The Press Box - Ep. 116: ‘The Press Box’: The Life and Death of the TV Sports Highlight

Episode Date: May 23, 2016

Ringer editor-at-large Bryan Curtis explores the history and uncertain future of the television highlight package. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hi, I'm Brian Curtis, the editor at large of The Ringer. This is the Press Box podcast. Let me ask you a question. Did you see what happened in the playoffs last night? These days, if you missed a game, you'd say, sure, I saw the highlights on Twitter. But 10 or 20 years ago, the answer would have been, I saw the highlights on Sports Center. And a decade before that, if you missed the game, you'd sigh and say, I didn't see anything.

I just caught the one or two crappy highlights they showed on the 11 o'clock news. The TV sports highlight has been the fans' companion for decades, and if you read the news about the declining ratings of SportsCenter, you could conclude that we're near the end of the highlights' life cycle, at least as something that can power a TV show on its own. So I thought the TV highlight deserved a proper biography, or at least an oral history, delivered by the men who have been doing highlights for the last 50 years.

This episode is called, life and death of the TV sports highlight. In 1978, 11 o'clock news, we were actually giving for the first time. In other words, that's 80% of the audience, maybe higher, didn't know the score of the Yankee game unless they listened to it or watched it when you came on with audience. That's Warner Wolf, one of the pioneering wiseacres in the field of TV sports highlights. Back in the 60s and 70s, Wolf was the 11 o'clock sports guy. at stations like Washington, D.C's W-T-O-P and New York's W-A-B-C.

The first thing you need to understand about these early days is that highlights weren't everywhere. They were scarce. You could get, like, videotape from the Redskin game if you tape the game or the Senators game at that point. And another outlet was in those days, if you went to the movies on Saturdays usually, show you, and I said, that's great, see, highlights. Warner Wolf then was a kind of knowledge broker, and if you missed his highlights, and I'm just old enough to remember these days, you had to wait until morning to find out what happened or place a desperate call to the sports desk of your local paper. What Wolf discovered was that great highlights are rarely about the pictures. They are about the wit of the men and women narrating them.

Wolf never used a teleprompter. He would look directly into the camera and recite a script he'd memorized. And when he spoke on TV, he'd written every. word himself. Jim Simpson, he was a network sportscaster, did everything, NBC, World Series, Wimbledon, Super Bowl, whatever. And when I got out of the Army, he was nice enough, I saw his sports cast. And he said, you know, I just have one piece of advice. People will be able to, the other thing, he said, always did. In later years, Sports Center became a giant box store for catchphrases. Wolf was a pioneer here, too. His parents were vaudevillians. And what does every

vaudevillian need? A hook, a signature line. Wolfe's came in 1968. He was a great defensive center, and I said, man, look at this block by Nate Thurman on Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. And there was no tape. So I'm sitting there with my face on the camera. So I said, man, look at it. This is great. Way to Q. He said, I could be doing 10, I heard you say, I punched it. Let's fast forward to the 1980s, and let's go to San Diego, California. There on Channel 8 News is a man named Ted Lightner. He has big glasses and salt and pepper hair, and most nights he's jabbing his finger at the screen.

When he does, the whole newsroom, all these grizzled TV types who couldn't give a damn about what was on TV, would stop to see what he would say. See, Lightner, who ruled San Diego like Ron Burgundy, was different. Warner Wolf used Sports Highlands. to delight, to entertain. Lightner used them to enrage. I had a news director when I would walk down from my office to go down to the studio. He would say, hey, piss him off today.

Literally, get out there. He knew that was my job because they would do the marketing research and people would say, oh, I hate that guy. I hate that guy. What did he say? He said this, this, this, this. So they realized they hate him, kind of the Howard Costell thing, which I was always uncomfortable with, but they hate him,

but they watch him and they know what he says and that kind of thing. and this news director, Jim Holtzman, was his name, would get that and say, come on, get out there. Piss them off. That's what you're here for. And I thought, this is wonderful. This is great. Do whatever you want, within the context of three and a half minutes and just have fun with it. Now, very few, nobody ever did that before, for the most part. Nobody's ever doing it now. It was a way of doing highlights that owed something to networks Howard Beale. For example, Leitner didn't like hockey. So instead of showing hockey highlights at 11 o'clock, he'd show 10 seconds of 2. two hockey players beating the living hell out of each other. What incredible athletes, he'd exclaim, never even bothering to give the score of the game.

