Further Reflections on ESPN

As I said yesterday, one of the biggest problems with the new book on ESPN is that as an oral history, it is short on analysis. But one of the nice things about reading it is that you have time to come up with your own analysis. Here are some thoughts on ESPN's history:

1. Down through the years, ESPN's bread-and-butter has been its ability to put on very good technical productions of sports that are particularly popular in the red states. Everyone talks about Australian Rules Football, but what really kept the lights on at ESPN for most of the 1980s were sports like college basketball, college football, the College World Series, and NASCAR. These were all sports that were relatively unpopular in New York, and were therefore not given coverage commensurate with fan interest. By doing network-quality broadcasts of these sports, ESPN was able to expand its business and its technical skill to the point where it could get an NFL package in 1987. And that package made ESPN's fortune, because it allowed them to get a lot more money from the cable companies.

2. By the end of the 1980's, ESPN had established itself as the go-to network for hardcore sports fans, and had finally become profitable. Ever since then, ESPN has been pulled in various directions by people who wanted it to be something more than just a sports network.

3. The first and most successful of these people was John Walsh, who took over SportsCenter in the late 1980's. When he took over, ESPN was still telling the scores the way sports guys had always done on TV: you go through the whole American League, then the whole National League, and so on. Walsh had a newspaper sensibility, and he insisted that SportsCenter should be laid out like the sports section of a newspaper -- with lots of space given to the biggest stories, and lesser stories at the back. Walsh also significantly upgraded the talent level, bringing in folks like Keith Olbermann, Dan Patrick, Charlie Steiner and Peter Gammons. Finally, Walsh insisted on much higher journalistic standards. These changes were successful; by the mid-1990s, ESPN was arguably the hottest thing on TV.

4. But success brought more attention from executives higher than Walsh, and those executives were generally convinced that this or that change would really cause ESPN to become a huge part of the culture. So since the early 1990s, we have been bombarded with one change after another. There was ESPN's launch of the "Deuce," and the notion that ESPN2 would be the MTV of sports. There were the X Games, the ESPY's, original movies about Dale Earnhardt and others, and all sorts of new shows: Cold Pizza, Beg, Borrow and Deal, Dream Job, Stump the Schwab, and others. There were also the screaming sportswriters: PTI, Around the Horn, Skip Bayless, Stephen A. Smith. And there was ESPN the Magazine (meant to be the Rolling Stone of sports), and the gaggle of pot-stirrers on ESPN.com.

5. For the most part, these experiments have failed. I think most people blame these failures on the corporate culture or on specific executives within that culture. And, in fact, one can imagine an inherent tension between a corporate culture based on really good technical skills and very strict cost management and the type of creativity demanded to put on shows that are truly entertaining. But blaming ESPN's shortcomings on claims that the "suits" are too "conservative" would be a huge mistake. Most times, the "suits" were the ones pushing for more change at ESPN. Executives like Mark Shapiro (who handled programming at ESPN in the early 2000's) were passionately committed to the notion that ESPN could break out of the sports ghetto and become a major cultural player. They overruled Walsh and other old-guard types like Chris Berman who wanted to stick more closely to traditional sports coverage. And they spent a lot of money to bring their dreams to life.

6. It is possible, of course, that the executives bet on the wrong horses, and that better management would have led to more success. But I don't think so. I think the whole "sports as culture" thing is simply overblown. In a society like ours, where very few young men are given a solid grounding in the liberal arts, and where so many of us spent our youth obsessing over sports, it is not surprising that a lot of very bright guys in the late 20's and early 30's believe that sports are a key to unlock the culture -- that they be used to explain everything from America's racial history to Quinton Tarantino movies. And there is no question that some efforts in this regard have been successful: Chariots of Fire, Rocky, and Fever Pitch are just a few examples of how first-class artists can use sports to reflect on the broader culture.

7. But you can only go so far. One can play beautiful music on the banjo, but it would be ludicrous to pretend that a banjo could cover the full range of music. Similarly, sports are wonderful but very limited. If you enjoy them for what they are meant to be, and you really care about who wins or loses the games that you watch, they can entertain you forever. But if you try to make them more than that -- try to use them to understand issues better covered under history, or religion, or literature, or philosophy -- you're bound to be disappointed. The sixth game of the 1975 World Series was one of the greatest sporting events of all time, and I could watch it over and over. But viewed strictly as entertainment, it can't compare to an episode of Seinfeld, much less to great works of art.

8. I think this is why so many great sportswriters ultimately get fed up with the whole business. Damon Runyan quit writing sports. Ring Lardner quit writing sports. Paul Gallico famously wrote Farewell to Sport. And I can see why. Writing is really hard. Once you don't care who wins the Big Game, it's hard to keep forcing yourself to write about it as if you do. The media guys who do the best are the ones who just love the game as a game, and don't expect it to be anything more. Guys like Cawood Ledford and Keith Jackson never got tired of watching sports, in part because they never stopped being fans.

9. And the same thing keeps happening at ESPN. Olbermann moves on to do politics. Craig Kilborne becomes an entertainer. Mark Shapiro leaves to run Six Flags. Sports just aren't big enough to contain their ambitions. After all, no matter how much joy and passion it generates, it really is just a game. And that's all it should be.