Some Rough Thoughts on Why ESPN Sucks and What That Means

ESPN is on. You know what that means. One highlight after another: The top ten plays, the ten worst plays, breaking news, breaking records, and, if appropriate, footage of breaking bones. If it’s a baseball game you have the score, the speed of each pitch, the batter’s statistics in relevant scenarios, the pitcher’s statistics against the batter, all the while a continuous ticker tape runs across the bottom of the screen with real time updates of every other game going on that evening. A not uncommon ESPN baseball game might include something like the following revelatory information: The score is Indians 8, Tigers 6 in the bottom of the 7th. The Tigers are 6 and 6 when trailing by 2 with more than two outs in the 7th. The Indians, on the other hand, are 6 and 6 when ahead by more than one run after the 6th inning.

This sort of commentary is patronizing to viewers, and though it might be up to date, whatever that means, and presumably accurate, it is impoverished. ESPN has adopted a strategy that seems, above all, to fear the banality of sports, and the frivolity of games. In their desperate attempt to make everything exciting and significant and charged with meaning, they too have bought into the myth of the fast forward button. This myth – so popular today in the widespread intrusion of pornography and in our 24 hour news cycles – delights in removing things from context. It strings together clips of exciting moments, but stripped of both their history and their future. Sportscenter, like so much else today, exists in a constant state of now, impatient of the boredom of the past and uninterested in the canvas of the future. “Without memories, without hope,” Albert Camus wrote, “they lived for the moment only. Indeed, the here and now had come to mean everything to them.” That’s the message of ESPN – they mine history but only to illuminate the moment, and then the information vanishes forever, uncared for, undigested.

To criticize this is to invite charges of ignorance and prudery. There is a place for the highlight reel. Think back to Mel Allen and This Week in Baseball. I’m not trying to deny the excitement of sports, nor the reality of truly great plays, nor the relevance of statistics. And it is unfair to focus solely on ESPN and Sportscenter when all televised sports are guilty. But that’s just it – this insulting attitude is so widespread and it, ironically, is diminishing our overall experience of the games. One might profitably ask how this coverage will continue to influence how we watch sports, what we look for and value about games, and how we play games ourselves.

Interestingly, in the face of this bastardizing of what sports are (highlights, low lights, but always lights), there is a corresponding emphasis on the human interest story about the transformative power of sport. These follow a tried and true narrative arc, athlete against all odds – socio economic, injury, racial – or, better yet, a non-athlete, preferably disabled, who teaches the able bodied about what’s really important. On one hand this is to say that even ESPN doesn’t seem to believe their party line that sports exist as a highlight reel. But more interestingly, it betrays a surprising lack of understanding of what sports are for. This insistence that it’s not the highlights that matter, but rather some human lesson athletes and athletics teach us (usually about inclusion or generosity), also speaks to an almost degraded sense of sport, that it must have a lesson if it is to be valuable in a non highlight, non statistical way.

Sports, in and of themselves, teach us nothing. They do however provide examples of excellence and an aesthetic experience. Christopher Lasch, in a very interesting and strange chapter in his The Culture of Narcissism writes that “It is by watching those who have mastered a sport, however, that we derive standards against which we measure ourselves. By entering imaginatively into their world, we experience in heightened form the pain of defeat and the triumph of persistence in the face of adversity.” That quality of imagination, so important to Lasch, is precisely what is missing from televised sports today.

Are there hopes for the future? Generally, I’m afraid not. I do have some hope that a love of games survives, that a sense of play and imagination are still prized by people, and that the displayed excellence of athletes will continue to lift us outside of ourselves and to help dramatize the human condition. As for enjoying this on my TV? I can only watch games muted now, and put some hope in technology, that in our age of choice, one day viewers will be able to choose the format they want the game to be in. And I can watch baseball on a 1984 style full screen, with no scoreboard except between innings, and simple batting stats. Then if I can only get Scooter and Bill White back in the booth, and banish the ESPN crew to a blissful silence, all might be well.