MEDIA WATCH: TALKING HEADS GETTING IN THE WAY OF THE GAME

By Al Mattei

Founder, TopOfTheCircle.com

Turn on most televised sporting events, and it is hard to hear the crack of the bat, the whoosh of a golf club through the air, the bounce of a basketball.

Why? An intrusive din.

You may know them by different categories. One is the sports anchor catchphrase: "The whifffff ..." "And they're NOT ... gonna ... get him..." "And de Lawd says you gotta rise up..." "Yahtzee!"

Another are the gabfests which masquerade as highlight shows that break down the game ad nauseum. These half-hour or hour-long shows try to fit into the genre of being "more than a news show" by bringing in experts and pundits whose function, more than anything else, is to fill network time.

Even worse is what has happened when the genre of sports talk radio took over the AM airwaves in the 1980s and 1990s. Opinionated, loud hosts, taking calls from louder sports fans, and even louder pundits getting together to see who is the loudest of them all -- at least until the next five-minute commercial block.

Such gabbing has been filtering down to live sportscasting in recent years. Whether it has been three men in the booth, loud analysts pointing out the obvious, or an entire game used to explain the nuances of a sport, the sum total of what American sport is these days is just talk, talk, talk.

It is no wonder that it costs so much to go to some American professional sporting events these days: you pay extra to not hear the professional gabbers cluttering the airwaves and obfuscating what is going on in between the lines.

Oh, sure, there are still great practicioners of the craft who let the pictures do all of the talking.

But when the commissioners of the four major professional team sports -- Gary Bettman (NHL), Bud Selig (MLB), David Stern (NBA), and Paul Tagliabue (NFL) -- make a point of criticizing today's sports media for interposing themselves on the game, feathers are ruffled in the sports media world.

Keith Olbermann -- no stranger he to a catchphrase -- jumped immediately on Stern's quote, taken from a forum at the Museum of Television and Radio in New York City held in April 2000: "But when it becomes about the next wisecrack, it cheapens the game." He launched into a tirade about how the how the 24-hour sports networks have translated into publicity for the pro leagues.

Olbermann's criticism of the commissioners, however, fails to take into account Stern's next sentence: "Our experience is that it's all about the game."

Perhaps this is why the so-called "alternative" and "extreme" sports are so popular: that the sport exists for its own sake, and that the accomplishment of a particular task -- climbing a mountain, negotiating a tight turn on a street luge course, a 720 trick on a skateboard -- is its own reward.

Even in this genre of sport, however, networks have been creating their own gabfests to talk about what is going on in the extreme sports world.

So, where do we go from here when it comes to shutting our ears from the din of talking heads? Sometimes, it's going to a live event and appreciating the subtleties of competition.

Or, sometimes, it is a matter of catching the right sporting event on television. On one occasion in April 2000, this space caught up with Erin Brown, the color analyst for a game that is not high on the national recognition scale -- women's lacrosse.

In our interview, she confessed that she did not feel the need to come up with a new catch phrase for the game of women's lacrosse in order to spice up the telecast. Instead, she amplified the subtleties of the women's game in response to her male broadcast partners' quizzing.

That night, I rewound the tape of the game, and something glorious appeared on the screen: a game in which Brown amplified, then got out of the way of, the clinic the Maryland women's lacrosse team was putting on in a win over Johns Hopkins.

Too bad more electronic mass media sports journalists don't do the same thing.

What do you think? Email us at topofthecircle@aol.com, and we'll try to print a random sampling of your opinions, as long as you are willing to give us your name and where you are from.