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Monthly Archives: August 2007

Impress Your Friends with Daily Trivia!

“Hey, wait a minute.  That was the same day he was at Ticonderoga, how could he be in two places at once?” – Bart Simpson

One of the most popular substitute teachers at my high school would read us interesting, “On this day in history…” type trivia before class.  He’d recite funny little stories about ancient battles and scientific discoveries from this old, yellowed trivia book.  He might be subbing for history, biology or literature, it didn’t matter; I even saw him read it in gym once.  He was famous for it and his temporary pupils wouldn’t let him start class until we’d had our fix.

That book is probably long out of print, but we have plenty of decent internet stand-ins.  Today, for instance, is the twenty-ninth of August and you can find out all about it in just a few minutes.  According to todayinsport.com the first heavyweight title fight using Marquis of Queensberry rules was held in 1885.  The good people over at reference.com have today as the invention of chop suey in 1896.  IMDB tells us that John McCain (1936) and Michael Jackson (1958) were both born on 29 August, and that Slobodan Milosevic and Robin Leach started life outside the womb on this very day in 1941.  On-this-day.com has this tremendous bit of musical trivia, not only was 29 August 1958 Michael Jackson’s birthday, it also saw a young man named George Harrison join a group known as “The Quarrymen”, eight years later on 29 August 1966 they held their last public performance as “The Beatles” in San Francisco.

In addition to trivia sites, most news organizations have daily links to their past stories.  (Some consultant probably told them it’s a good way to maximize page views from archived content.)  I’m particularly fond of the BBC’s version, it’s a daily stop for me; today there are links to stories about the arrival of British troops in Korea (1950), the Gemini V space capsule’s return to Earth (1965) and, of course, Hurricane Katrina striking New Orleans (2005).  Unlisted by the BBC, I assume because there was no public story about it at the time, is perhaps the most significant 29 August of the twentieth century, that of 1949.  On that day in history the Soviet Union detonated its first atomic bomb.

This was not the decrepit Soviet Union of the 1980s that was forced to import grain; this was the Soviet Union that inflicted the overwhelming majority of Nazi casualties.  All of our Nazi killing heroes, from Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca to Tom Hanks in Saving Private Ryan, are a bunch of pussies compared to these Soviets.  This was our great nemesis in the Cold War, a fierce nation at the height of its power that now had the bomb.

29 August is a date that I find very comforting.  That may seem perverse, but allow me to explain.  Fifty-eight years ago, the largest country on Earth, a ruthless totalitarian state with an enormous and formidable military, gained access to the most terrible weapon ever conceived.  Yet today that terrifying event barely rates a mention as a piece of historical trivia.  There is no modern corollary for this, there isn’t anything close.  No threats coughed up by today’s world are remotely as scary as a globe-spanning battle-hardened empire with nuclear weapons.

All the Muslim bogeymen in the world put together don’t pose anything like that kind of threat.  I like to remember that, especially as we approach a more recent and raw anniversary, now less than two weeks away.  Those Soviet (now Russian) nuclear weapons are still with us, but we are still here in spite of them.  Terrorism, Muslim or otherwise, will likely be with us for a long time to come, but we will also still be here.

A week from Tuesday, when we’re all stuck in the muck and the mire of war politics and patriotic blather, let’s remember some other anniversaries as well, the birthday of D.H. Lawrence (1885), Brian De Palma (1940), and Moby (1965), the next to last time the Red Sox won the World Series (1918), the first public performance of “Oh, Susannah” which Stephen Foster sold for a bottle of whiskey (1847), the victory of William Wallace at Stirling Bridge (1297 – the first battle scene in Braveheart), the discovery of the island of Manhattan by Henry Hudson (1609) and the Pinochet coup in Chile (1973).  It’s not much, but hopefully it can start to give us all a little perspective, so that in thirty or forty years, when people in their forties and fifties are the youngest ones left who can remember that awful September day, only the high school kids who are into history will know the date off the top of their head.  It won’t mean we’ve forgotten it, only that we’ve moved on from it.

Blood on the Flag: As Impeachable as Semen on a Dress?

“My mother was a saint.” – Richard Nixon

“Yes, I’m sure she was un-impeachable.” – Jay Sherman

Exactly two years ago, on 26 August 2005 (three days before Katrina hit New Orleans), I wrote an e-mail to a friend of mine in which I laid out my reasons for believing that Bush the Younger would be impeached and removed from office prior to 20 January 2009.  From the e-mail:

     Short of alien life making first contact on the White House lawn or a 180 degree turn in Iraqi violence/American deaths (I’d say the two are equally likely) he is a millstone around the necks of Congressional Republicans. 

     Brutus killed Caesar, it will be the Republicans who take down Bush, the same way they took down Nixon.  When it’s all said and done, the party is bigger than any man.  Nixon resigned when a bunch of Congressional Republicans rode to the White House and told him he had lost the ability to govern.  It will happen again.

     I seem crazy when I say that, but there are two immutable truths that are going to collide on George W. Bush.  The first is that Iraq is not going to get better any time soon.  It is going to get worse, a lot worse.  Think about Yugoslavia and the words “civil war” will materialize in your mind.  The second is that his popularity (upon which all else chiefly rests) is inextricably tied to Iraq. 

     At some point his numbers will sink below the total of registered Republicans, below anything that could even be called viable.  There is a level where he will no longer be able to deal with Congress, no longer be credible to foreign governments, no longer have any ability to act on even the slightest political issue.  That’s when he’ll go.

