They Shoot, They Bore

Several years ago, the online magazine Salon.com reprinted Vin Scully’s call of the ninth inning of Sandy Koufax’s 1965 perfect game. “Twenty-nine thousand people and a million butterflies,” was the headline, borrowed from Scully’s description of the attendance that evening.

To read the transcript now is not only to rediscover Scully’s ability to call a game as a kind of omniscient narrator (“A lot of people in the ballpark now are starting to see the pitches with their hearts,” he said that night, as Koufax closed in on perfection), but also how unintelligible and out-of-touch today’s broadcasters are by comparison.

Put their words to paper and what you get, to borrow a line from Mel Brooks’ “Blazing Saddles,” is authentic frontier gibberish. During the UCLA-Cincinnati NCAA tournament basketball game, for instance, CBS commentator Bill Raftery referred to Bruin point guard Ryan Walcott’s “ability and strength to go at the numbers and complete the sequence.” (Walcott had just made a layup.) Meanwhile, on radio, UCLA play-by-play man Chris Roberts--who has a curious habit of calling games in the future tense, as in, “He’ll throw it on that far wing”--evidently spotted Walcott holding up his fingers, prompting this call: “Walcott says, ‘Let’s run the five-play, gentlemen.’”

Walcott then jacked up a three-pointer. Ah, yes, “the five play.”

It is difficult to bemoan what has happened to sports broadcasting without sounding like an old-school crank, but here goes: The profession, corrupted by the imperatives of marketing and compromised beyond repair by the influence of all-sports channels that cover an NBA draft like a world summit, is now the province of serviceable hacks straight out of central casting.

On television, they fill carefully prescribed roles--the play-by-play man, the sideline reporter, the in-studio analyst. Like the populace of the idyllic town in “The Truman Show,” everyone is chirpy, but no one is quite real. Rather, they strive for just real enough--for salesman real, with all the emotion of dinner theater.

And so, before UCLA played Cal in the Pac-10 tournament at Staples Center last month, there was Fox Sports Net announcer Bill Macdonald nattering on about the Bruins’ freshmen class. Their role on the team, he said, was to “re-energize the energy.” I thought about this phrase: Re-energize the energy. Was it possible, given that I had failed a science class in college, that Macdonald knew something about the molecular structure of Pac-10 basketball that I didn’t?

But no, I had only caught Macdonald’s goof because I had pad and pen out--because, in short, I was listening to his voice. I was trolling the dial, on the lookout for sportscaster gibberish, circa 2002. And what I concluded is this: You’re not supposed to be listening too closely to what these people are saying.

Oh, sure, they want you to hear them, but only for verbal cues--as in, please don’t turn the channel because something utterly thrilling is about to happen. Now that TV has exploded the demand for talent, the game’s true narrators are all technical--the cameras, the informational graphics, the instant Internet poll questions, and the sports ticker crawls that keep shrinking my screen, as if I’m suddenly watching the game through the wrong end of binoculars.

For the sports junkie, these aren’t necessarily unwelcome distractions. But the onslaught has juiced up the viewing experience, leaving behind a human connection to the game. It’s all hype, or mostly hype. The announcer? He’s just some guy trying to keep up with the action.

Citing that dynamic, novelist David Shields likens the current breed of sportscasters to a man constantly running to catch a bus. As a result, “their language has no rhythm or meaning or pace or coherence,” says Shields, who has written several works of nonfiction, including “Black Planet: Facing Race During an NBA Season.”

By way of comparison, Shields recalled the 1987 Chicago Cubs game called by comedian Bill Murray. Murray was filling in that day for the late Harry Carey, who at the time was recovering from a stroke.

“Is this that terrible Foley up again?” Murray asked as Montreal Expos infielder Tom Foley came to the plate. “Hey, Foley! Foley! Strike out, Foley! I hate everything you stand for!”

Murray’s performance, exaggerated as it might have been, exposed the phoniness with which most broadcasters approach a game. You don’t have to be quick-witted to be original (although it helps), you just have to be willing to break character, to risk losing the viewer. Dennis Miller didn’t pan out as a commentator on ABC’s “Monday Night Football,” but the instinct to put him in the booth was correct: If a civilian was watching, what non-sportscaster things would he say?

Of course, losing the viewer is not a risk anyone is willing to take, particularly with all the options available and with ratings on the decline for most sports. In this climate, the advertiser always comes first.

Because that is the real game, after all. As televised sports have grown in importance as a means to grab coveted male viewers, companies have increasingly superimposed their agendas on the field of play.

For no contextual reason, ABC anchored its coverage of last year’s college football Bowl Champion Series from California Adventure, providing a running infomercial for parent company Disney’s theme park division.

On basketball broadcasts, advertising has become so pervasive I almost don’t notice now when CBS or NBC or Fox Sports Net or ESPN uses the five seconds between free throws to promote network product. But I did notice what a pleasure it was to watch hockey games during this year’s Winter Olympics, because all the commercial stoppages that often rob sports of its flow were mercifully absent.

