FRIDAY, just before midnight, as Andy Roddick grew closer to defeating Ivan Ljubicic in four sets, USA Network threw up a graphic that ticked down the seconds to Roddick’s 21st birthday, which we were told – over and over and over – was Saturday.
It seemed highly unlikely that similar attention would have been paid to Ljubicic’s birthday, but Ljubicic, while he played some brilliant tennis, is not an American. Far worse, while he’s not a bad-looking fellow, he’s not particularly hunky.
Shortly after midnight, seconds after Roddick had won, USA’s roving reporter, Michael Barkann, stood beside Roddick, gave him a familiar, “Hey, man,” then wished him happy birthday. Still, that wasn’t enough. With his USA microphone attached to the public address system at the National Tennis Center, Barkann encouraged the crowd to sing “Happy Birthday.”
While these made for inappropriate moments – is Barkann a reporter or Chuckee Cheese? – they weren’t nearly as inappropriate as they were lame. And yet, given what the U.S. Open has become and how tennis is now packaged and sold to American audiences, they seemed to fit.
The U.S. Open annually seems to have less to do with the sport of tennis than it does with boobs, dudes and attitudes. Surely, many of the younger, more attractive female players could wear more modest, less revealing clothing while playing. But they wouldn’t dare.
It’s as if strategists from Fox Sports Net, MTV, Nike, Coors, Seventeen Magazine and Playboy have combined to produce an extravaganza that’s only loosely predicated on tennis – and, of course, designed to attract an audience that’s mostly young, mostly shallow and otherwise has little-to-no interest in tennis.
The NFL’s opening night pre-game show Thursday on ABC will include performances by Britney Spears, Mary J. Blige and Aerosmith. The Jets-Redskins game that follows begins at 9 p.m. and will end after Jets and Redskins fans are asleep, but that’s OK; the football’s not all that important.
Last season’s halftimes from NBA and NFL postseason games were designed, not for fans of basketball or football, but for fans of rock and rap. Low-brow comedians are now standardized acts within Sunday afternoon NFL pre-game shows, and strip-tease artists are hired as sideline reporters. MLB backstops carry Viagra ads and lottery tickets are now decorated with NBA logos.
ESPN now has a prime-time show that’s scripted to include nudity and vulgar language. ESPN warns that it’s for mature audiences – and explains it as an attempt “to appeal to younger and more casual sports fans.”
The Golf Channel recently announced that it will air a reality show to “attract people who don’t normally watch golf.”
These are desperately desperate times. Everyone’s working off a copy of the same plan, one that has determined that our sports can no longer stand alone as sports, so they must be something else, in addition. Pre-existing sports fans of all ages, of course, are still welcomed, but they’re no longer considered terribly important.
*
Jim Kaat says more in one sentence than most analysts say in an hour. Friday from Boston on Ch. 2 the Yanks took a 2-0 lead in the first off Derek Lowe, who was so clearly spot-pitching himself into trouble. “He pitched the first as if he had scouting report-itis,” said Kaat. Beautiful.
MSG’s “Angles,” tonight at 10:30, is devoted to extreme religionists among NFL players. We’re still waiting to see the player who goes to one knee, bows his head, then points to the sky – after fumbling.
Sunday, after ABC took a shot of two vintage bi-planes flying above the PGA event from Massachusetts, analyst Ian Baker-Finch said of the pilots, “They probably play with persimmon drivers, too.”
Do pro athletes have an inflated sense of entitlement? Well, David Wells, who reneged on a handshake deal with the Diamondbacks to take more money from the Yanks, now feels as if he’s getting a raw deal from the Yanks.
*
Last college football season was a disturbing one for post-game riots that began with the field being stormed and the goalposts being torn down before the mobs hit the streets. There were four such riots on just one Saturday.
Additionally, the act of tearing down the goalposts has, in recent years, become a gratuitous inter-activity, one that has led to brawls, arrests and serious injuries.
But the taped open to ABC’s Oklahoma State-Nebraska telecast Saturday included the celebrated sights of college football pageantry – including footage of a mob ripping down a goalpost. Yahoo!
