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Actual commentary by John Madden on a recent episode of NFL on FOX, paraphrased:
"You know.....the difference between being a winning coach and a losing coach is that, okay, when you win a lot, and you get used to winning, you forget what it's like to lose, and so when you DO lose it hurts a lot more than a losing coach who doesn't win a lot, but loses all the time so he's used to losing. But when he wins, it feels great, because he doesn't win as much as he loses, but not compared to the winning coach who's so used to winning that winning is, like, just another game for him that he didn't lose."
Allow me to express what I hope at least every semi-intelligent male who has ever enjoyed the grace and glory of football has expressed at his television set no less than thirteen times a weekend every winter: John, for the love of God, please, just SHUT THE FUCK UP.
Now, it might not be his fault. After all, one of the cardinal sins in broadcasting that they teach you in 'How to Smile While Reading Small, Moving Type' School is (besides how to modulate your expression across three octaves to induce faux-excitement in whatever you're babbling about) that dead-air is a no-no. Whatever happens, keep filling the airwaves with your senseless chatter. Now, this doesn't seem too difficult in the world of sports, where there is always something going on or something to talk about. Except for football, of course, where there's so many stoppages and so many timeouts and so many lulls and instances and situations where the game is not going on that broadcasters feel a bit hot under the collar about having to adlib where the tight end played his college ball to keep YOU, the ever-dependable stats-consuming public, readily informed.
Except sometimes that's all unnecessary. Sometimes it's just signal for the sake of signal. Chattering sportscasters is proof of the old axiom: you give a quiet person a megaphone, they will quickly think of something to say. And in John Madden's case, it's like giving a stupid person a megaphone who needs help on how to turn it on.
Last week also had a Dallas Cowboy alumni appreciation day. Michael Irvin, Troy Aikman and Emmitt Smith were in the broadcast booth. For a whole quarter. Yeah. Six guys, with microphones, talking about the game. Other games have no less than four announcers. A play-by-play man and three colour commentators, two more than necessary, who have the combined insight of a bat in broad daylight and whom are more useless than 20-person strong rapper entourages who hobble on stage with him after he wins a big award, acting like they helped him win it and everything.
You see, in Canada something unique happened this year. Our favourite crown communications corp, the CBC, had a labour fit with the broadcasters union, which ended up with a (still ongoing) strike. The result: Live CFL games on TV..........with no commentary. At first the games seemed bizarre, a bit amateurish, and completely naked. How are we supposed to know what's happening without the invisible mouthpieces telling us what just happened and what they think will happen next? And then, as each week wore on, more people started tuning into the games, at first for the novelty of seeing a profressional sporting event with absolutely no voice-over accompaniment, and then for the genuine appreciation of that very thing. The lack of vocal overtones superseding every play suddenly brought other, lesser things to the forefront that we could hear better than ever: tackles, hits, the reaction of the fans, whistles, and things that are usually normalized (that means volume-controlled) far below the level of the commentators. After all, it is absolutely paramount that you hear THEM over everything else. CBC ran a recent poll asking people what they thought of this new, commentator-less format. A staggering 76% responded that it was refreshing, that it was great, that they could hear all the sounds of the games the way they were meant to be, it seriously felt like the next best thing to being there.
A game with commentators and a game without commentators is like going for a ride in the country with a car or a motorcycle. With commentators is like the car. You are inside and internal, and you look out a box-shaped window and watch everything pass by. But you are always separate from it all, enclosed and distanced from everything going on around you. But when you remove the commentators is like removing that enclosed box. On a motorcycle, the restrictions are released. You see more of your surroundings. You see the ground rushing underneath you and around you, you feel the wind, you smell the air, and you are no longer watching the scenery pass you by. Instead, you have literally become apart of it. Without commentators, without anyone to dictate the game to you, without the closed-off world of sportscasting to distance you from the game you want to watch, the game feels more alive. More raw. More real. There is less of the plastic, polished sheen of animated cursors and stats comparisons, and more of the game in its element. The way it was meant to be.
We, as a television generation who get the bulk of our sports entertainment from the boob tube, have become so accustomed to hearing blathering idiots on every televised sporting event that it has, in effect, ruined the sports experience for us. We aren't getting our sports from TV, really. We are getting a watered-down, filtered version of it. We are getting someone's interpretation of it. Instead of just sitting back and letting the picture and the sounds tell the story, they have a broadcast booth on a 7-second delay (so they can edit objectionable content, of course) choosing what they want us to see, what sounds they want us to hear, what plays are happening complete with magic pen outlines to explain to us how it happens, and, of course, the venerable commentators, who consider it the kiss of death if they are quiet for any longer than 2 seconds. So, under no circumstances must they ever shut up.
Well, I'm telling you now, sportscasters: Shut the fuck up. We don't care about your incessant prattle. Stop pointing out the obvious. Stop insulting our intelligence. Stop giving me YOUR version of the events. Stop packaging the game into a digestible little box for me to consume. Stop being a bottleneck between the action on the field and the "I LOVE SPORTS" nerves in my brain.
We can do without you. Really. Just show the damn game. We'll let our imagination and our enthusiasm and passion fill in the rest.
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