and end the 2001 series.
''When you the consider the pressure of the moment,'' Keith Olbermann says, ''the time he had to say it and the accuracy, his call was the sports-announcing equivalent of Bill Mazeroski's home run in the seventh inning to defeat the Yankees in 1960.''
McCarver does this kind of thing all the time. He thinks of what he does as ''first guessing'' (as opposed to second guessing) and considers the job description ''baseball analyst'' almost insulting because of its inference that he is talking about something after the fact.
All of which leaves his peers much more impressed than the fans. If one was admired as a sportscaster largely on the quality of the information delivered, McCarver would be at least as much of phenomenon as Madden. Yet every time Madden's contract is up, there's an all-out bidding war for his services; McCarver, meanwhile, has had a nomadic career. Though he has held on to his once-a-week post as a broadcaster on Fox's national telecasts, he has essentially been let go by his most recent regular employers, the Mets and the Yankees. This year, he is calling a limited schedule of regular-season games for the San Francisco Giants. To his many detractors, McCarver's brilliant call was just another example of him trying to prove how much smarter he is than they are, and why he's so annoying.
McCarver, whom I visited in his condo on the Gulf Coast, does not have an empire like Madden's. There are no video games that have his name on them. Your typical American teenager has no idea who he is. Instead, he has become famous for his run-ins, usually with baseball managers. Bobby Valentine, the Mets manager, couldn't bear to have his moves constantly scrutinized on the air, and that's how McCarver lost that job; Seattle manager Lou Piniella became incensed when, on a national telecast, a strategic maneuver of his backfired precisely the way McCarver predicted it would. Granted, these confrontations are the stuff of inside baseball, but they show how different McCarver's relationship is to his sport and audience than Madden's.
McCarver is fully aware of it. ''I bet you didn't talk to John about his detractors,'' he said. ''I don't get the feeling coaches ever go toe to toe with John.''
The other thing that distinguishes McCarver from Madden is that from the moment he sat down in front of a microphone, he stopped thinking of himself as an ex-ballplayer. Rather than straddling the worlds of playing and broadcasting, McCarver, like some high-level Soviet scientist, took everything he learned from one side, defected to the other and never looked back.
''A lot of players can't make the break -- I made it immediately,'' McCarver says. ''My job ceased being one of the fraternity the moment I became an announcer.''
More than any other sports analyst, McCarver has the instincts of a journalist. He likes to think of himself as working for the TV station that broadcasts a team's games and not for the team itself. ''That gives me the freedom to legitimately criticize according to my background as a player and my sense of fairness and my sense of an organization.'' he says, and if it causes problems with his new employer, so be it. ''If Bonds doesn't run to first base, I'm going to say it. You got to run. That goes for everybody.''
But McCarver's outsider integrity does even less for his popularity with fans than it does with managers. Having willfully exiled himself from the fraternity, McCarver is just another guy out there on his own, like the rest of us. He has no special sense of inclusion to offer viewers, no free passes to get us into secret athletic societies.
McCarver is all about distinctions, about the difference between doing it right and doing it half right. ''I have reverence for playing the game the right way,'' he says. ''I don't apologize for that.'' In fact, for McCarver, variations on the phrase ''I don't apologize,'' as in ''I don't have to apologize for trying to get it right,'' is a kind of solitary hard-guy mantra. Joe Morgan, a former player and respected ESPN baseball analyst, will let a bonehead play slide, particularly if it turns out to be inconsequential. To McCarver, the same lapse is ''inexcusable.''
McCarver also makes it clear that baseball is not his life. Most of his close friends have nothing to do with the game. When I visited him he had just returned from a trip to Argentina with two male friends and was still looking for a spot to hang a photo of two tango dancers he'd brought back from Boca, the Buenos Aires barrio where the dance was invented. As I arrived, Carl Steger, a local jazz pianist, was just leaving, and after I left, McCarver would be heading to a wine tasting.
McCarver reads books and lets people know about it by sprinkling references to Shakespeare and ''Beowulf'' into his telecasts. Madden, who has an apartment at the Dakota and two sons who went to Ivy League colleges, reads books, too, but has the good sense to keep any evidence off the air, going so far as to pretend during last year's Super Bowl broadcast that he didn't know how to use the word ''inordinate.'' While Madden sees as the triumph of his life his finding a way to freeze his development at 16, McCarver's is that baseball has taken him beyond baseball, and that's the last thing a sports fan wants to imagine.
