MAYBE it’s time to depart the denial stage. Perhaps it’s time to admit that I’m crazy and everyone else is sane.
Tuesday night on ESPN2, I watched an 11- or 12-year-old kid in a Little League regional final stand at home plate and flamboyantly gesture with his bat toward the center-field fence.
Then the kid hit one in that general direction for a double. Then he stood at second base hollering and violently chest-bumping himself, presumably because the closest umpire and opposing infielders were disinclined to chest-bump with him.
And the adults calling the game on ESPN2, including ex-major leaguer Harold Reynolds, who was known to play in a modest, sportsmanlike fashion, then told their national audience – comprised of who knows how many tens of thousands of kids – that what we’d just seen was absolutely fabulous.
It didn’t end there. News and sports highlights shows over the next 48 hours played the tape of this episode. Sports anchors, news anchors and even weathermen and weatherwomen echoed the declaration that this was a marvelous sight to behold.
And, except for the creeping notion that I’m the one with the socialization problem, I wanted to grab every one of these professional communicators – adults – shake them hard, then tell them that if this was such a delightful happenstance, why don’t they go home and teach the kids in their lives to play sports – in fact, to live their lives – the same way.
If they truly loved what they’d seen from this child, then they should be more than eager to instill that kind of behavior in their children. Teach them how to showboat, encourage them to be showoffs. Get to them as early as possible, even before Little League.
Or was this just the latest worst case of insidious, hideous bad-is-good pandering?
By the way, in his next time up, that same kid made the same gesture toward center field with his bat. He grounded out to first. I didn’t see that clip on that night’s or the next day’s news.
Tuesday’s LL telecast was loaded with institutionalized sickness. That’s to be expected from ESPN, which now exists less as a sports network than it does a product, a brand name that exploits sports – even Little Leaguers – to sell ESPN as if it were ketchup.
From the moment the first batter stepped to the plate, Tuesday, 11- and 12-year-olds were used as ESPN billboards.
The graphics, throughout the game, told of the kids’ favorite X-Games performers – the X-Games, of course, being an ESPN product now being staged/sold in Philadelphia. You think that ESPN would’ve asked this question of these kids had it not owned the X-Games? Those kids who actually knew an X-Games performer were used as unpaid, unwitting commercial endorsers.
Other graphics included: “Person I’d Most Like To Meet: Stuart Scott.” Scott’s an ESPN anchor, so the kid who got the right answer to that question – an ESPN personality – had his response appear. “Keith Olbermann,” after all, was not the right answer.
Then there was “Favorite TV Show: SportsCenter.” If the kid had responded, “Anything on Fox,” you think ESPN would have posted that response?
But ESPN’s shamelessness in duping children into becoming ESPN shills during ESPN’s LL coverage is an old story that grows worse.
Someday, LL coaches will be encouraged to instruct their players to provide the “correct,” ESPN-preferred responses, starting with “Favorite CEO: Michael Eisner.”
And if self-aggrandizement and self-promotion among athletes – even 12-year-olds – proliferates, no network celebrates itself more than ESPN. Next week it’s celebrating its 25,000th “SportsCenter” during the show that airs Sunday at 11 p.m. That’s SportsCenter’s prime slot, each week.
And what a coincidence, for all the SportsCenters that air every day, all day, its 20,000th SportsCenter celebration, in 1998, also fell on a Sunday night.
Last Saturday, as seen Wednesday on HBO/NFL Films’ “Hard Knocks,” an inside-look series, the Cowboys’ Randal Williams blocked a punt. The ball rolled into the end zone. Williams, closest to the ball, would also have an easy TD.
But he’d already turned to the Cowboys’ bench to celebrate himself in one of those check-me-out muscle-flex bits. The ball was recovered by the Raiders.
Clearly, Williams was fully schooled in our modern sports culture. And until I finally accept the fact that this is what makes sports great, I’m just going to have to get used to the fact that I’m the one who’s crazy.