Hey, maybe I shouldn’t talk… Screenwriters as political pundits? Well, at least we have to understand such things as beginning, middle and end… also perhaps a soupcon of subtext or hidden agenda. In any case, the new POLIWOOD is about sportscasters as political pundits. Lionel and I trace the sad decline from the pure sports excitement of Chick Hearn, Howard Cosell, etc. to the extraordinary pomposity and grandiosity of Bob Costas (calling out George Bush at the Olympics?) and that Olbermann character. I even make a prediction about the NBA finals, which is smelling better since it was recorded earlier in the week. [Does that mean you're going to get into sportscasting?-ed. Every man a Walter Mitty.]
Et n’oublie pas: Old Poliwoods available here. And please support PJTV by subscribing here.
Olbermann will be gone by the end of the year.
The politicalization of sportscasting is frightening—and I am not saying this in a hyperbolic manner. It is a sure sign that we are gravitating toward a totalitarian society. Politics should not entire every sphere of one’s life. And if this is increasingly occurring, then we are in serious danger. We don’t have much time to turn the situation around. Corporate leaders like GE’s Jeffrey Immelt have already made their peace with fascism. They are doing their best to curry favor with government officials. Immelt has essentially told the employees of NBC and MSNBC to become fascist attack dogs. Large corporations are easily tempted by fascism. It helps them to destroy smaller competitors and protect their industries from the gales of creative destruction. A fascist economic is instinctively hostile towards technological advancement.
“Rollerball” anyone?
The politization of sports is very problematic, although I do not think we are standing on the abyss. I think that fewer people are interested in televised sports and there are few unifying events apart from the Super Bowl. What Costas did was self aggrandizing and ratings driven, even if part of a sorry trend. The Olympics were held near the end of Bush’s term in the middle of political hot season. Still I don’t think the Olympics do for television what they used to. Without Michael Phelps and the NBA players, the ratings would have been in the toilet. People do increasingly outrageous things in order to attract viewers in a very fragmented market, competing against 100 channels and video games.
Politics should not be in everything, as David says. This is a problem for the culture, because it continually works against civility, an even more necessary virtue in “post” modern times. I believe there are numerous institutional and cultural safeguards against a slip into a totalitarian society, although I would not adopt an attitude of “it could never happen here”, because human nature is what it is.
Sports has the potential to be a more unifying experience for people in the sense that sides realign (The Obama supporter and McCain supporters don’t all support the same teams). The Olympics is one occasion where Americans could come together in support of American athletes. The president of the United States is interviewed, and Bob Costas decides he needs the approval of the Olberman audience but no one else. And yet Bob Costas seems less relevant today than he used to seem, and I felt that way before the interview. Costas was the aging former ingenue trying to get a face lift.
I was talking to my brother about this. I can remember a time when politics was not an everyday topic. People lived their lives without any thought to who was president. Back then we did not feel the need to keep an eye on them at all times.
I will not watch a program that has Olberman .
A great line about Costas, made by Tim McCarver on the Charlie Rose Show with Costas sitting there– I’d rather be head-butted by Hulk Hogan than yes-butted by Bob Costas. Even fellow sportscasters think Bob is too full of himself.
Bryant Gumbel is another of the political pundit wannabes. I remember when he had a quick interview with Ronald Reagan for some sporting event in the early 80s. Reagan hadn’t declared yet whether he was going to run for a second term. The first thing Gumbel asked was”Are you going to run for a second-term” in a blatant attempt to get a scoop. I remember thinking what a jerk Gumbel was, but Reagan as usual was unperturbed and handled it well. I’ve never watched Gumbel since and am glad to see his career isn’t doing that well.
Comedians are becoming more politically influential than sportcasters. Tina Fey, Jon Stewart, Steve Colbert, and Bill Maher have all reinvented themselves as philosophical and political sages. Sportscasters becoming political is, I think, one of the minor manifestations of the entire entertainment/media/pop culture imagemaking complex merging with the political sphere and becoming largely indistingishable from it. This past year, with the massive ginning up of the financial crisis from a problem involving some tens of thousands of subprime mortgages to the collapse of the international economy, and the elevation of someone who has no expereince or achievment into a messianic cult figure and most powerful human on Earth, the power, primacy even, of this complex has become terrifying, depressingly obvious to anyone not hypnotized by it.
Cosell and the New York Daily News’ Dick Young had a major feud going on for years in the 1960s and 70s that was politically motivated — Cosell on the left, Young on the right — over Ali, his Muslim conversion and his refusal to serve in the Army during Vietnam. Howard’s politics combined with his ego and abrasiveness didn’t wear well not just out in the heartland, but even in New York (WABC anchor Roger Grimsby once introed him for the local sports segment as “And now a man who is to sports what pigeons are to statues, Howard Cosell,” and got by without any problems, so even the home market like to see Howard taken down a peg).
The irony 15 years down the line was that for all his championing of liberal causes and civil rights that angered conservative viewers, it was the reaction from the professionally-offended race hustlers in 1983 (Al Sharpton was still an apprentice hustler at this time, and didn’t get his full license until ’87) to Cosell’s Monday Night Football “Look at that little monkey run” comment about Washington’s Alvin Garrett that was the real end of his career. Didn’t matter what he had done over the previous 30 years. One remark that was un-PC to the wrong group and their liberal supporters and he might as well have been George Wallace at the schoolhouse door.
So I’m sure people like Costas, or Mitch Album, or Mike Lupica may think they’re scoring points with all the key people with their political comments in the middle of sports events or columns (the New York Daily News even gives Lupica his own politics-only columns occasionally). But no matter how many gold stars they may think they have, they’re only one un-PC slip from being personna non grata with all the people they’re trying to impress.
Thanks for a great conversation.
Do you know if there is an mp3 of Vin Sully reading a phone book? I do think I’d like a copy when he is gone, just to hear his beautiful voice. God bless him, and thank you Vin for not being a pundit.