Leitner treated auto racing, which he didn't consider a real sport, with similar disdain. So then I got to the point of instead of actually using racing highlights, quote-unquote, we had a stationary camera that was for traffic, for traffic updates within the news before they got to the sports. So I would have to activate the traffic camera and show you want some highlights, you want some racing highlights, want some car highlights, and they would shoot the Interstate 8, or the Interstate 805, and I'd do about six, seven seconds of it, and come back out. It wasn't just fans, Leitner enraged. He enraged players, too. He'd show a highlight of one of the Padres circling the bases and say something like,

I have never seen an athlete with less desire and zest to play. Not surprisingly, the players hated this. When Dave Winfield left to go to New York, they decided Jerry Turner would replace him. And Jerry Turner couldn't catch a ball and does it stop rolling. You know, any one of those guys. So on the air, I'm doing this and we have highlights and I'm saying, you know, the windfield's gone. And they told us today that it's going to be Jerry Turner.

And I said, you know what? If you enter a Volkswagen in the Indy 500, you better know a hell of a shortcut. And believe it or not, Jerry Turner took Cambridge at that. So I go to the ballpark that next day. And I'm standing around the batting cage. And he's standing there. He's giving me the evil eye. And then he walks over and he says,

Volkswagen, huh? Volkswagen? And he's right here, and I'm thinking, I'm dead. I'm dead. It's going to be Duke City right here with this guy. At least I was younger then, so I had a shot, a small shot, but a shot. And that was one of those that sticks in my mind. Lightner didn't write a script.

What he said on the news was whatever popped into his head. For a time, his station installed a buzzer beneath the desk so that production people would have a cue when to roll the highlights. Out of protest, Lightner held down the buzzer for the whole newscast. And eventually the plan was dropped. The 1980s was a golden age of local news. Lightner's daily workload amounted a three minutes and change of stream of consciousness on the afternoon news and another three minutes and change at 11 o'clock, along with some play-by-play work on the side.

For this, he made a small fortune. And it's nobody's business, but to show how wonderful it was, I started for $30,000 in 1978, and 10 years later I was making a million-five in a local, nothing, 29th market, CBS affiliate in television. Because most of the people, as even they showed me, the market research, which they shouldn't have done. It's bad negotiating. Look at this.

60% of the people watch because of you. So then when I had other offers that go other places, it was like, hey, no, you're staying. Here's more money. Thank you, God. If you're adjusting for inflation, Lightner was making $2.8 million in today's money, and there were other perks that came with doing highlights. I can't say women, can I? But I have to be honest, I was young, it was wonderful, and I had this little bit of celebrity.

You know, what I could look at Hollywood types and think, wow, what are they doing? Because I got to be honest with you. I had women calling me on the phone after the 11 o'clock news that wanted to meet me in the parking lot. And that, I'm sorry, to answer your question, that's a great perk. That's a great perk. Like John Lennon was when he first saw Elvis, and they were throwing panties in the night. and leaving hotel keys for Elvis, and John Lennon turned to his friend and said, that's a good job.

And I felt similarly the same way, you know what I mean? The TV sports highlight and the status of the man or woman delivering it changed forever with the arrival of ESPN Sports Center. Highlight Prevairs went national. You weren't telling San Diego to stay classy. You were talking to everyone. When I got to ESPN in 1988, I had no. ever done a lick of television before. And when I did my very first audition, they had called and said,

would you be interested in coming to ESPN? And my response was to do what? That's Charlie Steiner, who was an anchor for 14 years on SportsCenter. When Steiner came to ESPN, he was a 39-year-old radio veteran who'd just done a stint as a play-by-play man for the Jets. They were trying to rebuild SportsCenter, which was just a little sports. sports cable station show that was on the verge of extinction in 88. So I came in and later, of course, Keith and Dan and Robin and all that. When I auditioned for the job, they gave me what was called a shot sheet, where individual scenes of games unfolded with some words that were to correspond with the pictures.

Never having done television before, I had no idea what the hell it was. Sports Center had been around since ESPN's first day on the air, September 7, 1979. But it wasn't until magazine veteran John Walsh was hired nearly a decade later, that the highlights acquired a governing intelligence. According to the book, Those Guys Have All the Fun. Walsh thought an episode of SportsCenter ought to be structured like a newspaper. The most important stories would be out front, and the rest would be a mix of news reciting and news breaking.

