The Art of Covering Sports: American Dispatch Number 2
The news came like a steel-capped boot to the testicles on a cold and rainy Chicago night. Dan Patrick is leaving ESPN, the face of an institution moving into the abyss of free agency and the unknown. The gun has sounded. An era has ended. The finality of the full stop.
The name Dan Patrick probably doesn’t mean all that much to the Australian sports fan. If pro football, American hoops or Big League baseball aren’t your scenes, well, there is a good chance you are more familiar with the Big Wigs of the Weimar Republic or the political leanings of Colonel Sanders or the local Texaco in Farmington, New Mexico. But he is one of the best, an icon among sportscasters and a star in his own right.
ESPN, today, is a multi-billion dollar global corporate entity. The company revolutionized television, spawning not only a wild labyrinth of descendants and imitators but a new form of sports reporting focused on more than just scores. Quality became the name of the game. News items, features, niche programming. ESPN became not only a place to watch sports but it became the place to watch sports. ESPN and their presentation was as much the story as the sporting contest being played out or the highlights package showed. They took the quality of print journalism and moved it to television. Without ESPN, the world of sport may be a six minute update at the close of the nightly news and the occasional live game. The horror of such a scene is more terrifying than a hangover in Death Valley…the jackals, the pain, the heat, the nausea.
The man who became the face and the voice of the network was a major force in propelling ESPN into the stratosphere. Dan Patrick- along with Chris Berman, the Rex Hunt of American sports – came to personify ESPN. In his early days, Patrick was teamed with another iconic broadcaster in Keith Olbermann and they turned sports news from a pre-hash of tomorrow morning’s newspapers into something truly worth watching. With clever writing, witty turns of phrase and a genuine understanding of sports and what viewers tuned in for, Sportscenter, under the care of Patrick, turned ESPN from another news provider into an institution on par with Saturday Night Live. It was a different take on sports reporting and it worked. Quality reporting infused with emotion and clever language and a healthy dose of the amusing. And that is before even mentioning Patrick’s involvement in the shingles-induced hysterics of the fabled Sportscenter commercials…
After calling Sportscenter “a young man’s game”, Patrick eased out of the face role and focused more on the voice. The Dan Patrick Show was born and the most brilliant sports radio show had began. It offered insight, humour and depth with the information flowing like the Potomac and the integrity of the reporting as steadfast as a cigar store Indian. The live crosses to Samir Patel (CHECK), Dan’s favourite speller, at the 2006 National Spelling Bee and the subsequent devastation at his defeat will go down in history as one of the great comedic moments of radio. It showed some originality, some balls to take his piece of the sports media world in a different direction. It was absurd but a deeper analysis shows that it came to personify the pioneer approach to sports reporting Patrick took.
“Samir Patel is out…eremacausius got him…it’s all over…little Samir is out…the champion from Colleyville, Texas, the inspiration, will have to wait another year.”
In Australia, there is no Dan Patrick. In both print and on air, sportscasters in Australia do not even compete in the same league as him. Sports reporting in Australia is as stale as it is mediocre. Creativity and insight are sacrificed for populism and staidness. There is very little bite and even less thought. It is, for the most part, churned out drivel hacked out by talentless fools or spewed out by air heads. The terms thought provoking, talented, entertaining and original rarely come to mind when considering sports coverage in Australia. This isn’t some sort of perverted inferiority complex. It is fact. Who among the smorgasbord of sporting media types in Australia is much watch or must see?
There are, of course, exceptions. There nearly always is. In television, Richie Benaud is still a delight to listen too on a scorching summer’s day. Dennis Commetti and Tim Lane are two brilliant callers of Australian Rules Football. The unbridled and genuine enthusiasm for rugby league of Matthew Johns makes him a pleasure to listen too. In print, Paul Kent and Roy Masters are the only rugby league writers worth a job. Robert Craddock and Mike Coward are always interesting in cricket season and Max Presnell is as enjoyable to read as the late, great Bill Casey. Warren Ryan is a great rugby league analyst on ABC radio while that station does not have a weak link in their cricket coverage. Kerry O’Keefe is the closest we have to Dan Patrick…witty, informative, entertaining, original.
But that is about it. There may be an AFL writer or two missing but on the whole, the above is the definitive list of people worth watching or listening too. They are the only people who can provide some insightful sporting analysis and some entertaining or thought provoking commentary. And the unfortunate part…all their decent words and thoughts are lost in the quagmire of the low rent gossip of Rebecca Wilson and Danny Weidler, the mind bending bandwagon regurgitation of Ray Chesterton, the bitter “the game isn’t the same as it was in my day” analysis of Robert Walls and Ian Chappell, the thoughtless hyperbolic bluster of Ray Warren and Ray Hadley and the wasteland that is titled “sports journalism” on major websites such as Fox Sports. The sift is sometimes too difficult, the search for good writing or insightful commentary as onerous as finding moral uprightness in the Australian Labor Party.
What happened, O Lord, what happened? Where did it all go wrong? Did we take a wrong turn? Did the pigfuckers take the stones of the Australian sports media collective in the middle of the night and stomp them like crazed sex fiends?
Perhaps it is the dearth of diversification in media ownership. Maybe we have just been fed mediocrity for so long that we have just grown to accept it like a Pentridge patron surely digs his baked bean slop on toast. It is possible that all the great talent has fled the Australian shores like a swarm of locusts on the feed. Perhaps those with something to say are just never given a chance, those signing the cheques crippled with fear that those with something to say will cause nothing but inconvenience and unnecessary trouble. There is a distinct chance that only bums, fools, addicts, the infirm, the mentally retarded, the jaded and the lazy are attracted to a career in the sports media. Most in the sports media are poorly read, fundamentally incapacitated by their lack of drive and ambition and tend to think comfort is the name of the game. That is a generalization, a harsh one at that, but it is more truth than fiction.
I don’t understand it. Old Captain Punt just knows that each turn of the sports pages is more depressing and infuriating than the last and that each sports broadcast tends to inspire little but stomach ulcers. All we can do is hope. Hope like hell that a saviour is out there, somebody with something to say and an ability to say it, who will descend like a prophet and make us all sit up, take notice and read or listen. Somebody who will change the face, the style and the depth of sports coverage in Australia. At the moment, hope is all we have.
These are depressing times and the humid air is closing fast. Faster than we all think. Even during the nineties, when the rabid moralists and Nazi thought police were riding high, there wasn’t this much negativity in sports. They have us by the Titleists and the squeeze is well and truly on.