That was two years ago, and while I underestimated the continued effectiveness of Administration bullshit when it comes to Iraq, I think Bush is now in more danger than is generally understood.  His poll numbers are low enough that the word ‘Nixonian’ is being used to describe them; the money for his precious war is in the hands of very angry Democrats; and Senators from his own party are publicly pleading with him to at least consider bringing troops home.  If his ludicrously insane historical analogies and unwavering attitude of exasperated contempt are anything to go by, Bush seems to have hardly noticed any of these developments.  John Warner’s suggestion of a small, Christmas timed drawdown was as polite and harmless as humanly possible.  The White House dismissed it immediately and outright.

Congressional Republicans, especially those running for reelection in 2008, need some compromise and flexibility from the White House when it comes to the war.  The great majority of them would like nothing more than to let Bush limp through the rest of his term and slink quietly into disgrace next winter, but the war in Iraq cannot be ignored that long.  Ignoring the war is the main reason that they have fewer friendly Republican faces in Congress this year than last.

Polls about the unpopularity of the war prior to the 2006 election were easily dismissed as media generated hyperbole, now those polls have a proven electoral bite.  (A rarely mentioned footnote to that election is that the popular vote totals skewed Democratic by millions, more than anything else that ought to put real fear into Republican electoral strategists.)  All those states and house districts turning from red to blue proved that the country, far more than our government, is done with Iraq.  Raise your hand if you think the remaining Congressional Republicans care more about salvaging Bush’s presidency than they do about keeping their cushy jobs.  Nobody?  Okay, let’s move on then.

Congress can put the war to bed, politically speaking, by establishing a solid, bipartisan blueprint for ending American combat involvement in Iraq.  The broad shape of the compromise is that we fund the war with a definite withdrawal date, blame the Iraqis and call it a day.  It is in the interests of everyone in Washington not named George Bush or Dick Cheney to do so sooner rather than later.  A spectacularly truculent Administration tantrum might, maybe, garner another token extension, but one way or another it has to be settled soon.  Everyone is looking for some sign of compromise from the White House and the Administration’s political survival depends on showing a sliver of flexibility about the war.

If Bush doesn’t compromise, and he has given no indication in his speeches or past actions that he will, it will come to a grand showdown.  In such a contest Bush will be a lame duck president (with historically low approval ratings responsible for launching a disastrous war) pitted against a Congress comprised of Democrats who despise him and Republicans who would like nothing more than to be rid of him.  A fight like that is a test of political strength in its rawest form and this is a politically weak Administration.  Just this summer they’ve been hit with the ongoing embarrassment of Alberto Gonzales, the Scooter Libby saga, the ever increasing subpoenas (any one of which can explode into a Watergate tapes level catastrophe), the departure of his last foreign friend in Tony Blair and the recent spats with Nouri al-Maliki and Hamid Karzai over Iran.  The odds are decidedly against him.

Even knowing that, I think Bush will still choose to fight rather than compromise.  If he does lose a veto proof vote on a war spending bill then he’s been neutered as commander-in-chief.  Two thirds of Congress ranks him, and no amount of signing statement chicanery can change that.  While there are doubtless a lot of Republicans who would want to stand by their man, fight it out and let the chips fall where they may next November, there are probably even more who are ready to desert him over the war if given the right political cover.  From there it’s a small step to deserting him totally.

It is inconceivable that Congress is going fund this war through next November in a way the current White House finds acceptable.  The Democrats are opposed to the war in general and on top of that it would be politically disastrous for them to do so.  The Republicans may have once loved the war, but they are far more willing than the President to admit that it isn’t going to end the way we hoped and they have their own electoral futures to consider.

As public disapproval of the war rises (and it will) the pressure to end it builds accordingly.  That pressure is most squarely on Congressional Republicans.  They’ve got elections to worry about and they know that if the war is still a political issue in 2008 it’s going to be an apocalyptic nightmare for them.  To avoid that they’ll squeeze Bush to do something other than mindless cheerleading, but he’s said on multiple occasions that the job of removing American troops will fall on the next president.  He is probably right about that, it’s the timing that might come as a surprise.

People tell me I’m crazy when I say that I think the odds of Bush finishing his term are less than 50-50, and maybe they’re right, but those two truths from my two year old e-mail remain true.  The war is getting worse all the time and the President’s popularity continues to decline.  I have yet to see any kind of plausible scenario for how the war can be wound down with Bush the Younger still in office.  If he were willing to roll over, accept some kind of bipartisan compromise that blames the Iraqis, declares victory, and ends the war, it’d be different.  But I don’t think he has it in him.

It has occurred to me that the real reason I think he’s toast is because I find the idea of Bush the Younger being president for a further year and a half so unpalatable that I’ve talked myself into something foolish.  I don’t think that’s the case, but appearing foolish seems a small price to pay if it lets me laugh at this monstrous man.  I know too many otherwise bright people who are reduced to furious anger when he becomes to topic of conversation.

Bush Victim Zero

“Are you familiar with my friend Al Gore?” – Bender

One of initial consequences of Al Gore’s rolling Live Earth series of concerts last month was to finally bury any speculation that he is going to run for president again.  Prior to that he’d denied that he has any plans to run, but that didn’t stop the speculation.  To get the byline brigade to accept it would’ve required a torrent of verbal self flagellation and absolute denial that he was unwilling to provide.  But he isn’t running, and both he and us will probably be better off because of it.

Setting aside John McCain (and to a lesser extent, Ann Richards), Gore was the first victim of Bush the Younger’s political machine.  Many names have since been added to that list, from the famous and formerly credible like Colin Powell to the all but anonymous ones that are in the New York Times every day along with their age, rank and hometown.  Because of his prime place on that sad list, Gore has become someone on which people can pin a lot of hope and regret, as exemplified by his Saturday Night Live monologue from last spring.  That sense of regret, and a lot of people wishing we had a mulligan for 2000, makes speculation about his candidacy inevitable but no less silly.