Moreover, an anchor shouldn't just describe the highlights you were already, watching. He should tell you a story about the game. When I started doing highlights in the very beginning, it was kind of like one play-by-play riff to the next play-by-play riff to the next play-by-play riff. John Walsh, who of course the high potentative sports center and the genius who put it all together, called me aside one day and said, you're missing the point on highlights. It's not play-by-play. What it is is telling the story through various pictures. And so instead of saying, here's the two and two, and he bounces one to the right side,

you know, on this ground ball to the second base, booted by the second baseman, whatever it was, and then you go into whatever your riff is. So it was a big difference between a play-by-play highlight and the highlight of telling a story, and these are the plays that make the story. And that was something it took me a while to kind of find the right balance. The catchphrases that Warner Wolf had tried out decades before were becoming, as Dan Patrick once noted, America's primary form of communication by 1997 Patrick and Keith Olberman, who were hosting the 11 p.m. Sports Center had 76 catchphrases they were using,

gone, and it's deep, but I don't think it's playable, and drooling the drool of regret into the pillow of remorse. The old hierarchy of TV sports was flipped. Now the guys doing the highlights, rather than the play-by-play man, was king. SportsCenter anchors started to hear their catchphrases repeated back to them by fans and players and journalists who were writing fawning profiles. The sportscaster was, for lack of a better term, infuego. We were the last ones to realize that, ooh, this is becoming a big deal.

Early on, you had to explain to folks what ESPN was and to some slower folks how to spell it. But then around 1990, 91, as Sports Center was beginning to evolve, truly we were the last ones to know. We were just a bunch of Jemokes working in a concrete bunker in Bristol, Connecticut, playing sports TV. Then all of a sudden, then we started going out and doing games, and in the airports, people would, you know, turn around and look and recognize and say hello. And then there was always that one go, da-da-da-da, da-da, like that was the first time we heard it. And then, so it was over a period of maybe within three years of my arrival, ESPN had graduated from that sports cable station in Connecticut. into ESPN. And then we had the Rose story, the Tyson story, the Magic Johnson story,

and that's when SportsCenter became a bigger deal, and it became a news gathering agency, which it had never been and never dreamed of being. And so you throw all of that into the mix that within a couple of years, ESPN became a big deal, and again, going through an airport, or walking into a saloon, it became a totally different thing than I could ever have imagined.

Sports Center's golden age lasted well into the new century, with anchors like Stuart Scott, Rich Eisen, and Scott Van Pelt. The show never really had any serious competition for highlights on TV. It turned out the competition would come from the internet,

where around 2010, Twitter denizens like At Jose 3030 would hasten the death of the TV highlight. When we called him up for an interview, Jose 3030 asked to remain anonymous. Here's what we can say about him. His name really is Jose. He's 36 years old, lives on the East Coast, and works in IT. Jose took a strange path to becoming a highlight broker.

Between 2010 and 2014, his boom years in the trade. He was living with elderly parents. This took up all his time and most of his money. So late at night, when he needed something happy in his life, Jose would flip on an NBA game, and he would make highlights. I'd pay more money than I'm best. And I also had a day job. So because I had a day job, I was able to basically go home and look forward to, you know, watching basketball,

which is, you know, an outlet for everybody that loves basketball. So I was able to watch basketball. I was able to help other people out, post videos, and then go to sleep, you know, with a smile on my face, and then ready to go to the day job in the morning again and do it all over again. Highlights almost became a form of therapy for Jose, along with other online masters of the forum, C.J. Fogler and later the guys of the cauldron, and especially Deadspins Timothy Burke, Jose began to dramatically change the highlight as we understood it. The first thing someone like Jose could do is work faster than the TV guys.

