{"id":74872,"date":"2014-08-04T14:00:53","date_gmt":"2014-08-04T18:00:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=74872"},"modified":"2014-08-04T16:36:07","modified_gmt":"2014-08-04T20:36:07","slug":"bad-call","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/08\/04\/bad-call\/","title":{"rendered":"Bad Call"},"content":{"rendered":"

The growing redundancy of sports commentary.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"James_Boyd_microphones_2\"<\/a>

Photo via Wikimedia Commons<\/p><\/div>\n

\n

You\u2019re gonna have to learn your clich\u00e9s. You\u2019re gonna have to study them, you\u2019re gonna have to know them. They\u2019re your friends. Write this down: \u2018We gotta play it one day at a time.\u2019
\u2014Bull Durham<\/em><\/p>\n

They smelled the jugular.
\u2014Sportscaster Chris Berman, during the 2002 NFL playoffs<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In 1945, George Orwell\u2019s \u201cThe Sporting Spirit\u201d appeared in the leftist weekly Tribune<\/em>. The essay argued that large-scale athletic competition, rather than creating a \u201chealthy rivalry\u201d between opponents, is more likely to rouse humanity\u2019s \u201csavage passions.\u201d Thus: \u201cThere cannot be much doubt that the whole thing is bound up with the rise of nationalism\u2014that is, with the lunatic modern habit of identifying oneself with large power units and seeing everything in terms of competitive prestige.\u201d<\/p>\n

To a contemporary reader, Orwell\u2019s assessment of the \u201csporting spirit\u201d may feel exaggerated, if not slightly paranoid. Then again, in an age of rampant merchandising, zealous fandom feels more pervasive than ever. Not long ago, riding the subway, I saw an infant with a San Francisco 49ers pacifier; in the same car, there was a man wearing an Ohio State football sweater bearing the laconic slogan, \u201cFuck Michigan.\u201d What Orwell might have thought of such displays of allegiance is anyone\u2019s guess.<\/p>\n

But what he would find troublesome is sports culture\u2019s continued abasement of the English language. Professional sports jargon has become so vacuous that TV interviews with athletes are increasingly farcical\u2014and tremendously boring. An interview with LeBron James, after a botched play at the end of a quarter:<\/p>\n

\n

INTERVIEWER<\/small>: Lebron, what happened with you and Norris on that inbounds pass?
JAMES<\/small>: We didn\u2019t execute.
INTERVIEWER<\/small>: You were talking to him as you guys walked off the floor. What did you say?
JAMES<\/small>: That we need to execute better.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Perhaps such vagueness is intentional: if LeBron James had, in fact, just told his teammate that if he makes the same mistake again he\u2019s going to rip his face off, he\u2019d be disinclined to share it with a national audience. For similar reasons, a coach interviewed at halftime isn\u2019t going to be too forthcoming when asked to reveal his strategy for the remainder of the game: \u201cWell, Chris, we\u2019ve just gotta keep pressuring their quarterback and not make any unnecessary mistakes.\u201d <\/p>\n

David Foster Wallace puts forth a more cerebral take on this trend in his essay \u201cHow Tracy Austin Broke My Heart.\u201d Wallace was fascinated by pro athletes\u2014they could \u201cexecute\u201d under insane pressure and, asked afterward how they did it, would resort to clich\u00e9s:<\/p>\n

\n

How can great athletes shut off the Iago-like voice of the self? How can they bypass the head and simply and superbly act? How, at the critical moment, can they invoke for themselves a clich\u00e9 as trite as \u201cOne ball at a time\u201d or \u201cGotta concentrate here,\u201d and mean<\/em> it, and then do<\/em> it? Maybe it\u2019s because, for top athletes, clich\u00e9s present themselves not as trite but simply as true, or perhaps not even as declarative expressions with qualities like depth or triteness or falsehood or truth but as simple imperatives that are either useful or not \u2026 Those who receive and act out the gift of athletic genius must, perforce, be blind and dumb about it\u2014and not because blindness and dumbness are the price of the gift, but because they are its essence.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It\u2019s a seductive idea, but ultimately unconvincing. Suggesting that blindness and dumbness are the \u201cessence\u201d of their genius is to ignore that pro athletes hardly hold a monopoly on inarticulateness\u2014theirs just gets a disproportionate amount of media coverage. Most of us are sadly inept when it comes to self-expression. And if, as Wallace suggests, spectators are the only ones able to articulate athletic genius, why is it that TV commentators, who should be the most well-informed and passionate spectators of all, are responsible for the most mundane platitudes in professional sports?<\/p>\n

