TALK STUPE
On sport TV, words don't always mean just what they say
A
H, TO sleep, perchance to miss it all.
During the first half of Sunday’s Niners-Jets game, a large graphic appeared to promote the halftime show that would include, “Steelers Host Winless Broncos.”
Winless Broncos? The Broncos were 0-1. Half the NFL’s teams were winless!
No matter, play-by-play man Brandon Gaudin dutifully parroted the “winless” graphic for our further enlightenment.
At the start of the GiantsBears game, CBS scrolled a bunch of distracting stats giving both teams’ offensive and defensive percentages and ranks. The “when accumulated” went unaddressed, but if these were last season’s numbers they were irrelevant and if they were this season’s they were, off just one game, also irrelevant.
In the first quarter, CBS play-by-play man, Ian Eagle, perhaps stuck for something — anything — to say, said the Giants’ defense “has been in its nickel throughout.” The game was just over three minutes long.
It’s wall-to-wall. Late Sunday afternoon, the statheaded host of the NFL’s gambling-centric Red Zone channel, Scott Hanson, stated that the Falcons, up 15 over the Cowboys midway through the fourth quarter, had a 98 percent win probability. That soon dipped to zero percent.
The USGA, over the weekend, did everything in its power to wreck its premier event, the U.S. Open.
In repeated — as in dozens of times — frame splits that relegated live major golf on NBC to distant stick figures in indiscernible activities, three-fifths of the screen was devoted to commercials.
What made this particularly astonishing was that many of the commercials/ promos seen in those dominant boxes were for the USGA! Don’t watch the USGA’s Open, watch repeated promos for the USGA!
And the commentary, especially that spoken by cliché-dependent NBC host
Dan Hicks, was insulting. He repeatedly said this was the first Open cut missed by Tiger Woods since 2006, citing his father’s death at the time for the reason.
But such a maudlin treatment was terribly misleading. Woods, golf’s most privileged, took an entire month off after his father passed — evidence, as per groveling TV announcers, that no one loved their father as much as Woods loved his.
How many of us are allowed such leave from work after the passing of a loved one? An itinerant pro, Jay Delsing, played in the Open and played in other events shortly after his father’s death in order to try to keep making a living — a story widely ignored.
And the say-anything filler was enough to stuff a year’s supply of prison meat loafs. As contender Harris English prepared to play the 18th hole during Round 2, Gary Koch, who relies on vacant commentary, said, “It all starts with a tee shot.” To think he has the right to remain silent.
NBC’s Stanley Cup final “coverage” continues to beg both the impossible and senseless from viewers. Along the top it has scrolled the running time of players’ shifts on the ice. Who cares enough to cease watching the game to study for such needless info? And during the Stanley Cup final, no less!
And will someone at Fox, please — please! — at last tell or convince MLB analyst John Smoltz to take off a pitch or two. Whatever good stuff he has to add is lost after the first inning of his say-something sense of duty after every bloody pitch!
Sanctuary!