The old order of things had a small army of production assistants in Bristol, Connecticut, watching games and cutting highlights for SportsCenter. Jose was doing that instantly and alone. Think of the highlight of Russell Westbrook, traveling at the end of Game 1 of the Western Conference Finals. It felt like you were watching the highlight on Twitter while Marv Albert was still describing the replay on the air. And everything was done through my computer, TV Tuna Card, high-speed internet, really fast computer. So everything that came down the pipe that basically was HD connection and I would just record things on the actual computer, edit them right on the computer, modify them, you know, splice them, whatever I need to do. put them together and then pump them right out

right through the internet as well. It was pretty seamless, but you wouldn't know it because like two minutes, three minutes where I was just... The second way Jose and others changed the highlight was to change its focus. TV showed us the great plays and the bad plays and maybe a few bloopers. But on Twitter, you could put a spotlight on any meltdown,

including those on the broadcast itself. The highlight was replaced by the low light. What do you remember about the 2016 NFL draft? The Grateful Smile of Jared Goff or ESPN's Ed Werger, accidentally calling linebacker Miles Jack, Miles Jackass. Jose's greatest lowlight came on April 12, 2011, when he was watching a game between the Lakers and the Spurs. With under seven minutes left in the third quarter, Kobe Bryant got called for a technical foul. TNT's TV cameras caught him in a close-up on the bench seconds afterwards,

shouting an anti-gay slur at official Benny Adams. Jose went to work. of the game. Things got chippier and chippier and chippier and there was a foul call and then essentially, you know, he got ticked off and and went berserk. Brian blamed the slur on frustration. He wound up being fined $100,000. A number of websites tried to hire Jose. He demurred because Jose, like Wolfe or Leitner or Steiner, didn't want to be a content machine. He had taste. A couple of years ago, Jose told me, his sister started taking care of his elderly parents and Jose got a new job working nights. He doesn't make highlights anymore, and he doesn't miss it.

This is the universe in which a sportscaster has to do a highlight show today. In 2013, the newly christened cable channel FS1 wanted its own highlight show to compete with SportsCenter. It hired Jay-on-Ray, who with Dan O'Toole had done 10 years on the Canadian station TSN, hosting the northern version of SportsCenter, the one in which the final R and E are inverted. On Ray, like nearly everyone who has done sports highlights over the last 20 years, cited David Letterman as a creative influence. John and Keith and Craig Kilbourne and Rich Eisen. You know, the guys doing the 1 a.m. shows I thought were having the most fun, and that seemed like the most fun to me. And I guess that informed things a little bit for me, but I was also obsessed to the original late-night show on NBC is the template for kind of everything.

thought, you know, at the time, people forget how revolution is so different than all the other talk shows on the air. Johnny Carson was still on. Letterman was just having a stagehands do stuff like that. Henri and O'Toole had an act. Henri was the tall, funny one. O'Toole was shorter and more deadpan. The problem was they'd gotten the biggest gig of their lives, just as the highlight show was facing its most intractable problem. Our industry, in my personal opinion, in the three years we've been here in the States,

that had in the 15 years previous thing to do with. for people to just instantly access things on their phone. You know, I just think it's, it didn't change the way we've did change viewing habits, no question. When FS1 and Fox Sports Live debuted on August 17th, 2013, people said, thank God, a competitor to ESPN. Then they saw Fox Sports Live, and it was a mess. It was a three-hour-long variety show

that included a panel hosted by Carissa Thompson, ex-joc opinionists like Donovan McNabb and Andy Roddick. And oh yeah, Jay and Dan doing highlights. I think that was our... I was the viewer. If you were someone who might be interested in checking us out, if you flipped over to FS1 in those early days, you might go 10 more you even saw us

while the panel at people aren't going to stick around too long. So it seemed like a good idea, but I really wish in the end that we had just done two separate shows. When Fox Sports Live was canceled on January 26th, it was averaging about 87,000 viewers, according to numbers from sports TV ratings that appeared on s.i.com. Executive Jamie Horowitz would declare that highlight shows were secondary to opinion shows. Ironically, this would allow On Ray's dream of becoming David Letterman to come true. The new retooled Fox Sports Live is basically a late night show,

with On Ray and O'Toole doing lots of bits and interviews with players. Now, to try this sort of daily show for sports format that we always want to, to do. And I think it's going pretty well. I mean, it's a little more digestible on the fact that it's a half-hour format. We were on air for a long time in the old format, up to three hours at a time. And it's a lot to ask people to sit something like The Daily Show. If you remember when John Stewart would win, you know, when his show would win Best Air, you know, 25, 30 writers would come up on the stage and you'd be like, holy man, is it take this many people to write that show? It takes a ton of talented people to write a show like that.

different and something refreshing and something that people want to stick around for. The downside is the old-fashioned sports highlight show, the one on Ray and O'Toole did in Canada, and which they would still love to watch, if not host, is gone. We had a show, and the more you watched it, the more you got our cadences, the more you got our jokes, more you got our referencing, cool, something cultish, something, you know, everyone wants to be in on that. That goes all the way back to me being into Letterman when I was in high school, you know. You felt like you were into something cool. And if you knew someone else who was into it, you know, you thought that person was pretty cool.