He’s not running for president because he knows that as soon as his candidacy became real all of the fond, glowing coverage he gets now will immediately devolve back to the childish level of “I invented the Internet”.  In the last couple of years he has very skillfully extricated himself from the caricature of a pathetic, wooden loser.  Any candidacy that didn’t end at 1600 would destroy all that work.  He also knows, first hand, just how limited the power of elected office can be.  Even if he jumped through all the hoops, made all the distasteful compromises and wound up at 1600 he’d immediately have other issues weighing him down and literally millions of ways to get distracted or slowed by something immaterial to his environmentalism.  He also knows that winning the 2008 election will not erase the 2000 election and all that’s happened since.

Instead of another run at an office that he probably doesn’t really want, he has dedicated himself to what he considers most important: environmentalism in general and global warming in particular.  He has no direct power, but his influence on this one issue is so great that he can affect policy.  As long as he keeps doing what he’s been doing no Democratic president could advance environmental or climate policy without his blessing.  Even a Republican president (other than the current one) would find it hard going against Gore on environmental policy.  That is real power.  He was way ahead of the curve on climate change, so we know that he’s patient and knows how to plan long term.  He cares about the planet and he is now in a position to do good, meaningful work on its behalf.

As an added bonus, he has hit on something so potentially huge that it could radically change his, ahem, legacy.  He is the leading figure associated with environmentalism and climate change and if, decades from now, we look back on these years as the time when climate change started being taken seriously, Gore will be able to claim more credit than any other individual.  His efforts on the environment have the potential to bump the losing scrum in Florida from the first paragraph of his obituary.  Being the Barry Goldwater of the left, loved for his ideals, hated for losing, probably isn’t much fun and this is a way out from that.

Gore’s foresight about global warming and his growing reputation for integrity and honesty are moving his appeal beyond the left and towards the center.  He’s been limited thus far because as long as Bush the Younger is in office the public perception of Gore will remain tied to Florida and the 2000 election.  But when 1600 has a new occupant we’ll be freed of that constant reminder that things didn’t have to be this way and Gore can finish rehabilitating himself.

Even an outfit as relentlessly inept as the Democrats have been in recent years probably can’t lose in 2008, but any new Administration will have to substantively deal with climate change, denial is no longer an option.  Some kind of action will have to be taken and Gore is going to be a big part of it.  If he wanted to become the first Secretary for the Environment a new Administration would be crazy to reject him.  From within government or without he’ll have unequaled influence on the one issue he cares most about and for him that is better than the presidency.

Gore isn’t running for office, but he’s not going away either.  He’s going to be our environmental steward and public scold.  For that job, he’s the perfect candidate.

Rove Resigns, Ivan Drago “Disappointed”

“You must have a few tricks left up your sleeve.  Smithers, boil some coffee, we’re not licked yet.” – C.M. Burns

“Yes we are. Come on boys, the old guy’s finished.” – Burns for Governor Campaign Manager

Karl Rove is quitting at the end of the month and no one knows quite what to say about it.  Cable channels, newspapers and websites are, per regulations, filled with opinion and opprobrium, but no one is really happy with the way it’s ending.  Rove had his lungs handed to him in last year’s election, so he can’t go out on top as a conquering hero; and while his ideological enemies beat his team last November, they didn’t beat his most famous client.  Nailing the prom queen two years after she’s out of high school just doesn’t have the same cachet.

I don’t know what will become of Rove and, at this point, neither does anyone else.  He’s screwed either way though.  The bulk of the country will look at him as a tool of evil in the Ehrlichman/Haldeman mold while people who were once on his side snidely deride him for being at the controls when the train derailed.  Unless he hitches himself to a Savior of the Republic type in a future election he will go down as the man most directly responsible for giving us Bush the Younger.  In terms of crude sexual metaphors, this is like being known as the ex-boyfriend who gave you HPV.

I have no problem with Rove’s campaign tactics.  Electioneering in the United States of America has always been a cutthroat affair; lying, cheating, smearing, and all other manner of dishonesty have always been part of the game, from the Revolution through the age of Jackson, the Civil War and right up to today.  Complaining about it, by direct whining or earnest appeals to higher notions of democracy, has always struck me as naïve and childish.  This man once headed a campaign that insinuated that John McCain was in favor of cancer…and it worked!  What can you do but applaud the balls of that?

I was disappointed to learn of his upcoming resignation though.  There is a great deal of hard political fighting ahead and Rove has become known as Bush’s foremost political warrior.  Yet there he was on the White House lawn, stepping down just as the battle for Bush’s political legacy and survival are about to be joined.  My suspicion is that it’s another act of cowardice from a group of people unaccustomed to actual political opposition.

Rove represents a political force predicated on the idea that the opposition is not only wrong, but un-American.  It’s all good fun when you’re winning elections against paper tigers like John Kerry and you feel the winds of history at your back.  But when the going gets tough, when the invincibility that you’ve convinced yourself of disintegrates, life and politics become a lot scarier.  Rove lost badly last year, a loss he has no choice but to take personally, and if he’s as much of a history buff as he’s supposed to be it ought to sting that much more.  With the tea leaves pointing to an even bigger defeat next year he decided to resign rather than stay in the bunker.

It’s an understandable decision, though not one that reflects well on him personally.  He became a true member of the Administration when he took a job with policy responsibilities after the 2004 election.  When he did that he stopped being just an election strategist.  If he was still merely a campaign manager, a man tasked with winning votes and little else, his resignation would be justifiable.  After all, no elections remain for Bush the Younger.  But he is a member of the team now, a government official accountable for government decisions and he’s quitting right as those policies and decisions are facing their biggest test.

