IN 2008 America, time-dishonored negative stereotypes, as main stream media utterances, are rare. Those who suffer physical and mental afflictions, all religions, all races and ethnicities are sensitively and nobly protected from antiquated, ignorant expression. With one exception:
Italian-Americans.
While one could lose his job, or at the very least his reputation, for openly mocking a fill-in-the-blank, you can still ridicule Americans of Italian heritage and suffer little-to-nothing in return.
Last Sunday, ESPN was providing that day’s NFL highlights, including a blocked punt that was returned by Bucs DB Sabby (Sabatino) Piscitelli. Over this footage, ESPN anchor and signature personality Chris Berman said, “And he goes all the way to the 22-yard line.”
Except, as Berman said this, he stepped into a stereotypical “deeze and doze” Brooklyn-Italian accent; he cleverly attached an uncultured and uneducated Italian-American dialect to the name Piscitelli.
“Could you imagine,” asks reader John Siciliano of The Bronx, “if he did an impression of a stupid Hispanic or a stupid African-American?”
No, I couldn’t.
How about an Asian? Could one imagine Berman speaking imitation Chinese, Korean or Japanese – pronouncing his Ls as Rs, as if ordering “flied lice” – over clips of Yao Ming, Chan Ho Park and Hideki Matsui?
Or maybe speaking with a thick Eastern European/Lower East Side pushcart Yiddish accent over footage of Sandy Koufax or Kevin Youkilis?
Or speaking with over-the-top, feminized affectations when clips appear of Greg Louganis or Billie Jean King?
None of us could imagine that from most career sports broadcasters, not in 2008. That’s because most recognize that such cheap, bigoted, unfunny humor is long gone – and good riddance.
During this June’s U.S. Open, NBC’s lead golf analyst Johnny Miller seemed to find it odd and amusing that someone named Rocco Mediate and who looks like Rocco Mediate was Tiger Woods’ primary competition.
“Guys with the name ‘Rocco’ don’t get on the trophy, do they?” he said. He also said that Mediate, who has a darkish, Mediterranean complexion, “looks like the guy who cleans Tiger’s swimming pool.”
Although he later apologized for choosing “my words poorly,” Miller, like Berman, having caused offense, surely meant none. Not for a moment am I suggesting either man intended to injure.
Still, had Miller said that rising PGA star Camilo Villegas, from Colombia, looked or sounded more like the locker room attendant, or that Tiger Woods, “looks like the guy who cleans Rocco’s pool,” or that, “Guys named Vijay or Jose don’t get their names on U.S. Open trophies, do they?” . . . Miller, by now, would be six months removed from NBC.
*
Once a notion is repeated enough, fact has no chance. In fact, notion becomes fact.
The 1958 Colts-Giants NFL championship – “The Greatest Game Ever Played” – throughout its 50th anniversary year has been identified as the game that made the NFL indispensable to TV audiences. After that game, there was no looking back – the NFL and TV, forever!
An estimated 10,820,000 watched that game on NBC. Thus, TV audiences and pro football, starting that very day, became inseparable.
This “fact” began to be regularly spoken and written in the 1970s, was repeated throughout the rest of the 20th Century and now well into the 21st. And, for the last 35 years, it has made a nice story. Except for one small detail: It’s not true.
“TV viewership rose only a little the next season, then went flat in 1960,” said Steve Sabol, longtime head of NFL Films and among football’s most reliable historians.
“The ’58 game wasn’t a great game, but it was great theater. But in truth, it didn’t establish the NFL and TV as a can’t-miss partnership. I think what drove viewership that day was that the game was close throughout. NFL championships, until then, had mostly been blowouts.”
NBC began televising the NFL Championship game in 1955, when the Browns beat the Rams, 38-14. The next year, the Giants beat the Bears, 47-7, and in 1957, the Lions beat the Browns, 59-14.
“The ’58 game was more like the first distant rumble, the first flash of light from far away, a hint that something big might be coming,” Sabol continued, Friday, from his South Jersey HQ.
“But that storm didn’t arrive until the early 1960s, with Vince Lombardi‘s Packers. That’s when it became clear that the NFL, as a televised sport, had arrived. That wasn’t clear in 1958.
“Those great Packer teams, led by a man with a gruff voice and representing a little town in Wisconsin that would beat the big-city teams, made for national appeal.
“Lombardi was on the cover of Time Magazine, Paul Hornung was Joe Namath before Joe Namath, Ray Nitschke went on ‘What’s My Line?’ Jerry Kramer wrote a best-selling book [“Run To Daylight”]. That’s what made it happen for the NFL.”