Agony and ecstasy
"Have you had to do a lot of [dramatic pause] soul-searching? Have you [another emotional pause] questioned your ability? Have you doubted yourself in the last while? I don't mean that in a negative sense.”
No, this wasn't Sean Whelan asking the deep questions of a battered and bruised Brian Cowen in Brussels, nor was it Aine Lawlor getting sensitive with that sweetie, Micheal Martin. If it's real soul-searching journalism you seek, look not in the media's Lisbon Treaty “fall-out” shelter (from which, by the way, left-wing analysts are barred), but check out the sports reports.
“Have you had to do a lot of [dramatic pause] soul-searching? Have you [another emotional pause] questioned your ability? Have you doubted yourself in the last while? I don't mean that in a negative sense.”
No, this wasn't Sean Whelan asking the deep questions of a battered and bruised Brian Cowen in Brussels, nor was it Aine Lawlor getting sensitive with that sweetie, Micheal Martin. If it's real soul-searching journalism you seek, look not in the media's Lisbon Treaty “fall-out” shelter (from which, by the way, left-wing analysts are barred), but check out the sports reports.
The above-quoted cascade of psychological probing could be heard on Morning Ireland, and came flowing, uninterrupted, from the lips of rugby correspondent Michael Corcoran. He was asking Peter Stringer about his recent spell left on the sidelines for the Irish and Munster teams. Corcoran's last, half-apologetic sentence, absurd though it sounded after what came before it – really, how could his questions imply anything other than negativity? – gave Stringer the opening to answer in well-rehearsed, unrevealing jock-speak. But Corcoran diced with emotional danger, and he was correct to sense that sometimes sports-talk demands it.
Sports reportage can obviously drown you in pseudo-science. Even when discussing loose-structured games like rugby and soccer, statistical analysis has risen inexorably in the last decade or two, approaching levels previously reserved for cricket and, god help us, American sports.
Right through Euro 2008, viewers were being distracted not just by the now-venerable “possession” statistics, but new ones about passes completed, to go beside the trendy “distance covered” stats for individual players.
But all those numbers are arguably just there to give “manly” cover, and something to talk about, to the fellas whose real attraction to games is emotional. After all, what made the Champions League final so compelling? (Hint: it wasn't the quality of the football.) Will we remember John Terry's distance covered or his tears on Avram Grant's shoulder? Cristiano Ronaldo's passing percentage or his lying on the grass pounding the earth in trauma and relief?
When I was a child in New Jersey, no Saturday afternoon was complete until, at 4.30 or 5pm, I turned on Channel 7 and watched a montage of sports clips, with inspiring music and the following, halting narration: “Spanning the globe to bring you the constant variety of sport… the thrill of victory… and the agony of defeat… the human drama of athletic competition… this is ABC's Wide World of Sports!”
The programme that followed was by any objective standard one of the poorest in the history of television. There would be coverage of three or four sporting events, often from justly neglected “sports” such as surfing and demolition derby – ABC paid a pittance for “rights” – and often so out-of-date that the film stock seemed to be fading already.
But what made ABC's sports coverage legendary was its attraction to, and sense of, “the human drama”, so that suddenly we cared about cliff-divers and figure-skaters, the race-driver crashing or the ski-jumper tumbling down a hill – the clip that famously accompanied the words “agony of defeat” in the opening montage.
The man who intoned those opening words, and then sat in a New York studio linking the various events with avuncular bemusement, was Jim McKay, who died in June. McKay was and is most famous for fronting ABC's coverage of the 1972 Olympics, sitting tight for 14 hours to bring news of the carnage at Munich's airport when the Israeli athletes were slaughtered. (“They're all gone.”) But he's also memorable for his week-in, week-out donkey work persuading ABC audiences that the human drama of rodeo, curling and, saints preserve us, soccer might be worth a few minutes of their attention.
McKay was remembered recently on NewsTalk's superlative Off The Ball programme, with the great US sportswriter Frank Deford on-air to pay him tribute. Much as I love Off The Ball, hearing the chat about McKay got me thinking. The genius (if that's not too strong a word) of McKay was that he was a general interest journalist/broadcaster who came late into sports coverage and was alert to ways of widening its “human interest” appeal.
The genius (not too strong a word) of Off The Ball is that it's full of absolute sports fanatics, who (barely) clothe their anorak knowledge in a veil of smartarse-ery. They're funny, self-deprecating, pop-culturally literate, but listeners who don't already care a lot about sports are bound to need simultaneous translation.
The Off The Ball guys would be way too smart to ask an awkward, emotional question like Corcoran's to Stringer: they know they're going to get jock-speak anyway, so why strain? When drawly Ken Early, my favourite sports-talker bar none, interviewed Damien Duff recently, he dragged a few banalities out of the player, then went back to the studio and enjoyed his mates' mockery of the interview's emptiness. (When Early previously shouted with excitement about an event in a match, the audio-clip was played for months after, as the show's collective snigger at emotional excess.)
One reason, arguably the main reason, RTE's Aprés Match brings wives, girlfriends and assorted non-fans of non-stereotypical gender around the telly is its understanding of the emotional depths hiding beneath games and game-talk (eg Liam hates Eamo), and its comic plumbing of those depths.In contrast, Off The Ball is brilliant, to be sure, but it's missing something – something that even the gently inadequate Des Cahill is likelier to deliver: the thrill of victory… and, what's more, the agony of defeat.