Bush will be fighting for his very political survival this fall and Rove won’t be on the front lines.  I had hoped he was made of sterner stuff.

ESPN Doesn’t Hate You: But It Might Be Time to See Other People

“People of Earth, this is Bartron, commander of the Martian invasion force.  Your planet is in our hands; resistance is useless.” – Bart Simpson

Communicating a live sporting event through a television broadcast has always been an imperfect science.  Television people have experimented with different broadcast techniques and new technologies over the years to make events more realistic, or give a better feel for the game, or reproduce the atmosphere at the stadium.  But your house is never going to be like the stadium (no matter how much of an over-the-top-super-fan-do-it-yourself home improvement nut you are); you’ll still have upholstered furniture, easy access to the bathroom and a refrigerator that does not charge eight dollars for beer.  There is an inherent difference between attending a game and watching one on television, no way around it.

Television is the way most fans watch their teams in action though.  Even season ticket holders, unless they are incredibly gung-ho about road trips and have very little else going on in their lives, end up watching a lot of games on the screen.  You can skip the tedious pregame shows and ignore any idiotic local columnists, but you cannot avoid watching the games live on television.  Everything that happens beyond the field, from talking about the game with your friends all the way up the food chain to SportsCenter, is optional; but the live broadcasts are inescapable.

Television channels, ESPN and all the rest, aim at the widest possible audience, and that means that some people will inevitably be unhappy with all the ancillary stuff that comes with the action.  However, we live in an age where more and more of the information we receive can be filtered and customized.  That can be a good thing or a bad thing depending on context, but as far as sports are concerned, I think it’s to our benefit.  What’s more, we are living in the infancy of this age of information, and we ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

If the internet has taught us one thing about sports it is that people who truly understand the games being played are not limited to the payrolls of television networks and newspapers, quite the opposite.  There are smart people on-line who are passionate about sports, from large websites like www.footballoutsiders.com to humble blogs following the travails of individual teams.  The barriers to entry are already low, and likely to fall even lower as bandwidth grows and internet users proliferate.  The ways that we can enjoy sports will increase apace.

So far this has mostly been limited to time spent before and after the game, rather than during.  As that changes, and it has already begun, we’ll eventually see the big money (sports leagues, broadcasters and cable/satellite companies) follow suit.  We’ve already taken the first primitive steps by blogging events live.  When you get right down to it, isn’t live blogging a game (quick analysis, a few insights and some jokes) basically what a color commentator does?  There are obviously limitations on how quickly you can type something while an event is occurring, but what about talking?  Skype and the like have certainly shown us that free instantaneous live audio over the internet is a reality.  So what’s to prevent a couple of friendly bloggers from simulcasting an audio stream during the game?

What if J.E. Skeets and Tas Melas from The Basketball Jones decided to watch the Thursday night NBA games with a live mic connected to an audio feed?  What if a couple of the guys from Kissing Suzy Kolber watched and commented on Monday Night Football live?  I’d be willing to bet that every pro franchise and major college in the country has at least a few fans that would like the idea of doing that and know how to set it up.  Local, amateur announcing teams could build up quite a following for doing nothing more than watching and talking about the games, (which they are going to do anyway).  I have no idea what something like this would look or sound like, but the internet is great place to try out new ideas.  Most of them fade instantly, but some become hugely popular.

There are obvious technical restrictions to this, first and foremost the need to have a computer up and running in the same room as your television, but we know from live blogging and comments sections that lots of people have that already.  I don’t think there are any real legal obstacles; though I wouldn’t put it past any of the above mentioned big money parties to make some noise about it.  There is also the issue of lag, anyone who has ever been in a sports bar knows that some feeds can be ahead or behind others by a few seconds, but we’re not trying to do play by play – at least not yet.

All I know for sure is that there is an audience out there for something like this, it’s not for everyone, it’s not even for everyone who reads sports blogs, but the audience does exist and somebody is going to find a way to speak to it.  I realize that this is a crude idea at this point, but I think it’s roughly the direction we’re headed.  Journalists no longer have a monopoly on analysis and inside information about teams, why on Earth should the live announcers have a monopoly on commentary during the event?  The internet has tremendously increased our options in everything from shoe purchase to dating, why not sports announcing?

The example I’d like to follow here are the local radio announcers.  Every pro sports team has a local radio broadcasting team.  It’s usually some sports broadcaster paired with an ex-jock and between the two of them they know the name of every single employee of the franchise and their kids.  No vagabond network announcing crew could or should be expected to understand the franchise that well.  For football it would be nice to have the same local announcers each week.  (This would eliminate the generic network announcers saying things like, “I remember we did a game here back in Week 3…”).  For baseball, basketball and hockey it would mean that the local guys who carry the load most of the season would keep going through the playoffs.  I would certainly be interested in that, the question is, would I be willing to pay for it?

On-line amateurs are a good start, but serious money is going have to get involved sooner or later for something to really change the way we watch sports.  So…how much would you pay for more customizable sports broadcasts?  The increased bandwidth needs for cable and satellite would be minimal.  It’s the HD picture broadcast that sucks bandwidth, but you could have multiple audio streams with only a fractional increase.  (I have no idea if the current generation of cable/satellite boxes could do this, but the underlying concept is simple enough, building a circuit board and writing some firmware to make it work seems like a small hurdle.)  At first it would likely be limited to simple things like local announcers, on field microphones that would let you hear what’s really going on at the line of scrimmage (with all the colorful words included), a pair of newspaper columnists (one from each team’s hometown), etc.  The possibilities are limitless though, and with a little experience the networks would be able to find formats and personnel that are knowledgeable, entertaining, and worth a few extra bucks per season to the discerning fan.

