[Speed Gibson,
Sunday September 12, 2004 at 10:14am]
Brevity
I suppose I should have already known, but it was great to see and hear Pat Summerall in the booth once again, calling the ESPN Sunday Night game. What I always admired was his brevity, especially when paired with Tommy Brookshier those wonderful years before John Madden appeared. He seemed a little tentative at first, but quickly settled in to his old rhythms.
Summerall demonstrates that you can communicate a great deal with relatively few words, with or without the video image. Reagan had that same gift, perhaps because he, too, was an old school broadcaster? Or perhaps, facts and logic don't need quite the embellishment that speculations and non-sequiturs require.
But now we have chatterboxes in the booth, even locally, most notably Paul Allen for the Vikings, and John Gordon for the Twins. Allen is a screamer and a delusional homer. If the opponents fumble the snap, somehow it was a great defensive play by the Vikes. His constant referring to Randy Moss as "Superfreak" sounded like an older man trying vainly to be hip. I've heard many such broadcasters in my years and travels. Paul Allen is easily among the worst football announcers in the country, college or pro, for the simple reason he won't shut up.
John Gordon, to his credit, loves baseball, no question, and he does a good job telling you what happened. But it's like an episode of Showtime's "The Paper Chase" where the students tried to tell Professor Kingsfield that one of his staff was losing it. Kingsfield attended his next lecture, which was flawless. "What's wrong with that?" demanded Kingsfield. "He gave the same exact lecture last Friday," replied one of the students.
John isn't losing it but he gives out the same information 2 or 3 times each inning. Where a more terse announcer might say, "Runner holds ... low, ball three, full count", John will say something like "the pitcher checks first base, sets and delivers, and here's the pitch ... low, out of the strike zone, for ball three. That makes it 3 balls and 2 strikes, a full count for the batter." I half expect him to also tell us that the catcher threw the ball back to the pitcher. Before this season is over, I think I'll record an inning or two and tabulate the redundancies.
What these announcers forget is that radio should allow us to picture the event. If they're constantly talking, it's hard to get our imaginations in play.
***
p.s. Another great time-waster are "audio highlights" - now part of every sports' post-game show. Is there anything sillier?
Summerall demonstrates that you can communicate a great deal with relatively few words, with or without the video image. Reagan had that same gift, perhaps because he, too, was an old school broadcaster? Or perhaps, facts and logic don't need quite the embellishment that speculations and non-sequiturs require.
But now we have chatterboxes in the booth, even locally, most notably Paul Allen for the Vikings, and John Gordon for the Twins. Allen is a screamer and a delusional homer. If the opponents fumble the snap, somehow it was a great defensive play by the Vikes. His constant referring to Randy Moss as "Superfreak" sounded like an older man trying vainly to be hip. I've heard many such broadcasters in my years and travels. Paul Allen is easily among the worst football announcers in the country, college or pro, for the simple reason he won't shut up.
John Gordon, to his credit, loves baseball, no question, and he does a good job telling you what happened. But it's like an episode of Showtime's "The Paper Chase" where the students tried to tell Professor Kingsfield that one of his staff was losing it. Kingsfield attended his next lecture, which was flawless. "What's wrong with that?" demanded Kingsfield. "He gave the same exact lecture last Friday," replied one of the students.
John isn't losing it but he gives out the same information 2 or 3 times each inning. Where a more terse announcer might say, "Runner holds ... low, ball three, full count", John will say something like "the pitcher checks first base, sets and delivers, and here's the pitch ... low, out of the strike zone, for ball three. That makes it 3 balls and 2 strikes, a full count for the batter." I half expect him to also tell us that the catcher threw the ball back to the pitcher. Before this season is over, I think I'll record an inning or two and tabulate the redundancies.
What these announcers forget is that radio should allow us to picture the event. If they're constantly talking, it's hard to get our imaginations in play.
***
p.s. Another great time-waster are "audio highlights" - now part of every sports' post-game show. Is there anything sillier?