ESPN Has Jumped The Shark
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by Wade Garrett
Sports fans, ESPN has jumped the shark.
Ten years ago, ESPN looked totally different than it did now. For one thing, a much larger portion of its schedule, perhaps 8 hours a day, was devoted to SportsCenter, an hour-long sports news program. Over time, ESPN became known for a unique brand of wit, as its anchors peppered the highlight reels with one-liners, funny nicknames for players, and clever historical analogies. Nobody was better at this than the team of Dan Patrick and Keith Olberman,\whose literate copy was music to the ears of discerning sports fans. And, most importantly, they were actual journalists.
Over time, ESPN began to put the entertainment cart before the sporting horse, hiring sports anchors more for their wit than for their knowledge of sports. Stuart Scott and Craig Kilborn, for instance, were basically talk show hosts whose employer happened to be a sports network. Its no coincidence that, when Kilborn left ESPN, it was to host a late-night comedy talk show on CBS, in what is now Craig Fergeson's time slot. Kilborn's jump to late-night television proves two things: first, that he was better suited to being a talk-show host than a sports anchor, and second, that he wasn't even very good at being a talk-show host.
Stuart Scott is still on ESPN, but has become a caricature of his old self. Originally hired to bring an urban sensibility to the once lily-white network, he has become a sort of minstrel, a parody of an inner-city fast talker. Nobody, not even the young, black professional athletes, have any idea what he's talking about half of the time. SportsCenter soon became populated by a series of former athletes who possessed varying degrees of talent at the skill of speaking in front of a camera. Some, such as Sean Salisbury, employ the Fox News-inspired tactic of repeating a single point at increasingly loud volumes until the dissenting opinions in the room just give up and move on. This, combined with increasingly-prevalent product placement spots, such as the Budweiser Hot Seat, the Coors Light 'Cold Hard Facts,' the Coors Light Freeze-Cam, and the Coors Light 'six pack of questions' make me reach for the Sony cold, hard remote.
All of this product placement is only possible because ESPN has a near monopoly on the sports news market. Otherwise, who would watch it? With so few alternatives, sports fans are not only subjected to ESPN's worst excesses; they are also subjected to ESPN's programming decisions. I want to know who at ESPN decided that televised poker, hot dog-eating competitions, and American Gladiators reruns make for good television. Most sports fans would probably add the WNBA to that list, but I don't mind the WNBA as much as a lot of other people - at least its basketball, and there isn't much other than baseball on during the summer. But the poker and American Gladiators are now broadcast year-round. I feel about these shows the same way that I feel about figure skating - it draws an audience, but the people who watch it don't even think of it as sports.
Sometime around the end of the last decade, ESPN began to show more and more opinion-oriented broadcasting. The first successful show of this sort, , is still one of the best talk shows on TV. Michael Wilbon and Tony Kornheiser, both well-known sportswriters from the Washington Post, would discuss a series of different issues over the course of half an hour, never staying on one subject for more than three minutes. The opinions were short, sweet, well-informed, and pointed. Unfortunately, this spawned a series of knock-offs, such as and , all of which lack the style and panache of PTI.ESPN's current "Who's Now?" feature epitomizes all of ESPN's recent negative trends. More than that, it is ESPN's perfect post-modern moment. It is sheer self-reflection, a story about a story about a story teller, utterly devoid of substance. Here is a partial list of things that piss me off about the "Who's Now" competition:
1) Nobody knows what it means to be "now."
2) To the extent that I am able to discern its meaning, it seems to mean "the biggest deal," which is not something you can measure.
3) Since ESPN basically has a monopoly on sports journalism in this country, it more or less gets to arbitrarily decide who is a big deal, and who is not.
4) Therefore, the contest is, basically, ESPN asking its fans to vote on who ESPN devotes the most time and attention to. Not who they should devote the most time and attention to, but who they already do devote the most time and attention to.
5) Everybody knows that Bill Simmons, ESPN's most famous columnist, is under strict orders not to make fun of the network. When he decides to say "fuck it, I'm going to make fun of the 'Who's Now?' competition because its stupid and I don't care what my bosses think about it," you know its pretty stupid.
6) The bracket is set up like a half-assed NCAA tournament, with four brackets of seeds #1-16. The brackets are named after Michael Jordan, Billie Jean King, Babe Ruth, and Muhammed Ali. However, in the NCAA tournament the brackets are named after the region of the country in which the games are played. For instance, the games in the "Southeast" regional are played in the southeast. (Under the old rules, the teams used to actually come from the southeast.) It means absolutely nothing to be in the Jordan bracket as opposed to the Ali bracket.
7) There is no good way to compare athletes across genders and across sports. For instance, Roger Federer is as "now" as any tennis player has ever been; he is both the best player in the world and the focus of more press coverage than any other player. But even the tenth-most popular baseball player gets more publicity in this country than does Federer. By any definition of the word, is Ryan Howard more "now" than Roger Federer? Not in my view.
8) Though ESPN's viewers get to vote, ESPN provides a panel of "experts" to help the viewers make their decision. If nobody knows what it means to be "now," then how can somebody be an expert in now-ness? Today there was a panel of Kirk Herbstreit, Michael Wilbon and Jon Barry. Do any of those guys know more about being "now," than, say, any the first ten people you see on the subway in the morning.
Its all a shame, because ESPN used to be one hell of a great television network.