The expansion of HD in the last few years has proven that millions of people are willing to pay more for an enhanced home experience.  The HD equipment (television set, DVR, etc.) is more expensive than regular equipment, and the cable and satellite companies charge a premium for programming on top of that, yet HD grows faster every year.  Using some of that technology to personalize the broadcast (and target the ads a little more precisely) seems like a natural next step.  Personalized access inevitably means tiered access, but so what?  Tickets to an event are not created equal; people that can afford to pay for better seats get a better view.  People willing to pay a little more ought to have a better time at home, nothing wrong with that.

What we want to do is widen the gap between simply watching the game and the network presentation of the game.  The two are not one in the same.  After all, where is it written that if I’m watching the game at home I must do so exactly according to how ESPN or Fox want me to?  Internet and television technology improve all the time, that goes almost without saying, and it’s up to us, people on-line who have an interest in sports and the technical savvy to make new things work, to gently nudge things in a better direction.  This isn’t some call to arms or anything like that.  We just need to keep doing what we’re doing.

I’m leery of starry eyed predictions about how blogs and the internet are an up-with-people style revolution in the making.  However, what we know already is that a lot of people are willing to follow their sports teams on-line in ways that no one thought possible just a few years ago; that’s a fact, not speculation.  And it makes me wonder just what else this dedicated (and growing) subset of sports fans can do.

ESPN Doesn’t Hate You: They Just Don’t Know How to Love

“Bart Simpson telling you to lock the doggie in the barn ‘cause here comes dodgeball action!  The shirts continued their domination over the skins today.” – Bart Simpson

Four years ago, when ESPN first put that awful “Playmakers” show in their lineup, I had a conversation with a friend of mine about whether or not it was a good thing.  We decided that it wasn’t, even if the show hadn’t sucked.  Our main reason was that we didn’t want to see ESPN turn into MTV with sports.

Most of today’s MTV viewers weren’t even born when the station got its start back in the eighties.  At the time all MTV really did was show these newfangled music video things.  That was how it began, as music television.  Today MTV has become less of a music channel and more of a youth oriented brand with numerous original series, reality shows (they practically invented the genre), pop culture celebrations, etc.  Our fear was that ESPN might gradually follow the same path until it was little more than a clearing house for sports themed programs that aren’t actually sports.  A lot of those fears turned out to have been justified, but it doesn’t really bother me because I don’t have to watch everything on ESPN.

The monumentally silly “Who’s Now” series, cause of so much on-line teeth gnashing, hasn’t had the slightest effect on me because I didn’t see even a single second of it.  Come to think of it, I don’t think I’ve watched an entire SportsCenter from start to finish since I got a TiVo.  No less an ESPN luminary than Bill Simmons, the Sports Feller himself, said on a recent podcast[1] that he doesn’t even watch SportsCenter anymore.  He just TiVos ESPNews and watches one when he needs to see highlights.  It’s not like anyone is forcing you to watch all of the filler that ESPN crams into their schedule, especially during the summertime sports doldrums.

I think the on-line sports community often loses sight of the fact that the universe of sports fans goes beyond people with internet connections and lots of time on their hands.  This is a crude simplification, but if the comments section of popular blogs and the questioners on the daily ESPN.com chats are anything to go by, the on-line sports community is primarily composed of two groups, kids in high school and college plus white collar guys with desk jobs that do not require their full attention from nine to five.  (There is a reason Deadspin only updates during the daytime.)  That’s all well and good, but it doesn’t account for a lot of people who take an interest in sports.

To give just a few examples, it doesn’t include truck drivers, mechanics, people that construct or repair homes and offices, cooks, janitors, retail sales clerks, factory workers, and a hell of a lot of other people who don’t spend their workday at a desk with internet access.  According to the most recent column by the ESPN.com ombudswoman there were over five million on-line votes cast for “Who’s Now”.  That doesn’t mean five million people, but at a bare minimum it has to mean hundreds of thousands.  That’s a huge number, and they thought enough of “Who’s Now” to actually log-on and vote.  Similarly, it’s easy and fun to make fun of people like Jim Rome and Schrutebag, but like it or not they have big audiences.

ESPN targets all of those people to expand its reach, the same way any other large media outfit does.  One of the ways they do that is by trying to turn coverage of an event into ownership of the public discussion about that event.  That can piss people off.  For example, determining yourself to be the arbiter of “Sportsnation” betrays an insulting hubris towards your audience.  Other tactics include using gimmicky camera angles during play to make things seem more exciting, shameless use of the word ‘coverage’ to avoid telling you when the game actually starts, and of course, never ending cross promotions designed to get you to watch/listen to/read their other offerings.  You could read those things almost as a list of my grievances against ESPN, but I understand them.

Like any large organization ESPN probably has a lot of smart people in powerful positions, but they also have a lot of stupid people in powerful positions.  They get an enormous amount of feedback in the form of ratings, web statistics, e-mails, blogs, etc and then try to make informed decisions.  Sometimes they screw up and sometimes they do well, but in a media environment that evolves as rapidly as ours has in the past fifteen years mixed results are inevitable.  Even Google and Amazon make mistakes.

To illustrate, I’d like to cite another telling piece of information in that ombudswoman’s “Who’s Now” column.  She mentioned one Glenn Jacobs, whose job she described as “senior coordinating producer for 6 p.m. and weekend morning editions of SportsCenter”.  I don’t know what “senior” and “coordinating” mean in that context, but if there is a person in charge of just those editions of SportsCenter it begs the question of what, besides the title and theme music, those editions have in common with the others?  Maybe everybody except me already knew this about SportsCenter, but I find it very significant.  Is the 6 p.m. SportsCenter like “60 Minutes II”, a lesser version that can be taken less seriously?

