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Missing the action NBC's tedious telecast was caught in a time warp
Latest Update: Thursday October 12, 2000 5:57 PM
I've been back from Australia for a week, which means two things: 1) I'm finally sleeping at night and staying awake during the day, after several days of ferocious jet lag, and 2) I'm half a step behind the U.S. sports scene. My calendar says mid-October, but my brain says late August. Are the White Sox done already? Is Northwestern 5-1? Did the D-backs really fire my man, Buck Showalter? Help. Might have to just shove a modem cable into my left ear and download a month's worth of CNNSI.com straight into my brain. But before I do that, one look backward. Returning home from the Games allowed me to get the skinny from friends and neighbors on NBC's coverage of the Olympics, which was the lowest-rated since the helicopter remote failed during Philippides' marathon in 490 B.C. Here's what people told me: They didn't watch. No surprise. You probably didn't watch, either. Allow me to come clean here. I love the Olympic Games. I think they remain the most unfailingly emotional sporting spectacle on the planet. For a journalist, for an athlete, for a fan. Period. In the last three years, the Games have been bludgeoned by drug and bid corruption scandals, yet they endure. Salt Lake City sold $23 million worth of tickets during the first day of sales for the 2002 Winter Games. Does this sound like a dying venture? Yet the Sydney Games went largely unwatched, by Olympic standards. NBC and TV critics listed a litany of reasons for this, among them the 15-hour time difference between Australia and New York, competition from the NFL and Major League Baseball and the lack of a "breakout" American hero. (Who is Marion Jones? Lenny Krayzelburg? The women's basketball team? The women's soccer team? Please.) Beyond that, I'll buy some of the reasoning. September Olympics are a tough sell. Kids are back in school, football is in session four or five days a week, including the NFL and colleges. And the time difference was brutal; anybody with Internet access and eyes knew results long before NBC went on the air. All of these issues contributed to NBC's bad ratings, but none of them were as responsible as the network's own prehistoric arrogance. Those of us who were in Sydney didn't get to watch NBC's coverage on a regular basis (we got Australia's Channel 7, which was wall-to-wall Aussies in Action and a taste of our own flag-waving medicine for us Yanks). However, three days before the close of the Games, I saw part of one of NBC's prime-time shows. There was some taekwondo, a little diving, some track and field. It was unwatchable, 20 minutes of action spread over five hours, with countless commercial breaks and horribly ill-timed puff pieces on athletes whose stories are already well known. (During the show that I watched, there was a looong piece by Jimmy Roberts, who is very good, on two U.S. taekwondo-ers, detailing with much violin music and overproduction a story that most people already knew about). Let me say this up front: I don't hate television. Sure, I'm a print (and Internet) journalist, and we all know that video killed the written star and marginalized all who type for a living. Big whoop. That happened ages ago. It has long been established that there's room for us in the same media universe. In fact, I like televised sports. If I'm at home on a Saturday afternoon, I buy ESPN Game Plan and watch half a dozen college football games, much to my family's consternation. I loved Howard Cosell. I get weepy when I think about John Tesh's new-age Tour de France coverage. But what NBC did with the Olympics Games was staggeringly myopic. The media world has changed dramatically in just the last decade. Look at your daily newspaper: It's a collection of charts and pull-quotes and huge photos, all designed to grab hold of your flickering attention span. Look at Sports Illustrated: Once we were strictly a literary sports magazine, now we're often as loud as talk radio, because that's the competition. Look at ESPN SportsCenter: The information comes at you like photon torpedoes for 60 minutes. The Web is another level altogether. The people who work at NBC know all of this. They produce joke-a-minute comedies like Will&Grace and breakneck dramas like Law and Order and ER. They know what the playing field is like. Yet ... yet ... they produced the Olympics as if it was 1964. Not only were the features overtly sappy and obvious, but the pacing of the telecasts was glacial. In the warp-speed media world of 2000, do they really think it's good business to show me Maurice Greene standing behind his starting blocks, preparing to run a race that took place 18 hours earlier, and then cut to a dreamy feature about him? And then a commercial? It would be idiotic to go live at 3 in the morning, but once you get on the air on tape delay, start showing things. I realize that NBC is trying to sustain a nightlong audience. You can't serve the filet mignon before the salad. But you also can't serve it at midnight. SportsCenter doesn't bury leads. It comes down to one thing: Show action. It's what television does best. It's why televised sports exist.
Sports Illustrated senior writer Tim Layden will contribute a Viewpoint every Thursday on CNNSI.com. To chip in with your two cents, click here.
The opinions expressed here are solely those of the writer.
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