Ideas to avoid quiet game
Opinions vary on adding crowd noise for TV and fanless venues.
David Hill, who as president and master imagineer of Fox Sports helped bring viewers the glowing hockey puck and the constant score-and-time screen graphic, says when it when it comes to sports on TV, silence is not golden.
Accordingly, if and when games resume later this year without fans in the stands because of COVID-19 social distancing requirements, Hill says TV networks might consider using recorded crowd noise on telecasts and perhaps piping noise into stadiums and arenas as well.
“I don’t see why not,” Hill said. “As for the purists who would say, ‘How dare they,’ every sitcom you’ve seen over the last 25 years has had a laugh track. The public is used to it. Did people not watch ‘Seinfeld’ because there was a laugh track?”
Hill, 73, left Fox Sports in 2015 to launch his own production company and today watches sports for enjoyment. That being said, he admits his audio suggestion “is not for the faint of heart.”
Then again, neither were such innovations as the Fox Box — “I got death threats for that one,” he said — or the other audio or video enhancements Fox added to football and baseball telecasts.
Hill is a longtime sound aficionado.
Richard Becker, a longtime audio engineer, said during his first production meeting at Fox in 1994, “David said that from now on, audio is no longer the bastard child of video.”
“For an audio guy like me, that was as sweet a mantra as you can imagine.”
Hill acknowledges added crowd sound will require a considerable suspension of disbelief for players, announcers and viewers. It also would draw flack from critics who have decried such gimmicks as adding bird sounds for golf telecasts or added noise pumped into stadiums.
But if it’s entertainment you want, Hill said, you need good audio to go with exciting video.
“You would put in applause and cheers and pipe that through the sound system, and you would add the guy playing the organ and mix it in, and if you shot it the right way and shot it tight, you wouldn’t notice that there wasn’t anybody there,” he said.
None of the major national networks that carry live sports, including NBC, CBS, Fox, Turner Sports or ESPN, would comment on Hill’s suggestion.
Some announcers, however, are willing to give it a go, including Todd Kalas and Bill Worrell, who call Astros and Rockets games, respectively, on AT&T SportsNet Southwest.
“Any crowd noise is better than no crowd noise,” Kalas said. “It’s going to be a new world whatever we end up with.”
For the play-by-play announcer, Kalas said, “Certainly a lot of enthusiasm is derived from the fans. It would be different calling a game at an empty ballpark.”
Worrell said broadcasts now use so many courtside microphones that announcers have to talk louder to be heard. Without crowds, he said, basketball fans would hear a different sort of din — dribbling, squeaking sneakers and players calling out defensive switches.
Without a crowd to add excitement, he said announcers would invariably lower their volume and, arguably, lose the urgency an announcer can impart to a close game.
“I did a lot of games in empty arenas early on, back in the days when the Rockets weren’t very good, and you could hear the ball hitting the court,” he said. “Your voice tone would be several decibels lower. It wouldn’t be as exciting.”
Jeff Van Gundy, the former Rockets coach who is an NBA game analyst for ESPN, said microphones in empty arenas likely would pick up conversations between players and coaches that might not be suitable for airplay.
“For the announcers, if we say something critical of a player, it’s got a better chance of being heard by that player,” Van Gundy said. “You (the announcer) don’t want to become part of the game.
“Everything should be on the table to give the players as good a feel as they can have for the game and to do the same for the viewers. We want to give them a good experience, too. Whatever we do, it will be a surreal experience. It won’t be normal.”
Brian Anderson, who calls basketball games for CBS and Turner and baseball for Turner and the Milwaukee Brewers, said piped-in crowd noise for live games would be no different than the crowd noise that accompanies sports video games.
“I love the idea,” he said. “When I was about to call a game without fans at the Big 12 tournament, I thought of the ‘Happy Days’ episode where Potsie was the PA announcer and Richie was at the free throw line and could hear everything he said.
“It’s not as if you don’t stand by what you say, but you don’t want to get into a player’s head.”
Astros radio play-by-play voice Robert Ford and Rockets radio announcer Craig Ackerman, however, doubt sweetened sound would fly with listeners or players.
“There’s a reason you don’t hear as many canned laugh tracks anymore,” Ford said. “They don’t sound the same, and it would be the same with crowd noise. It would be inauthentic.”
For baseball, Ford thinks listeners and viewers would prefer to hear sounds of the game that normally are drowned out in a crowded stadium.
“You could hear what a dugout sounds like,” Ford said. “I think it would be cool if somebody hits a home run and you hear the spontaneous dugout celebration.”
Ackerman said he would be OK with sound added to the broadcast but doesn’t think it would fly with players in the arena.
“At some point, I think it would become annoying.” he said. “But if it could be made to sound authentic, maybe the listener would enjoy it.”
Geoff Blum, the former major leaguer who is an Astros TV analyst, said while the broadcasters might benefit from added sound, he doubts that players would benefit.
“Players want the noise,”
Blum said. “We’re not golfers. We don’t enjoy calm. But these guys are pros. They were handle it appropriately if and when the time comes.”
Opinions of how games could be scored range from a constant background hum to an orchestrated broadcast in which the sound engineer would increase or decrease volume based on the action on the field — mild applause and cheers for a leadoff single, roars for a big home run.
If it sounds like a musical performance, it bears noting that in Becker’s job as an audio sweetener, he programmed effects for each sport on a 66-key piano keyboard to insert sounds during highlight clips.
“For football, I had keys for ambient sounds to a line scrim, to a catch, to hits, to kicks, to goalposts when the ball hit them,” he said. “We would do it on halftime highlights and game breaks.
“The concept of doing it when people see and know that the stadium is empty is increasingly difficult. It would not be difficult to create the system, but you would have to have a feel for the game. You’re a bit of a performer in such cases.
“Simple crowd noise would be the easy part. It’s a doable thing. I just don’t know how it would be received or if people would say, ‘Why are they putting in that fake crap?’ I don’t know the answer to that.”
The most notable U.S. sports event without fans was a 2015 game between the Orioles and White Sox played in the wake of riots in Baltimore following the death of a man in police custody.
The Orioles said veteran announcer Gary Thorne, who called the game for the MASN network, would not be available for comment on the game. However, in a 2015 interview with the Huffington Post, he said players tailored their behavior to the unusual circumstances.
“What I did hear though at different times was the chatter of the ballplayers to one another on their team — encouraging them from the dugout and the guy at bat, talking to them, ‘Nice defensive play,’ and somebody hollering out,” Thorne said.
“You don’t hear that in the course of a ballgame.
“The guys were cheering for one another and urging each other on. You could hear that, and I thought that was pretty good. I thought that was interesting.”