It’s unfair of me to single out “Who’s Now” and the 6 p.m. SportsCenter, but it goes to a larger point – SportsCenter, and by extension all of ESPN, is a gargantuan enterprise that will inevitably sprawl in some dumb and embarrassing ways.  They attempt to provide coverage for everyone with even a passing interest in sport while expanding to new audiences, and they have to do it every day of every week on their enormous website, numerous television channels and an almost uncountable number of radio programs, some of which you will enjoy and some of which you will not.  That’s why we have things like TiVo and flash block, to make selective consumption of information easier.

I understand that writing off things like “Who’s Now” and the ESPYs as merely annoying and frivolous doesn’t address a deeper, and widely held, objection.  Namely whether or not ESPN’s journalism and objective coverage are undermined when other parts of the empire are manufacturing content and piggybacking on celebrities (some of whom they are largely responsible for making famous).  I don’t have much of an answer to that question, but I think it misses the point.  We live in a world of corporately owned media outlets that seek greater profits through something called, if you’ll permit me to use a foul word, synergy.  That structure has come under increasing scrutiny the last few years (witness the recent hand wringing over the sale of the Wall Street Journal) but it’s with us now, for better or worse.

MTV had a lot of success branching out from what originally made them popular, and so has ESPN.  They will continue to do highfalutin journalism (steroid investigations, NCAA violations, etc), gutter journalism (what Pacman Jones is up to, which celebrity is sleeping with which athlete), and fluff pieces (NBA stars in third world countries, inspiring stories of people overcoming things).  I’m not saying we shouldn’t make fun of “Who’s Now”.  We should; something that self indulgent is crying out to be ridiculed.  But what it ultimately comes down to is that ESPN, in all its forms, is a media organization that focuses on sports.  All we can do is roll with the punches and take each story one at a time.  The third and final installment of “ESPN Doesn’t Hate You” is coming on Wednesday.


[1] 26 July 2007 with Matthew Berry

ESPN Doesn’t Hate You: The Devil Made Them Do It

“Well sir, we’re two hours and forty-five minutes into the pre-game show, and we’ve got ourselves a special guest, actor Troy McClure whose new sitcom is premiering tonight, coincidentally enough right after the game.” –  Brent Gunsilmen

“Thanks Brent, my new show’s called ‘Handle with Care’.  I play Jack Handle a retired cop who shares an apartment with a retired criminal.  We’re the original odd couple.” – Troy McClure

Once upon a time there was enough football for all three networks.  NBC had the AFC, CBS had the NFC, and ABC had Monday Night Football.  Every Sunday you got your local game, plus a couple of national games and that was it.  If you happened to turn the game on twenty minutes late, you had to wait for a commercial break to see the score.  Then the Fox Network came along and all of a sudden there weren’t enough dates to the dance.

In 1993 Fox outbid CBS for the NFC package of games (they started broadcasting during the 1994 season), forcing the Tiffany Network out of football and making way for the FoxBox and it’s ever more intrusive successors.  Four years later CBS got back into the game by outbidding NBC for the AFC package in a deal that CBS outright admitted would lose money for them.  The NFL had become such a status symbol for the networks that it was believed (correctly or not, I have no idea) that no network could be taken seriously without broadcasting pro football and to hell with the cost.

Ever since the 1994 season there has always been one network bereft of football and the NFL has brilliantly used that scarcity in television rights negotiations.  Their prices are now almost unfathomably huge; it costs NBC $600 million per year for those marquee Sunday night games, CBS and Fox pay $622.5 million and $712.5 million respectively for the afternoon games and ESPN pays a whopping $1.1 billion per year for Monday Night Football.[1]  Those amounts, staggering as they are, pay for little more than a few pieces of paper that say you may broadcast NFL football.  Network coffers are still responsible for all the people and equipment it takes to broadcast one of these games, costs that have only increased with the advent of high definition.  It’d be easy and fun to just blame Fox for a lot of this, but if they hadn’t done it, someone else would have.  The great expansion of media outlets that we’ve seen in the last couple of decades has been an enormous boon to providers of premium sports content like the NFL.

These astronomical prices have put the networks in a terrible position.  They are no longer impartial conduits of content; they are now advertisers who happen to also be broadcasters.  (I’m not even going to try to get into the way all those commercials and coverage have changed the way the game is played.)  With NFL telecasts leading the way, broadcasting sports of all stripes has become less about making money directly and more about attracting those desirable sports demographics to other programs.  In a world where DVRs threaten to all but annihilate advertising breaks on recorded programs, popular, live programming is all the more valuable.  Caught in the middle are the viewers (I assure you, they do not think of us as fans).  You can trace a line directly from those outrageous 1998 broadcast contracts to celebrity guest stars in the booth, ads popping up during play, and all that other relentless cross promotion that many fans find so aggravating.

It doesn’t help that football season coincides with the start of the television season.  There are a lot of new shows to promote and even though the networks know that most of them will never see a second season, they have to try as hard as they can to promote them during those first crucial months.  There is almost no limit to the amount of money a hit show can make, and the people running the networks would be derelict in their duty if they didn’t do everything they could to increase the chances that a new series becomes one.  Unfortunately, one of their tools is saturation advertising during football broadcasts.

The fundamental problem here is that ordinary people don’t watch the NFL on Sunday afternoons to learn about the new fall schedule on CBS and Fox.  Fans watch to see the game, to see a contest that is truly unscripted.  The people who plan these broadcasts see sports as leverage to push the rest of their schedule.  We do not have each other’s interests at heart.