If you, like me, spend an irrational amount of your fleeting time on Earth watching huge men brutalize each other in hi-def, you\u2019ll know what I\u2019m talking about: \u201cIt\u2019s hard to overstate what this win means for this organization\u201d; \u201cHe\u2019s got tremendous basketball IQ\u201d; \u201cYou can feel the momentum swinging\u201d; \u201cThey\u2019re a real Cinderella story\u201d; \u201cThey\u2019ve got that championship swagger\u201d; \u201cThey stepped up and made plays\u201d; \u201cThese guys have to keep their continuity\u201d; \u201cHe makes his presence known on the field.\u201d Et cetera. The silliness of these stock phrases becomes more apparent in a nontelevised context. The next time you get into a heated sports debate, try describing your favorite athlete as \u201can absolute specimen with great physicality.\u201d For maximum effect, keep a serious expression and maintain eye contact.<\/p>\n

In fairness to the Marv Alberts of the world, sportscasting requires live commentary on the same activity, night after night, season after season. How realistic is it to expect linguistic ingenuity? Criticizing a sportscaster\u2019s lack of originality might be as obnoxious (and pointless) as lamenting the uninspired prose of the user manual that came with your new toaster.<\/p>\n

Which makes me wish I could ignore the current trend in redundancy that has seemingly infected every foot- and basketball announcer on TV. These commentators have developed a verbal tic that compels them to remind the viewer, constantly, which sport is being discussed. Basketball players with consistent jump shots are no longer just good shooters\u2014they\u2019re \u201cgood at shooting the basketball<\/em>\u201d; astute quarterbacks are commended for calling out \u201cexcellent football<\/em> plays.\u201d<\/p>\n

If you\u2019ve been exposed to this verbosity for long enough, it no longer sounds bizarre. To the uninitiated ear, though, it\u2019s hard to ignore. I was watching a football game with a friend when the commentator announced that \u201cthis offense loves to run the football.\u201d My friend: \u201cWhy don\u2019t they just say \u2018run the ball\u2019? What other kind of ball is it going to be?\u201d<\/p>\n

Conversely, a new shorthand has oozed its way into the parlance of professional and college basketball: centers and taller forwards are now referred to as \u201cbigs,\u201d while a team that prevents their opponent from scoring on a possession has made a \u201cstop.\u201d After a losing effort, coaches and players will now offer this Neanderthal explanation: \u201cWe really needed to get more stops, but their bigs really stepped up and made plays. That cost us the basketball game.\u201d<\/p>\n

After a prolonged TV spectacle like college football\u2019s Bowl Week (whose contests last year included the Buffalo Wild Wings Bowl and the Taxslayer.com Bowl, the latter being only a slight improvement on the all-time most absurd Galleryfurniture.com Bowl), watching English Premiership matches or Six Nations rugby on BBC feels like a cultural upgrade. There\u2019s less advertising. There\u2019s less analysis of bullshit statistics (\u201cHeaded into this matchup, the Kentucky Wildcats are 11-3 in games played within four days of their coach\u2019s annual colonoscopy\u201d). And, on British television, the commentators\u2019 linguistic repertoires don\u2019t feel as inhibited; there\u2019s more room for an occasional flourish. Why can\u2019t we have a color analyst like Ray Hudson, who, in his exuberance, will announce that we\u2019ve just witnessed \u201ca Bernini sculpture of a goal,\u201d or claim that watching Lionel Messi \u201csoftens the hard corners of our lives\u201d?<\/p>\n

Surely the hollow phrasings of play-by-play announcers aren\u2019t comparable to instances where bad language is truly malevolent, as when despots employ euphemism to conceal mass murder. The latter is a concern of Orwell\u2019s most famous essay, \u201cPolitics and the English Language,\u201d where he argues that much political speech and writing has become a \u201cdefense of the indefensible.\u201d But he also insists that the decay of language can be combatted, and that it is necessary to do so, since \u201cbad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better.\u201d If this fight against banal language isn\u2019t to be confined to the political sphere, then we\u2019d be well advised to choose our words with care, even, and perhaps especially, when we\u2019re discussing harmless distractions.<\/p>\n

Fritz Huber is an editorial assistant at\u00a0<\/em>Outside Magazine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The growing redundancy of sports commentary. You\u2019re gonna have to learn your clich\u00e9s. You\u2019re gonna have to study them, you\u2019re gonna have to know them. They\u2019re your friends. Write this down: \u2018We gotta play it one day at a time.\u2019\u2014Bull Durham They smelled the jugular.\u2014Sportscaster Chris Berman, during the 2002 NFL playoffs In 1945, George […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":733,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[931],"tags":[8082,382,14668,14841,212,1132,12983,687,14843,14842,85,14840],"class_list":["post-74872","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-sports","tag-athletes","tag-basketball","tag-cliches","tag-commentators","tag-football","tag-interviews","tag-jargon","tag-language","tag-professional-athletes","tag-redundancy","tag-sports","tag-sportscasters"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nBad Call<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Fritz Huber on the growing redundancy of sports commentary.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/08\/04\/bad-call\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Bad Call by Fritz Huber\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"August 4, 2014 \u2013 The growing redundancy of sports commentary. 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