If you’ve ever been the designated driver at a particularly rowdy party, you know the feeling generated by all the live coverage that followed Michael Jordan’s latest miracle.
You watch the cigars burning and the champagne flowing–much of it onto the fancy garb of TV sports guys–in the victors’ locker room in Utah and you think, This species needs to figure out a more dignified mode of celebration.
You see all the fans back home, courtesy of countless live local-news shots, making indiscriminate whooping noises and feeding the customary cliches into reporters’ microphones, and you congratulate yourself for having the good sense to not be among the throng.
Post-championship celebrations ask that people put into words things that are essentially physical and emotional: playing for a championship and rooting for one. And as a result, they are almost always disappointing as television events.
Sunday, after the Bulls clinched their sixth and probably last championship of the decade, was no exception. After hearing Michael Jordan and Phil Jackson speak and getting a sense that the city was not in flames, there was not much left to be said.
The inevitable disspiritedness did not stop, of course, at least seven of the city’s TV outlets from going live with the fanfare Sunday night after the game was carried on NBC (WMAQ-Ch. 5): WMAQ, WBBM-Ch. 2, WLS-Ch. 7, WGN-Ch. 9, WFLD-Ch. 32, Fox Sports Chicago and CLTV.
You would think after six of these things that the TV stations would be polished and confident in their approaches, enough so that they would try something different. And then you see that the live cameras are at Michael Jordan’s Restaurant and at Clark and Division Streets, locations as familiar and original as a Dennis Rodman tattoo.
You see virtually no prepared stories ready to go, and you wonder if this Bulls victory could have taken news directors by surprise or if “live” as a news value has so utterly trumped the thoughtful, well-written piece. The one exception in my frantic channel-flipping–and there may have been more that I just missed–was Phil Walters’ neat, if too short, essay for WMAQ on the history of Bulls’ championships.
The surprisingly scattershot coverage of the frat parties in Utah and Chicago lasted from game’s end, after 9 p.m., to after midnight, when WBBM, surprisingly, was the last one to sign off.
‘BBM’s doggedness, although it had its dull moments, paid off with a shot of Jordan tossing trinkets, Mardi Gras-style, to Bulls fans gathered outside the team’s Salt Lake City hotel. His head was poking through the roof of the team bus as it pulled out for the airport, and it made for a fitting closing shot to the coverage.
Other impressions:
– In general, there was too much about the team–too many incoherent or redundant locker-room interviews–and not enough about the city. Most of the stations seemed satisfied that shots of revelers in one location, along Division Street, qualified as coverage of what was happening in Chicago. Poor Dick Kay, reporting it live for Channel 5, kept using the word “still,” as in “things are still the same here, and why do you keep coming back to me?”
An answer of sorts came later when two obscene fan signs, one about Utah’s Karl Malone, one about NBC’s Bob Costas, were clearly visible in the crowd.
Exceptions I was able to catch: WGN had a chopper in the air and carried video of an apparently looted window at a Northwest Side electronics store. And WMAQ went late to Mark Suppelsa at police headquarters for a wrapup of trouble spots. In both instances, it was a needed reminder that these celebrations aren’t all innocence. On the other end of things, WBBM and WFLD seemed to go out of their way to downplay any trouble, a WFLD staffer even opining that fans had become professional in their celebrations.
– NBC sideline reporter Ahmad Rashad earns a Yellow Heart for his battlefield performance. He didn’t venture into the Bulls’ locker room until he had zipped a rain slicker over his suit, a strategy that, as colleague Hannah Storm quickly pointed out, probably made him more of a target for players emptying bottles.
– I’m not sure yet what kind of reporter WBBM’s Lauren Cohn is, but she seems to be a fine dancer. Her reports from Jordan’s restaurant featured her grooving to the music, which seems as good a response as any to being in that utterly unimaginative location.
– We got to hear Channel 7’s Jim Rose in full petulance. Rose, apparently upset that someone else was horning in on a live interview with a player, was so upset that he forget the bigger picture, the broadcast to the folks back home. “Excuse me,” he said on air, “before the poor etiquette continues in the locker room.” It’s worse etiquette to complain about it on air.
– A technical glitch at WLS, where a commercial started prematurely, was nicely smoothed over by anchor Jim Rosenfield. Like Weigel and WLS’ Mark Giangreco in the field, WBBM’s Levine, too, did a solid job trying to bring sorely needed perspective to the evening, a sense of a magical era ending instead of just inchoate celebration occurring.
We are not soon to feel this again. Assuming the likely, that this Bulls team does split up over the summer, the city’s next best hope for more championships seems to lie with–gulp–the Cubs.