NFL broadcasts were the vanguard of this movement, but it’s no longer just them.  Having hauled Keith Jackson out of retirement for the 2006 Rose Bowl, ABC executives must’ve cringed when he hilariously stuttered through a promo for the illogically titled “Emily’s Reasons Why Not”.  I’d assume that TNT makes money showing all those NBA games, but they feel no shame at all about shrinking the game down to a fraction of my screen, during play no less, to show endless commercials for “The Closer”.  Then, of course, there is ESPN.  Depending on your point of view they are either the masters of wringing every dollar out of sports or a blundering corporate entity whose right hand doesn’t know what the left is doing.  The full ESPN post is coming on Sunday.


[1] http://money.cnn.com/2005/04/22/commentary/column_sportsbiz/sportsbiz/

Tricks of the Trade

“Hey Miss Doesn’t-Find-Me-Attractive-Sexually-Anymore, I just tripled my productivity.” – Homer Simpson

Today’s post is going to be the first of three in a series about the way our television networks broadcast sports.  At one point I had tried to cram everything into a single post but it just wasn’t working in anything that resembled a readable length.  Then I remembered that I’m writing on the internet with no word cap and no editor so I can do whatever I want.  I swear I am not just being lazy by splitting one post into three.

The first, published above, is about how we went from having to wait until a commercial for a score update to advertisements during play.  The second, which will hopefully be posted Sunday, is specifically about ESPN, the good, the bad, and the ugly.  The final post is a few ideas about where we go from here, including some things that we, the humble sports fans and viewers, can do to push things in a smarter direction.

At the kind invitation of Dan Lewis from www.armchairgm.com I will be cross publishing these over there as well.  (He said they didn’t mind me doing that.)

Trouble a Brewin’

“Gentlemen, it’s time we face up to the un-face-up-to-able.” – Mayor Quimby

The official website of the House of Representatives is not generally a place I go looking for laughs.  Their schedule does contain a truly profound piece of bullshit though, one worthy of our elected officials.  Tomorrow is listed as the start of the ‘Summer District Work Period’.  The Senate at least has the honesty to use the word ‘recess’ and while the image of United States Senators running around, playing tag and eating gooey peanut butter and jelly sandwiches is funny, it pales next to the unintentional comedy of the ‘Summer District Work Period’.

While our legislative branch spends the month of August roaming the countryside, those fine, upstanding maniacs in the executive branch will be busy trying to find some way to justify continued fighting in Iraq.  I do not envy them their task.  This war has been lost for a while now and finding some way to keep it going long enough to see Bush the Younger safely out of office is becoming increasingly difficult.  The old routine of lying and saying that up is down and black is white has almost become inoperable and the money is going to run out at the end of September.

Sometime between now and then Robert Gates, the Eagle Scout from Kansas who just happens to be the Secretary of Defense, is going to sit down in front of Congress and tell the world all about the war in Iraq.  In broad strokes there are two things he can say.  One is the administration line and it goes something like this, “It’s been tough, but we’ve reformed our ways and now that we’re seeing progress this would be the worst possible time to pull the plug.”  The other is what opponents of the war have been saying for four years and it sounds like this, “American military involvement in Iraq has been a catastrophic failure, and at this point withdrawal is the least bad option.”

I don’t expect him to say either one of those things.  (For all we know he might barely say anything and just continue being the quiet man in the room.)  His report on the war will be something between those two extremes, how close he is to one or the other will, at most, help determine the speed of our inevitable retreat from that nightmarish land.  Ostensibly his much anticipated report is about the war, but in reality, like everything in the District these days, it is about President George W. Bush.

Robert Gates’ real job is to succeed where James Baker failed: he has to find a way to end the war that is acceptable to Bush the Younger.  Bush basically scoffed at the political lifeline his father’s friend threw him last December; but whether he wants one or not there is going to be a political reckoning about the Iraq War before he can scamper away from 1600.  Too many people are dying to just wait until the 2008 election can settle things and right now Robert Gates is the only man with the credibility to bridge the gap between the Capitol and the White House.  He alone is in position to create a political space where the anti-war crowd can be appeased by knowing that the war will end while the President can maintain what little remains of his dignity.

Losing a war is probably the hardest thing for a leader, any leader, to swallow.  For one thing losing wars is a very good way to get thrown from power, either by force of arms or peaceful political embarrassment.  On top of that there is the ultimate punishment for men with such vast egos: the eternal humiliation of being lumped in with history’s dimwits and losers.  A hundred years from now people may or may not remember Clinton’s presidency or Reagan’s, but they will definitely remember Johnson and Nixon.  Those are the two that lost a war.  Nixon even had to resign because he couldn’t abdicate in the normal flow of elections like Johnson.

Bush is in very real jeopardy of going down like they did, reviled and disgraced for all time.  Worse yet, of the two, his situation is far more like Nixon’s.  There is no election this fall to save Bush from presiding over the end of this war; something is going to have to be done this year.  The Democrats in Congress cannot go back to their constituents next fall and simply say, “Well, we forced a few vetoes.”  Similarly, Republicans in Congress do not want to be in a position in 2008 where they have to say, “I was for the war before I was against it.”  One way or another, this is Mr. Bush’s war.  He has to deal with it or face the possibility of being expelled from office like the man from Whittier.

Which brings us back to Robert Gates and his impending date with the United States Congress.  At his confirmation hearings at the beginning of the year Gates was lauded for being honest and not really wanting this deeply unpleasant job.  He was as different from his predecessor as two old, rich, white, Republican guys can possibly be.  Since then he has kept an amazingly low profile, especially when you consider that we have not one but two wars ongoing.  When his name does turn up in the newspaper it’s often in connection with some shockingly rational ideas like closing the Guantanamo prison and actually speaking with other countries before we start bombing them.  But he has stayed as mum as possible about the war between the rivers.