I Hate This Game!
The recently retired superstar is an especially popular breed of television announcer. For them, there is no need to hone their shtick the way Rich Eisen has. They're honorably excused from any reporting, interviews or prep work of any kind. Even watching the game itself is optional. The only non-negotiable requirement is that they act like themselves in front of a camera, that they give the viewer what feels like an authentic link to the game they so recently played.
The greatest current practitioner of this art is the former N.B.A. star Charles Barkley, now a commentator for Turner Sports. When I go to talk to him, I find him in the TNT greenroom at the Meadowlands, where, to anybody within earshot, he is sending out a stream of putdowns and comebacks, wisdom and nonsense. He cautions the TNT public-relations man, Greg Hughes, about the perils of a comb-over. ''Accidents happen when you go from one lane to another,'' he says. He muses about buying his own jet, perhaps because the airline lost his luggage this afternoon: ''I hear I could get a pretty good one for 15, 20 million and lease it out a lot.''
Then he addresses the shy teenager stocking the buffet. ''Hey, little fella, you with the bad haircut, could you get me a Diet Coke?'' he asks. When a TNT staff member tries flattering Barkley to finagle an invitation to a party, Barkley offers it to the youth as a parable. ''Now that's a lesson for you, kid,'' he says. ''There are two ways to make it in this world, you can be damn good or you can be a kiss-up.''
About 200 feet or so from this room, there is a professional basketball game being played. Not just any old game, but the Eastern Conference finals between the New Jersey Nets and Boston Celtics. Barkley will be on the air discussing the details of this game three times within the next two hours, and yet he can scarcely summon the energy to watch more than a few seconds of action on the television at one end of the room. Walking out to see the game live is apparently out of the question.
How can he do his job with this level of inattention? ''I know the game as well as anyone alive,'' he says. ''I like my chances against anybody.''
Maybe so, but Barkley's lack of interest goes beyond boredom to disdain. This evening, when he does allow his mind to wander toward basketball, his comments are uniformly derisive. The Celtics, who will go on to win this game, aren't playing well, he tells me (and then repeats more or less the same thing on air at the halftime); it's just that the Nets are playing worse. The Sacramento Kings didn't show him anything by winning Game 2 of the Western Conference finals the night before against the Lakers. The Lakers came out disgracefully flat.
Barkley's knee-jerk negativism gives his analysis the gritty ring of truth even when it proves to be wildly inaccurate. ''I'm going to tell you exactly what Sacramento is going to do,'' he says. ''After they're down 3-1, they're going to know there's no way they can beat these guys three games in a row. So they're going to say to themselves, 'Instead of going back to L.A. and getting our butts kicked, we'll just lose at home -- then we can spend the night at home.' I know how these teams think. They think, 'Let's just keep it close to the end so people won't know we packed it in.'''
In the greenroom, Barkley tests out a joke he plans to use at halftime: ''This game is so boring I'm going to spend the second half looking for Jimmy Hoffa's body.'' He ends up not using it but instead discusses how United Airlines, one of the show's sponsors, lost his suit. He likes to do impertinent things like this. Last year, he made a point of repeatedly cracking on the car manufacturer Hyundai, another sponsor.
For all this, Barkley has been flooded with praise from fans and critics. To white male TV viewers, he offers the same thing he offers his white male colleagues in the greenroom: the exotic, bracing company of a funny, contrary, slightly out-of-control black man for whom the rules don't seem to apply. And since we all know (from him, mainly) that he's best pals with both Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods, he offers indirect entree to the most exclusive athletic V.I.P. room (black or white) on the planet.
In the past couple of years Barkley has also presented himself as the voice of civil rights in sports, steering any interview toward race. ''I'm trying to get away from sports,'' he says. ''I want to get into social issues.'' This drives his TNT partner, the former Houston Rockets point guard Kenny Smith, nuts. Smith was particularly offended when Barkley was depicted as a slave in chains on the cover of Sports Illustrated earlier this year with the headline ''Charles Unchained.''
''Since when has he been chained?'' Smith says. ''The league is full of people who have opinions on race and other things, but he's the only who gets asked.''
Barkley lives within the world of TV the way Madden resides in football. Like Ozzy Osbourne, he gets over just by being his own entertainingly flawed self.
