NBC showed Olympic drama — ESPN would’ve shown the sports
The sigh of relief from sports fans when the Olympics ended last Sunday night was so pronounced I’m surprised it didn’t register on the Richter scale. It’s not that they minded the Olympics. To the average sports fans, four years is just about the right interval to catch up on a little water polo or see who’s big in hammer throwing.
By the time the Olympics ended, though, almost all moderate-to-serious sports fans were salivating to click back to ESPN, whose nightly “SportsCenter” in particular covers sports the way the Lord intended.
Highlight, highlight, highlight. Bang, bang, bang. In 30 minutes, you’ve got the whole sports day, and if that feels like too long, ESPN distills it again into a twominute top 10.
There’s no way around it: ESPN defines television sports these days the way Coke defines cola, iPod defines personal music devices and the Cyclone defines Coney Island.
The weirdest thing for sports fans during the Olympics was not watching NBC, even at those moments when NBC made you want to gnaw off your right hand.
The weirdest thing was watching the Olympics reports on “SportsCenter.”
The hosts were reporting Olympics results, of course, but since NBC had exclusive rights to the film footage, ESPN couldn’t show any of it. All ESPN could do was post a still picture and describe what happened.
This is not how ESPN rolls. The whole deal with ESPN, and a big part of the reason the ESPN brand has encased the sports world like amber, is that ESPN almost always has the action.
You get to a segment of “SportsCenter” and within seconds you’re seeing live footage of whatever the anchor is discussing, often moments after it happened.
That’s no accident. ESPN has a monster room with dozens and dozens of TV monitors. At each monitor an ESPN employee is leaning forward to comb through video and flag critical plays or interesting oddities.
The result: For what feels like 90% of its stories, ESPN delivers quick, punchy video of the drama the host is discussing.
What ESPN is really doing here is applying the same principle to television sports that a man named Bill Drake applied years ago when he shaped modern top-40 radio.
“Play the hits,” said Drake. “Play ’em over and over.”
It’s a strategy that drives all-day listeners, and some deejays, crazy. But Drake realized most listeners aren’t tuned in all day. They tune in for 20 minutes here, 20 minutes there, and when they do, they want the day’s top hits.
A sports fan who has 20 minutes for “SportsCenter” wants the sports day’s top hits.
That doesn’t mean sports fans think ESPN is perfect. These are sports fans, dude. They will argue about the right way for the foam to drip down the side of a Samuel Adams mug.
ESPN gets slapped for loving its own cleverness a little too much, for its endless self-promotion and sometimes for what it leaves in or out.
Or just for being the biggest kid on the block, because someone always wants to take on the biggest kid.
At day’s end, though, all those sports fans are there. Flip on “SportsCenter” at 11 and in 30 minutes you’ve got your day and night in sports, with great catches and key home runs and end zone tightroping and slam dunks. Okay, way too many slam dunks. So many slam dunks they’ve made pro basketball almost unwatchable. But that’s another discussion.
You want to know NBC’s biggest problem with sports fans during the Olympics? ESPN. Because NBC wasn’t covering the Olympics the ESPN way. Take the Gabby Douglas moment. In the individual women’s all-around gymnastics final, Douglas had finished her routine and held the lead. But Russian Viktoria Komova still had one routine left, and if she got a certain score on that routine, she would have passed Douglas and taken the gold medal.
NBC commentators had several times specified what score Komova needed. She finished her routine and we all waited.
But when the score was announced, NBC never told us what it was. It only showed us Douglas’ and Komova’s faces, which made it clear Komova had not gotten the score she needed.
Why? Because, as NBC had stressed repeatedly, it wasn’t covering the Olympics as sporting events. It was covering “stories,” and with the gymnastics final NBC decided shots of two teenage girls’ faces — one beaming, one weeping — was a better “story.”
Now you could also make a compelling case that it was also inexcusably sloppy reporting. Someone couldn’t have found two seconds to tell us the score? How exactly would that have detracted from the “story”?
Still, given NBC’s broader premise, you see why the network took the approach it did. NBC would also argue, not without merit, that your average televised gymnastics event would draw, what, maybe 3 million viewers. Because this is the Olympics, it drew more than 30 million. So most viewers were not hard-core sports fans. As with the Super Bowl, they were there for the event. The story.
However anyone feels about hammering NBC, though, and Olympics watchers are hardly the first ones to join that game in recent years, this controversy simply reinforces the larger point about television sports, which is that it has become ESPN’s world.
The rest of us just borrow the field.