The history of modern professional sports is a real Cinderella story; a genuine David-and-Goliath fight between the teams on the one hand and an apathetic public on the other foot. Every team out there gives one-hundred-and-ten-percent every time the sun shines just to prove that they’re the team to beat … and watch. And nothing has contributed to the public interest in sports more than the development of color commentary.
Really.
The original public sporting spectacle — the ancient Olympic games — didn’t have any color commentators to explain the on-field action. To attract public attention, the players had to resort to wearing their summer uniforms. This helped draw a modest crowd, but modern historians all agree that more people would have gone to see the games if Howard Cosell had provided his insights into the nuances of the competition. Unfortunately for the organizers, Cosell was about two-thousand years too young to participate.
For hundreds of years after those disastrous early games, sports were just a pastime, something to be enjoyed with friends and family and not a serious business with significant financial implications. Professional sports only really took off when newspaper journalists were assigned to report on the events.
In those simpler times, the reporters stuck to the facts; telling who competed and how well they performed. While this raised public awareness, it didn’t do much to increase public excitement. After all, how thrilled could you be by a report which said, “Harvard and Yale had a rowing contest today. Both teams rowed boats on the Charles river, but the Harvard team rowed faster than their competitors and crossed the finish line first.”
Even the first World Series held in 1903 suffered from this kind of unexciting reporting. Just listen to this actual recording of the coverage of that game; dah-dit-dit-dit dah-dah-dah dit-dah-dit dit dah-dit-dit dah dit-dit-dah dah-dit-dah-dit dit-dit-dit-dit dit-dit–dah-dah-dit-dit. Sure, it conveys the bare facts of the game but there’s no passion, no excitement. It lacks the essential quality of good color commentary; the cliché.
The invention of the sports cliché in the early 1930’s was a watershed moment in the history of sports; a real turning-point in the game so to speak. Early clichés weren’t as sophisticated as their modern counterparts. For example, if a football team was on their last down and had to cover twenty yards to the goal, the early color commentator might have said something like, “It’s the fourth down and they have to cover twenty yards to the goal.”
A more sophisticated modern commentator would say, “It’s definitely a fourth-down-and-long situation down on the field and you really want to come away with some points when you’re this close.” While the nuances of this might have been lost on the audience of an earlier age, modern fans understand this to mean that the team is on its fourth down and has to cover twenty yards to the goal.
Some people assume that sports clichés are created spontaneously by commentators when they’re on the air. Nothing could be farther from the truth. In the early days, clichés were lovingly crafted by individual sportscasters working with primitive tools in their workshops. These were handed down from sportscaster to sportscaster as heirlooms and, today, can be found for sale on eBay.
As the demand for clichés grew, cliché factories sprung up in places like New Jersey and Dallas where they created as much as twenty metric tons of clichés each season. Modern sportscasters go through extensive training so they can safely and effectively drive to the net and deliver the goods every time they’re called upon to use a cliché.
The power of the cliché is that it can make even the most mundane contest seem more interesting. Imagine a grossly mismatched basketball game; say the local Jr. High School versus the Utah Jazz. A game like that would be a foregone conclusion and before you could say “we’ve got an intriguing match-up”, the score would be as lopsided as a houseboat in a hurricane. If it weren’t for the clichés there’d be no need to keep watching, but who can turn off the TV when the commentator is saying things like, “Well they’re hitting on all cylinders and that score gives them a big cushion, but it’s theirs to lose. It ain’t over till the fat lady sings and we’ve got lots of basketball left. The Jazz could still pull it out. Stranger things have happened.”
Up to this point, the awesome power of the sports cliché has been wasted mostly on sports. Oh sure, a few managers try to invoke the competitive instinct by calling their employees teams and telling them that on any given day, any team can beat any other other team … especially if the other team is those punks down in Accounts Receivable. Still, that barely scratches the surface of the potentially useful applications for the sports cliché.
For example, what about the productions of the local high school drama department? Wouldn’t Shakespeare be more interesting (to say nothing of more understandable) with a color commentator. The betrayal scene in Julius Caesar could become a real crowd-pleaser.
“It’s Casca and Caesar on the field and both of these men have come to play. Casca has his game face on. Casca makes the first move. It’s a hit! The fans are getting their money’s worth today. Now Brutus is bringing his A game and Caesar is down! The Conspirators are running up the score and that’s it! This game is in the history books. Come back for next week’s match-up between the victorious Marc Antony and the as-yet unchallenged Cleopatra!”
With a little thought, we could find dozens of ways to apply color commentary to everyday life if we could only answer the call and blow the game wide open. Just remember that you’ll all have to help because there’s no “I” in team.
