Not too long ago, ESPN promoted some upcoming anniversary, which has since passed. It doesn't really matter which anniversary ESPN promoted -- there's probably another one next month -- except it did have something to do with SportsCenter. As the gist had it, ESPN grew around its highlights show.
This certainly is news for anyone who first fixed eyes on ESPN trying to make sense of Australian Rules Football or wondering how Vern Gagne's Minneapolis-based American Wrestling Alliance would fare on the national stage provided by the cable network. Though SportsCenter could be entertaining in the days before Chris Berman began imitating himself, the network's credibility really began with its delectable presentation of college basketball, which prospered from the level playing field implicit in more television for everyone.
In the beginning, then, ESPN gave people not simply all sports all the time, but sports that viewers couldn't access anywhere else in quantity. Pro wrestling is off the network now, but that's not exactly progress. Rather than sports entertainment like pro wrestling, ESPN has introduced us in the past year to entertainment programming with sports content. It's not a very good trade.
ESPN has risen in little more than 20 years from upstart to a major player in the athletic business, particularly since Capital Cities bought the network and paired it with ABC. ESPN functions, essentially, as ABC's sports division with a lucrative shadow life on cable. The entire conglomeration is now owned by Disney.
While CBS, NBC and FOX were killing themselves for contracts with the major sports, ESPN just picked up the cable scraps from everyone and now holds rights to broadcast every kind of a game, as well as lengthy studio shows.
As ESPN groped toward legitimacy, it attempted to preserve its quirky roots in obscure sports by launching ESPN2 and packing it with extreme sports for a younger generation. But the beast of the sports business is just too big. Aside from the occasional X-Games, ESPN2 is almost entirely concerned now with the major sports -- though it's added bowling. Meanwhile, ESPN has launched ESPNews to record the second hand presence of big time sports, as well as ESPN Classic to observe its history.
While one wants to regurgitate whenever an ESPN hand crows that E, S, P and N are the four most important letters in sports, it's hard to deny their dominance. This past summer, CNNSI, the main competition as a national sports cable network, went dark. Meanwhile, FOX SportsNet, under the auspices of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., cancelled its national sports report.
FOX went into sports cable with meaty ambitions and a sensible plan. It set up several regional operations to purchase television rights for local teams and produce full-length local highlights shows. The local shows would feed National Sports Report, featuring Keith Olberman and Chris Myers, who had distinguished themselves at ESPN.
But the national show lagged, as did several regional shows, so FOX killed its national show and several regionals. It looked like a retreat for a while, until digital cable came along and enlarged the television universe by about 400 channels. Some digital packages now allow the consumer to watch not one but four regional FOX SportsNet channels, which alternate programming from more than a dozen regions in which FOX has been successful.
That means you might, more than you'd like, stumble onto The Best Damn Sports Show on Television, which might really be "The Worst Damn Show of Any Kind." Rather than compete against ESPN with a national sports report, FOX decided to take the worst elements of SportsCenter -- the self-important clowning of the anchors and the deification of the athlete -- and use them as the premises of a competing show in which the deified athletes are brought on the set to clown. The whole point of the show seems to be waiting for the athlete to finish talking so the studio audience can hoot and holler.
But if FOX doesn't give you a very picturesque big window, it gives you lots of little windows to little scenes that take you with detail the more you look at them. Each of its regional reports gives you the sports news as one town sees it, and you remember for a minute that people in Detroit care passionately about the Tigers. FOX can even cash in on its regional heft, including its local games on premium television packages for which fans pay hundreds of dollars.
FOX's real contribution, though, takes the viewer from regional news past the national picture and all the way out to the rest of the world. FOX SportsWorld shows you a whole different set of sports, highly competitive and brutally contested. Here is where you'll find your Australian Rules Football, your rugby from New Zealand and Gaelic games like hurling and Irish football, which are basically the same game, except that one is played with a stick.
The foundation for FOX SportsWorld is soccer, since it's the most popular game in the world. If you're really stumped about why Americans are so little interested in soccer, FOX SportsWorld will show you. Never before has so much energetic soccer been available to Americans on television. Outside the World Cup every four years, soccer used to go away.
Not so long ago, one followed soccer by finding newsstands that carry foreign publications and soccer magazines. Now you can watch games from the best European and South American leagues on television, you can tutor yourself on the Internet and you can see what all the fuss is about.
There's not a lot to be gained from watching something done poorly until you've seen it done well. Then you understand the difference. Of course, you don't really care to watch Major League Soccer after watching the English Premier League, which is such a wild competition that some Brits believe their teams are too burned out for the concurrent European club championships -- the Champions League and the UEFA Cup.
While FOX SportsNet shows a good number of soccer games from France, Italy, Spain, Germany, Scotland, Ireland, Brazil and Argentina, its emphasis is England. In addition to several games per week from the Barclaycard Premiership, the network's highlight show for that league is actually gripping, especially if you don't already know the results.
Because each show highlights about five games in an hour, they don't simply show goals and spectacular saves. That would take only about 15 seconds. Rather, each game is allowed to ebb and flow, so the viewer sees not simply a compendium of nifty moments but a condensed version of the game itself.
Even if you watch an entire game -- which takes less than two hours -- the Premier League action is unpredictable because of the remarkable skills we don't otherwise see. You don't see a lot of players there trying to blast a 30-yard shot past a sharp goaltender. Some teams, particularly Leeds, move the ball beautifully in the offensive end, and some players, like Arsenal's Thierry Henry and West Ham's Paulo Di Cania, can work for their own shots against close marking in the style of a great NBA scorer.
The real object of the game is to work the ball toward the goalmouth, where anything can happen. Once that many skilled players are fighting in front of the goal, every goal becomes a random event, just like every save. That's part of the "angst" factor in soccer, the recognition that teams need skill and preparation just to have a chance, while they can never leave nothing to chance.
While the Premiership and other major European leagues are about one-third through the regular season, the major international club competitions also are taking place. Every autumn, the top teams from the top European Leagues are assigned to the Champions League, with the next rung of teams going to the UEFA Cup. Think about the relationship between the NCAA Tournament and the NIT. The big difference is that half the teams being eliminated from the Champions League now are being sent to the UEFA Cup, and so most of the best teams now are fighting for two entirely different championships, not counting the domestic cups soon to be coming around to the top levels.
The result is lots of meaningful games, even for last-place teams fighting against relegation. And, because of low scoring, the games usually are close.
With winter coming to America, we're faced with basketball and hockey seasons that mean next to nothing in advance of the playoffs. And need we say more about the Bengals? As Sam Wyche might have once put it, there's soccer to be played.
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