When we go to a baseball game, it’s all about the experience of it all. Eating hot dogs, foam-fingers, catching foul balls, drinking our favorite beverage and enjoying some Blue Bell ice cream. I mean, there are also some athletes down on the field trying to hit a twine-wrapped cork with a metal or wooden stick. That’s really fun too, and if they do, everyone goes crazy and cheers or yells at them.
However, with TV, that’s an entirely different story. With TV we can watch from the batter’s eyes as the pitcher shakes off a sign from the catcher, then another, and then nods in agreement. He spits on the ground, delivers the pitch, and you can see the curveball actually spin and arc. The batter swings and misses.
There is such an inherent appeal of the pitcher-versus-batter close-up on TV. It’s like baseball players were made for the camera. A pitcher seems to pose just long enough for a camera or high-tech TV lens to capture the droplets of sweat dripping from the pitcher’s nose. Then it’s time for a commercial.
Television hasn’t done a lot regarding baseball, other than making it more up close and personal. However, other sports have changed significantly. The game of football, for example, is full of color, cheerleaders and players dancing and showing off in the end-zone (professionally that is). All of which you might miss without television. So where do the funny or annoying TV timeouts come in? What about those instant replays we love to watch? How about the changing of golf’s match play to stroke play? The answer is simple. Whether we love the changes or not, all of these are a result of television.
TV has changed the sports we love in a variety of ways. In some cases, TV has actually helped to create these very sports.
In the 2010 Winter Olympic Games, Canadian figure skater Joannie Rochette completed an almost perfect short program. This was done two days after her mother died from a heart attack. She eventually went on to win the bronze medal. In 1996, Kerri Strug guaranteed the United States a Gold medal in gymnastics over the Russian team by scoring a 9.712 on her second vault. As many remember however, this was done on an ankle that then required medical treatment for third-degree lateral sprain and tendon damage. And certainly, but not least, how can anyone forget the infamous Tonya Harding vs Nancy Kerrigan skating rivalry? How about when Brett Favre threw four touchdowns, 399 yards and achieved a passer rating of 154.9 in a Monday Night football game one day after his father passed away?
All of these absolutely incredible sports stories are just that if we know or feel like we know the players. That’s where television comes in. Through the sheer magic of TV, the powerful close-ups, the heart-wrenching commentaries and commercials, we are afforded that opportunity. Everyone needs Morgan Freeman’s famous tear-jerking mini-profiles of our Olympic athletes for VISA in 2008. We all need to know that after Kerri Strug’s first vault, she leaned over and asked her coach, Bela Karolyi, “Do we need this?” And he told her, “Kerri, we need you to go one more time. We need you one more time for the gold”. The medium of TV provided us that insight into the lives, and even into the minds of these athletes and their families which made sports just as much about their personalities as it was about the scores they achieved.
Before we began televising sports, if you wanted to see a game, you had to go in person. Now, we are presented a choice. Do we (the fans) want to drive to a game or just stay at home, eat a frozen pizza and watch the top teams from around the world on TV. The sport that was hit hardest by this TV trend were minor league baseball teams. Why would we watch a struggling local AAA team when we could watch our favorite MLB team? This was also true of college football fans. These same viewers picking from a broader palette of games meant that viewers could concentrate on the top tier college teams. The question then became, would you rather sit in the stadium watching your local junior college team, or watch Texas A&M versus LSU game on TV? And college teams aren’t just competing for fans. They’re also going one-on-one for future recruits. All of the conferences that get bowl games usually also get the best talent. It’s one of the hardest sells for recruiters today. If you were a top high school athlete, would you go to a smaller tier or local junior college, or would you rather sign with a SEC, Big 12, Big 10, or PAC 10 team knowing you will be seen by millions at-home and around the country?
Another example is that before the implementations of TV, tennis balls were white, the NHL centerline was solid, and most team uniforms were almost fairly equivalently drab. But those white tennis balls were hard to see, and so was that solid NHL centerline. Seriously, who really wants to see the old Cleveland Browns uniform up close (except hard core Browns fans)? Color looked fantastic on TV, so color became the new norm. Thank you, TV. Television coverage allowed colors to explode not only on the playing fields, courts and ice, but also from the stands. What do you think of when you see the Raiders Nation or the crazy Lambeau Field’s cheeseheads? TV allowed the athletes and fans both, to be viewed close-up and personal. The result was that these athletes and their fans became the characters in the event that’s was as much of the story as it was sport. This included not just adding literal color to the sport, but figurative color, too. How about the end-zone dances or ferocious slam dunks both developed in direct response to the nightly news highlight reel?
- It sped up the action.
- It increased scoring.
- It ensured competitive balance to keep outcomes uncertain.
- It maximized dramatic moments.
- It provided commercial breaks.
Sports not only look different now due to these enormous TV contracts all-powerful close-ups, but TV has also changed the rules of sport and the games we love. For example, because of TV, golf went from match play to stroke play to ensure that the big-name golfers ended up in the final stages. Why? Because that’s when most people watched TV. In the 1970s, tennis introduced the tiebreak rule to replace long and boring deuce games. The NFL first cut down halftime lengths to help games manage their 2.5-hour time slot. Then they reversed this and totally moved the opposite direction. TV timeouts initially drove the average length of a NFL game to 2 hours and 57 minutes. As a result of increased commercials, by 1990 this had increased to 3 hours and 11 minutes. Jay Coakley, a well published author, stated in his game-changing book, “Sport in Society,” five objectives of rule changes in commercialized sports that he believes TV truly had an impact on sports:
I would agree it’s pretty easy to see how television’s impacted sports just from this list alone! What do you think?
As a military guy, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that the very first instant replay was of the winning touchdown in a 1963 college football game between Army and Navy. But that’s just about how people view the game but what’s really more controversial and perhaps has more impact on games themselves is the use of replay by officials. Sure, we can all see the quarterback’s arm in super-slow motion from just about every conceivable angle that exist and can definitively tell whether his arm had started its forward progress when the ball popped out. But why should we? I think we would all agree, that in this era of instant replay technology, there are fewer bad calls that affect the outcomes of games (minus the New Orleans Saints playoff game last season. Sorry Saints fans!). But the old-school theory was that bad calls were just part of the sport. How many times have you heard “That’s just the way the ball bounces”?
Finally, and probably one of the most definitive indications of how televisions’ relationship with sports has impacted it and changed it is reflected in how much interest has been generated as a result of the two relationships. When television began growing into its major role in sports, the presidents, owners and managers of these sports had two primary concerns: 1. that fans would literally stop coming to the games, resulting in empty stadium seats, and 2. that people would simply prefer to watch sports rather than playing them, resulting in increased fatter and unhealthy American kids. This has simply not been true. While we are a nation whose children seem to be a little heavier these days, it’s not sports television’s fault. There are numerous research results that clearly show that interest in sports is actually enhanced by watching great athletes perform. Young people also report wanting to imitate and follow their heroes in sports on the playground. The results are that rather than people just sitting stagnate in front of their TV’s, the increase in television coverage of sports has actually inspired more people to participate themselves. The end result is that, television can itself have a critical role in developing and creating the future of the great sports it broadcasts.
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