Barkley's admirers love the fact that he comes to them unfiltered; if he's annoying, discursive, plainly wrong, even if he's talking about things that have nothing to do with sports, at least he's not pretending to be someone else. He's not a phony. The person up there yapping is the real Charles Barkley, and because he seems to be holding so little back for himself, it's easy for us to believe that we're seeing all there is to see and that our relationship with him is just about as real and intimate as anyone's, even Tiger's and Michael's.
The Male Nurses
When I started this article, I had a girlfriend. Things were going really well. Pushing the button on her intercom made me smile, and when she went away on business, she called and reminded me to floss. But one afternoon something clicked in her head, and she went from being angry about not having met my kids to not wanting to meet them at all, and nothing I could do would change her mind.
The next Saturday morning, I did what most men do in that 3 a.m. of the soul. I crawled to my couch and turned on the television. ''SportsCenter'' may make billions for Disney, but in dire times, it's also a public service. Its prime show for the night, the one that Olbermann and Dan Patrick made famous and that Eisen has anchored on occasion, is the 11 p.m. slot. They telecast a very slightly edited version at 1 a.m and then play that same show every hour on the hour from 5 a.m. to noon. Having made it to the couch, I hooked up ''SportsCenter'' like an intravenous drip and watched seven in a row, back to back.
''SportsCenter'' is such a dense wall-to-wall montage of scores, video, music, pop-culture references and wisecracks, the two VJ's stepping on the edges of each other's solos like bebop horn players, that you almost need to watch it consecutively to appreciate the content and flair that has been shoehorned into each episode. It's practically Joycean. Every time you rub your eyes, you notice something else. That's why it's such a favorite in whatever rung of hell includes airport bars.
The two guardian anchors looking out for me that morning and gently directing me to the cathode light at the end of the tunnel were John Anderson and Scott Van Pelt, who, like almost all ''SportsCenter'' tandems, are a pair of very straight-looking white fellows in their early 30's, clamping down loosely on their absurdist tendencies. ESPN management, and sometimes even the anchors themselves, are forever trying to play down the comic element of the show, talking about how the gist of what they do is to inform and only a minuscule percentage of the material is intended to crack you up. But a ''SportsCenter'' anchor who plays it straight isn't going very far; he certainly isn't going to be featured on one of the hilarious promos made by Wieden & Kennedy, the same agency that convinced us that buying a pair of Nikes made in a Southeast Asian sweatshop was a subversive act.
And one other thing. All of the funny anchors are men. There are several competent, well-informed female anchors on SportsCenter, but none do much on the comic end of the spectrum. Women can't be funny about sports. Not yet. They haven't been pickled in it for enough generations, and they're too grateful to have the job. Unless you have lived the true patheticness of the whole enterprise, you can't be funny about it.
Anderson and Van Pelt have lived it and then some, and they pull me through the morning. Since ESPN went on the air in 1979, every 18-foot putt still looks like every other 18-foot putt, every home run looks like every other home run, every diving stab by a Dominican shortstop looks like a thousand acrobatic plays before it. But they can't change the games, so ESPN changes the language. Since Berman's first path-blazing pun, the best ''SportsCenter'' anchors have been inventing and reinventing a new postmodern sports lexicon almost weekly. This morning the call of the clip showing the great play at short is: ''This is Omar Vizquel's highlight. You're just lucky to see it.'' The call of the home run, that great American iconic moment, is: ''Good to see you. Got to GO!'' and when Tiger Woods rolls in the millionth 18-footer of his well-documented career, Van Pelt, as white a human being you're likely to encounter, says in a way that is sublimely absurd, ''Tiger Tiger Woods y'all!'' For a highlight of a runner scoring in baseball, there's a reference to Chuck Berry: ''Rounding third and heading home, he's a brown-eyed handsome man''; and for a point guard leading the break a reference to LL Cool J: ''Pushing it and pushing it and pushing it good.''
For five hours they almost make me smile. They almost make existence seem bearable, and when, at 12 noon, the ''Mission: Impossible'' graphics fade out for the last time and the show doesn't restart, I have a flash of fresh panic. What am I going to do? But then, shuttling through the channels with my remote, I spot a CBS promo for the Houston Open, and I know that very soon after Anderson and Van Pelt's shift ends, the nurses Gary McCord and David Feherty -- aka the best golf announcers on television -- will arrive to puff up my pillows, take my temperature and dispense what's needed from a tray full of new meds, and it's only a matter of time till I'm my old self again.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.