With college basketball heating up, football playoffs coming and the Bulls suddenly a lot more competitive, it’s time to offer our high five of sports-TV beefs.
Why? Because if America can’t improve it’s sports television, then what hope is there for, say, the economy?
1. Incredible Fluctuating Focus. Nothing is more maddening than this one, and nothing seems easier to fix. When sports channels showing, say, a basketball game shrink the screen a little to allow for scores or ads or a sports-news crawl at the bottom, they invariably knock the game out of focus. Either the telecasters never watch their own games to see how they appear out in TV-land, or they just don’t care.
2. Great Balls of Lottery. This is a corollary to the focus issue. When WGN-Ch. 9 shows the freshly drawn lottery numbers during a game the station gives them almost half the screen. Thanks. I need to be able to see lottery numbers from all the way across the room with my glasses off, and I need to see them right now because there’s almost a one-in-a-million chance I might have won.
3. Bill Walton and Dick Vitale. The ultimate blowhard announcers, these gentlemen turn the fine art of television basketball analysis into an exercise in windy buffoonery. Two words for them: (a) Shut, (b) Up.
4. Lisa Guerrero on “Monday Night Football.” And people thought Dennis Miller seemed out of place at a football game. The ABC broadcast’s new sideline reporter spends most of her time giving puffy anecdotes about the players that seem to come straight from the teams’ PR departments. And, hey, want to get really drunk really fast? Down a shot every time Guerrero says someone “told me” something. Andy Rooney is sorry, Melissa Stark. Come back, please.
5. In-game close-ups. Directors love these, an attempt to “humanize” team sports like basketball. But invariably, while we’re stuck seeing the guy who just missed the three-pointer, or his coach, or the other team’s ecstatic fans, someone else on the shooter’s team is stealing the ball in the backcourt.
Close-ups are stupid.