That was a rare example of the game coming before the salesmanship, with NBC adhering to international rules that only 15 seconds elapse between face-offs. Normally, the hype imperative wins out.

Fox Sports Net, for example, covered this year’s Pac-10 tournament at Staples Center as if it were a political convention. On-site hosts and sideline reporters babbled on about an event that was a mere precursor to March Madness. In this chicken-and-egg equation, the tournament was less for the players than for Fox, which ran countless promos for “The Best Damned Sports Show Period,” a comedy-sports highlight show that, Fox hopes, will lure guys over from ESPN’s “Sports-Center,” the clubhouse of choice for the male sports fan.

The Fox show borrows liberally from sports talk radio, searching for the day’s hot topics and inventing them when none exists. It is difficult to watch, and it lacks the rage of the radio call-in shows, which have actually risen up to fill a void--providing those fans who obsess over box scores an emotional release and counterpoint to the happy blather of home-team-boosting announcers.

This was nowhere more true than during the latest UCLA college basketball season, broadcast on KXTA-AM (1150). The games, as called by Roberts and color man Bob Myers, were stock affairs, described with genial bias. It was possible, in fact, to listen to the entire season and not know that anything was amiss--unless you stayed tuned to the “Bruin Talk” post-game show, hosted by Steve Carbone, when a torrent of angry callers regularly demanded that UCLA Coach Steve Lavin be fired for the team’s inconsistent play.

The groundswell was so persistent that it didn’t even matter after a while who was right. Mostly, it was fascinating for its sheer expression of outrage. Regardless, I wondered how Lavin was handling it. This was a perspective the broadcasters, with their backstage access to the team, never offered. I also wondered what Roberts and Myers thought--again, perspective the two (who are employed by KXTA, subject to the approval of UCLA’s athletic department) don’t usually let seep into their broadcasts, which seem sanitized for the coach’s and university’s protection.

In the end, the voices that break through the clutter do so because they offer something of themselves. Roberts and Myers have to observe a level of decorum, but must they remain so “Truman Show” chirpy?

By contrast, talk radio hosts Joe McDonnell and Doug Krikorian, whose “The McDonnell-Douglas Show” is heard from 3 to 7 p.m. weekdays on KSPN-AM (1110), have put in hard time in stadium clubs and press rooms, and they have the confidence to veer entertainingly off-topic. On television, the few personalities bucking the system include Charles Barkley, the former NBA bad boy who does refreshing in-studio commentary on cable’s TNT; and Bill Walton, whose hyperbolic analysis on Clippers games can give you a reason to keep watching an otherwise sleepy mid-November game.

And what about play-by-play? In Los Angeles, we’re lucky, because the local triumvirate--Scully, the Lakers’ Chick Hearn and the Kings’ Bob Miller--remains.

Well, sort of. Miller still does the hockey games but only on TV. Hearn, sidelined this season by two major surgeries, is due back April 9. At 85, Hearn may confuse player names, but he’s such an original that the word salad blends into his overall charm. Besides, Hearn tells you when the Lakers look horrible.

Baseball returns this week and with it Scully, who has been behind the microphone for the Dodgers since 1950. As the culture of the team changes, Scully remains a constant, calling games as if reciting one of Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales” to a lecture hall full of English majors, the game a convenient but not entirely necessary ingredient in his narrative.

Scully no longer does radio--not exclusively, anyway. Fans get him on KXTA for the first two innings, but on a simulcast with one of the Dodgers TV outlets (this season, Fox Sports Net will televise 80 games and KCOP 50).

This is a shame for those of us who listen on the radio not for the game, but for Scully’s telling of it. If baseball is still a radio game, the Dodgers are a television team--owned by Fox parent News Corp., which has little incentive to boost the team’s ratings on radio because it doesn’t own the station. (KXTA is part of the Clear Channel Station group. Next year, the team jumps to Infinity-owned KFWB.)

Understanding Scully’s iconic status, the Dodgers have every reason to want to keep him close to the Dodger brand, and television gives Scully room to pick his spots. In fact, he has often compared doing a game on radio with painting a large, blank canvas, whereas TV presents the imagery fully formed.

But people who grew up with the more intimate version of Scully--in the car, under the pillow at night, on the transistor radio at the game--have had to adjust to a new reality in recent years. For his part, Scully doesn’t openly lament the technological incursions.

“For the sedentary person, for the person who is so interested that he or she locks on the TV set, that [serves] a great purpose,” he says, with his usual equanimity.

There are advantages, to be sure, to experiencing things on TV: If that Koufax perfect game were on the air today, we’d see an instant replay of each strike, and countless camera angles would heighten the tension. The obligatory excess would come after the game: player reaction, expert studio analysis and highlights of what we’d just seen.

On the radio in 1965, Scully remained silent for more than half a minute after Koufax fanned his last batter. What he’d witnessed, he knew, needed time to be savored and digested. Plus, he says, he’s always loved the sound of the crowd. Would that the people currently providing the pictures trusted us so implicitly.

Paul Brownfield is a Times staff writer.