Yes, American TV Sportscasting Sucks

The Sins of American Sportscasting

It’s easy to see why O’Brien and Balboa announce this way. They are simply calling soccer games the same way all American sports are called. And yet the fact that there is such dissatisfaction with a very traditional, mainstream announcing team speaks volumes not just about the way soccer is presented on American TV, but about the state of American television sportscasting in general.

American TV sportscasting is full of factoids, full of graphics, full of breakaways from the midst of play for prerecorded human-interest backgrounders, full of color analysts overexplaining what happened a couple of minutes ago even as new, more urgent things are happening in front of our eyes, full of overpacked broadcast booths with three-man teams, sideline reporters, spotters, graphics people and telestrators, all breathlessly jostling for air time. Goals are scored in hockey games, and instead of showing the players celebrating, hyperactive producers cut away to show coaches, random crowd shots, the empty net, the goalie whose expression is hidden behind his mask. A single football play cannot pass without two instant replays; lineups cannot be given without film clips of the players saying their own names. At any given moment in a baseball game, what you’ll hear is the studied casualness of the down-home, nothing-really-exciting-going-on-here play-calling tradition that O’Brien personifies.

All these strands together add up to the crisis in American sportscasting that is made evident at every World Cup, when English-speaking fans flee in enormous numbers to listen to commentary in a language they don’t even understand. It’s not just soccer, of course — for many U.S. sports fans, it has long been impossible to listen to the type of football telecasts epitomized by Al Michaels, John Madden and the overproduced Monday Night Football franchise. John Davidson’s interruptions wherever there is an American hockey telecast has driven those few fans who care about them to the Internet for local radio connections. And so on down the line. The common denominator in the way American TV covers any sport is the absence of the simple, urgent description of what is happening on the field, the court or the ice — the single most visceral thing for any fan watching any sport he or she cares about.