Polluted airwaves

Sports talk has taken on a nasty tone

Even going as far back as the 19th century, American sportswriting has tended to be both more provocative and more distinguished than most. The late Bart Giamatti, academician and sports executive alike, would point out, though, that this worked in two ways. The sports pages, Commissioner Giamatti said, offered by far the best writing in the newspaper, but it was also only in the sports pages where you would never find the word "allegedly."

By contrast, when sports came to be covered electronically -- first on radio, then television -- the golden throats were seldom anything but respectful, even worshipful. Games were, in the vernacular, called. Not reviewed. So sportswriters not only did not consider broadcasters journalists, but also rather despised them -- perhaps especially since the play-by-play boys made so much more money.

At some point, though, all of this was quickly turned on its head. First, print reporters sold out and began to cross over, moonlighting on radio and TV. Then radio and TV became vessels of sports opinion. Goodness gracious, it wasn't all that long ago that much of America was appalled when Howard Cosell would dare utter a point of view on a sports program. But apres Howard, le deluge. Sportswriters, outspoken by nature, became sports speakers -- louder and more obnoxious with each passing opportunistic year.

The political discourse that spews out of the electronic media in this country seldom may be confused with the Algonquin Round Table, but at least the issues are important and the debaters are appointed as Democrats or Republicans, so the jousting is defined. But sports debates that come over the airwaves are just freelance bar arguments, with the adversaries unable to duel with much that's substantive, so they employ only contempt, loudness and exaggeration. More and more, too, sports radio interlocutors (and now sports talking heads on TV) spew falsehoods and mean-spiritedness. It was only a matter of time before one of them would spout something that went so far over the top -- that he'd like to "smack" a player's wife, for example -- that an accounting was called for.

The worst thing about all the sports babble is not so much that it's tiresome and smart-alecky and rude, but that it always veers toward the nasty. Gee, sports is supposed to be happy. In the long run, the radio-TV jock jerks just take so much of the fun out of fun and games. There are, of course, some sports talkers who are intelligent and some who are witty and a few who are both, but mostly the genre rewards the loudmouths and the meanies.

Years ago there was a radio show called It Pays To Be Ignorant on which actors impersonated morons. We're too politically correct to do that now. But the emcee would, for example, say, "What color was George Washington's white horse?" and the first dummy would say he saw a horse in a movie last week, and the second would say he liked popcorn at the movies and the third ... well, it would go on from there. You had to have heard it. Anyway, too often now when I hear sportswriters joining the cacophony on the air, I remember It Pays To Be Ignorant.

Only, of course, those guys were just acting dumb.

Sports Illustrated senior contributing writer Frank Deford is a regular contributor to SI.com and appears each Wednesday on National Public Radio's Morning Edition. He is a longtime correspondent for HBO's Real Sports and his new novel, An American Summer (Sourcebooks Trade), is available at bookstores everywhere.

 

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