People who know Congress better than I do seem to think that the man to watch is the Republican Senator from Virginia, John Warner.  Warner certainly has Gates’ phone number, and when the Secretary goes in front of the cameras his presentation will hold no surprises for those Senators with an R next to their names.  The question is, how many people will go for it?  If Warner and a few other key Senators turn decisively from the President and back a compromise that funds the war in the short term but ends it in the long term it could find enough backing to pass.

Of course, the Administration might just figure that playing hardball has gotten them this far, so why stop now?  If that’s the case then Mr. Gates will head up the Hill and say that we’ve seen enough progress to justify continuation of this, ahem, new strategy we started back in January.  He’ll have a slew of well cooked numbers to back him up and if the sales job is really effective we might, maybe, see another extension like the one back in May.  But even that depressing scenario, which is about as much of a total victory as the Administration can hope for, will put us right back in the same situation a few months down the road.  Only when the money runs out that time, Robert Gates’ credibility will have been spent.

If last May is anything to go by the Pentagon can keep the war going for six to eight weeks beyond any fiscal deadline by stealing money from other parts of their budget, so there is some flexibility in the schedule.  But it is inconceivable that Congress will keep funding this war piecemeal every few months through November of next year.  This is one of the big reasons why obsessing over the presidential candidates already is especially pointless.  There is a huge political earthquake coming, a child could see it, and the landscape is going to be very different before anyone in New Hampshire casts a vote.  I don’t know how it’s going to shake out, but I do know that we’re too far from the next election to just keep putting it off.

Gambling? Sports? Say It Ain’t So

“Chief Wiggum could you hand me that little black book?” – Moe the Bartender

“Oh, sure thing Moe, I was just using it as a coaster.” – Chief Wiggum

Of the four big sports stories last week, three of them were, ahem, scandals and one was merely considered outrageous.  Barry Bonds is the outrageous one, but I’ve written about him already and I don’t particularly care whether or not he breaks Hank Aaron’s record.  Of the three scandals, the Michael Vick saga will get the most press for the next few months as we approach the trial date (in the middle of the season no less).  The Tour de France will fade the fastest and will probably not merit much American press coverage until it starts up again next summer.  (At which time the dominant storylines will be about who is and isn’t using banned performance enhancers and, I suspect, a few very loud teams and individuals proclaiming themselves purer than the driven snow before finishing dismally.)  But it is the Tim Donaghy story that will be with us the longest, albeit in mostly inconsequential ways.

Though all the facts aren’t in (Donaghy isn’t even in custody yet), we can say a few things with pretty high confidence.  Donaghy is done as an NBA referee, that goes almost without saying.  He’s fired for cause, either for betting directly on NBA games or for simply passing information about games he was going to be officiating.  Even the latter is enough for termination according to David Stern’s press conference last week.  He and a couple of bookies he’s known since childhood are going to be indicted and all of them are in very deep trouble.

I am a casual fan of the NBA and while the specifics of this story are unpleasant it won’t have much of an effect on how I follow the Association.  Officiating in the NBA comes in for a lot of criticism, much of it justified.  (The obvious joke here is that since the officiating is so bad to begin with, how can anyone tell if it’s fixed?)  That one of the referees has been revealed as having acted dishonestly feeds the general sense of unhappiness with the officiating.  That’s understandable, but I don’t think this is all that big a deal as far as the integrity of the game is concerned.

The number of teeth gnashing articles that came out right after the story broke was over the top.  Unless the NBA finds another ref or two with unexplained assets (and they’d be fools not to vet every single last one of them), this story doesn’t really mean much beyond the fact that Tim Donaghy is a greedy moron with shady friends.  NBA fans prone to heckling the officials have gotten themselves a big, fat early Christmas present, but other than that not much is going on here.

ESPN.com has helpfully assembled logs of all the games Donaghy officiated in 2005-06 and 2006-07.  By my count he called eight playoff games in that span, three last year and five this year.  (Was he a ref on the way up, I wonder?)  Only one of those games clinched a series (Game 6 of the Nets/Raptors this spring), and that was in the first round in the East.  You need to be pretty far into Butterfly Effect land before you can think this pipsqueak altered the outcome of the playoffs.

Even if he was consciously favoring one team over another in a playoff series, which I haven’t yet seen him accused of, how much of an impact could he really have had?  Game 3 of the Spurs/Suns series from this spring has gotten a lot of attention, but even in that game the officiating seems to have been more atrocious than sinister.  The people with the most legitimate gripe against this guy are the ones who bet the under on games where Donaghy was deliberately pushing up the score to cover the over/under line.  Those people have a right to be pissed off, the rest of us are just spectators.

Justin Wolfers, an economics professor at the University of Pennsylvania, has data that strongly suggests that large numbers (~1%) of NCAA basketball games have points shaved to cheat the spread.  Long story short, don’t bet on favorites of more than twelve points.  (He’s got a page with links to his press clippings, right at the top is a New York Times article with a succinct rundown of his position.)  To me this should be a far larger story than anything Tim Donaghy is accused of.  It appears to be widespread, systemic, and enduring.  Donaghy is none of those things; he’s just sensational and stupid.

Sporting events have universally unknown outcomes, that’s why we can gamble on them.  (And why betting on whether or not Harry Potter or Tony Soprano live or die is inherently flawed).  Our sense of sport, and the wagers that invariably follow, are predicated on the idea that the competitions are as close to fair as humanly possible.  When something comes along that calls that fairness into question we throw a media fit and the scolding begins.  At the professional level there’s more money to be made in honesty than dishonesty (Donaghy threw away a $260,000 a year job), but there will always be people with access of some kind who will choose to make a buck the quick way.  Official protestations of zero tolerance aside, the level of corruption we have in sports seems acceptably low.

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