IN 1994, just after a team of NBA All-Stars preened, taunted and bullied their way to a gold medal at the World Championships in Toronto, Keith Jackson, speaking to a newspaper reporter, tore into the American team.
Jackson said he was embarrassed by the team’s unsportsmanlike conduct, that the team’s boorish, loutish behavior reflected poorly on both its sport and the country. Jackson said he was too disgusted by the team’s comportment to take any pride in its victory.
Jackson’s take on the matter was strong, significant and, as far as many people were concerned, indisputable. He was dead-on.
And yet his words struck me as sadly ironic.
Jackson, from his perch as ABC’s longtime TV voice of college football – the nation’s voice of college football – had watched his game grow lousy with the very same demonstrations of incivility seen during basketball’s World Championships. He had many opportunities to voice his displeasure during those football telecasts he worked, but he rarely said a word.
In fact, this past Friday, the UCLA-Wisconsin Rose Bowl game he called was fraught with showboating and taunting. Virtually every play-ending whistle signaled the start to some demonstration of excessive immodesty or street-macho. Yet Jackson didn’t offer a word of condemnation, not for the players or the coaches who indulged such behavior in the name of sport.
Tonight, at age 70, Jackson works his final telecast for ABC. After the Fiesta Bowl, he’ll retire.
I always liked Jackson’s presence on college football telecasts. For 26 years, I enjoyed his voice and his countrified affectations.
And, while I much enjoyed Jackson’s presence, I grew disenchanted with his work.
To know that he abhorred the self-absorbed, barbaric behavior that was being performed on the field below him, to know that he was disgusted by this behavior as it grew to the point where it would become standardized, was comforting. But that he didn’t speak up was frustrating.
Given the national forum that was his, given that he, more than anyone else, could’ve done the most to change college football bad to college football good, he chose to remain silent, to see but speak no evil. He chose not to embarrass those who so richly deserved to be embarrassed.
He’s not alone. John Madden regularly indulges acts that he dislikes. Sometimes on the air he’ll even tell TV audiences that he enjoys immodest acts that he actually dislikes. Imagine if John Madden, starting 20 years ago, had regularly condemned the check-me-out acts and actors in NFL games.
You don’t think he could’ve made a difference? I do. The same way Keith Jackson could’ve made a difference.
Every time I see a video clip of a high school, college or pro football player preening in the end zone, or standing over a fallen opponent and posturing in self-glory, or a brawl or near-brawl erupts as a result of such behavior, I wonder what could’ve been had Jackson, Madden and so many others damned this stuff from the start.
No, Jackson’s not alone, and there are more on the way.
I’ll miss Keith Jackson, but I’ll always wonder what might’ve been had he applied his convictions to his microphone, a microphone connected to the entire country.
Then again, maybe it’s me. Maybe I expect too much out of TV and TV people. *IF WE’RE to measure the value of football analysts by the amount of light they shed on the games they work, Boomer Esiason’s rookie year was disappointing. Case in point:
Saturday, with 3:50 left in the Bills-Dolphins telecast, ABC posted a graphic that showed Miami to be eight-of-13 on third downs. Esiason grew excited.
“Look at that third-down conversion rate – terrific!,” he exclaimed.
Given that Miami, at that point, had scored only 17 points, Esiason would’ve provided more enlightenment had he said, “Look at that third down conversion rate – irrelevant!” *PETTY, Stupid TV Tricks: Fox, within its tone-cue inserts on yesterday’s Packers-Niners telecast, gave the kickoff times for this week’s AFC playoff games, games that will appear on CBS. But for the NFC games – games that will appear on Fox – Fox lied by a half-hour so that viewers might be sucked into its pre-game show. To hell with good-faith treatment of the public, to hell with fair play, to hell with honest advertising. And for the 20 people that such garbage might fool, Fox sacrifices its integrity. *
JOE Theismann, during ABC’s Cards-Cowboys Saturday, spent as much time telling audiences that he was going to tell them what just happened as he did telling them what just happened.
NFL ref-bashing has become gratuitous. There was no conclusive evidence Saturday that the officials blew the “no TD” call on Buffalo’s Andre Reed. Judicious use of a replay rule would not have reversed the call. And if officials are out to “get” the Bills, as some have suggested, how do we explain the two calls against the Dolphins that kept the Bills’ drive alive long enough for the Reed play to occur?
CBS’s Phil Simms, as he demonstrated during yesterday’s Pats-Jags telecast, remains one of the few network analysts working any sport who uses replays to amend or correct his initial analysis. Most, in credibility-killing denial, stick to their original stories, regardless of what replays may reveal.
Suckers sometimes do get a break. After all, the Larry Holmes-George Foreman bout, at 40 bucks per-view, has been cancelled … . The Reds, baseball’s oldest major-league team, this season, for the first time since its games began to be televised, will not appear in Cincinnati on over-the-air TV. All games have been moved to cable. *
CABLEVISION, owner of the Knicks, recently hiked subscriber fees to its area cable systems. So whatever money Cablevision might lose via the NBA lockout should be more than made up by Cablevision’s cable customers. And local cable subscribers are still paying for lost Knick and Net games on Cablevision-owned MSG/FSNY.
Funny, before Cablevision owned MSG Network, it claimed that MSG programming was so expensive that it was forced to raise cable rates. Now that it owns MSG, the loss of expensive MSG programming not only doesn’t cause cable rates to go down, they go up! But monopolies are funny like that.