I'll miss about the way we did the highlight. It's kind of a... But like I said, that's, you know, we move on and we continue. And hopefully people like the way we're doing things now. Over at ESPN, the diminishing power of the highlight was felt perhaps even more dramatically. In Charlie Steiner's day, the Sports Center anchor's job was to tell us what happened that night. I asked Scott Van Pelt, who started hosting the refitted Midnight Sports Center last September. what he thought his job was now.

For me, what I can tell you is at midnight, I'm not revealing anything anymore. The days of Dan and Keith maybe telling you something you didn't know or showing you something you hadn't seen, the only way I'm doing that now is if you chose to not know. Now I think you are, why you think things are important. We'll try to do on out,

maybe a different highlight treatment than say the 11, maybe occasionally it's a player to otherwise be in the highlight. Here's three great slam done. Here's a guy that got a block shot or a defensive rebound that was in a critical sequence or whatever. Try to maybe shine a light on that as opposed to the thing that you know has been a vine. It might be the motto of the TV sportscaster circa 2016. Is everyone already tired of seeing this vine?

Van Pelt felt the evolution of the highlight as much as any anchor at the worldwide leader. Back in the late 1990s, when he was at the Golf Channel, Van Pelt got out a post-it note and wrote on it the words, I will never work at ESPN. He thought he was too late that SportsCenter was overflowing with catchphrases, and the possibilities of doing highlights have been exhausted by Dan and Keith and Rich and Stu and Craig. In 2001, Van Pell did go to ESPN, and he did just fine. But then he saw ESPN begin to scale back its highlights to embrace debate and other gimmicks

that began to shove the highlights out of SportsCenter. Highlights is that I was the guy that was yelling the loudest, as I felt like SportsCenter was getting away from highlights, that there's just got to be more. There needs to be more highlights. Social media has evolved to the point that it is now. I've got an hour that's essentially mine to fill out as I please, and I find that I do more kind of conversation

and talk about the things and show fewer highlights than I probably thought I would. Using the old Dan & Key Sports Center as a cudgel against Van Pelt's version, is as unfair as comparing Jimmy Fallon's tonight show to Johnny Carson's. They do not exist in the same media universe. Johnny Carson wasn't going to go back in a closet with what and what you did, you know. But Jimmy Falunc would go back there with Adele and that becomes viral content the next day. They'll succeed on so many different levels. Whereas the show Dan and Keith did, I mean, it would be fascinating and I've done it.

If you just pushed play on the T's and watched an hour of sports center of what you remember as, but if you applied today's channel on the Twins game, you know, It's, you go to a graph for 30 seconds. And if that happened now, people go, what, what, what, did the machine get stuck? You know, let's go on to the next. There's, there'd be no tolerance for that. The brilliance and the writing and the chemistry, all people would be fascinated at what they remember.

It actually looks. It's just, it's just an undeniably different time. They couldn't do. People don't need highlights on TV anymore. But that presented a tradeoff. Van Pell can do stuff Dan and Keith couldn't do. He can do a bad, B. segment on gambling, one that's being copied by a new show on FS1.

He can have his pal Stamford Steve on. Van Pell could turn the network's Marquis Sports Center into something like his old ESPN radio show, one that revolved around his obsessions. We showed more Oakland University basketball highlights than anybody. A bunch of, they had this case like, and they had this kid that only shot three's Max Hooper, and they played pretty entertaining a member, and we took this switch. you know, it absolutely satisfies it. I've been empowered, I guess you'd say,

to not show maybe power easel collection. I asked Van Pelt what percentage of his audience at midnight has seen some form of highlights before they get to him. Oh, hell. You know, you get audience feedback in large other than that, you know, says that we do really well between how many 18 to 34-year-old males can't be, it can't be,

I made some dancing, and I laughed about kids on the couch in college that are faded out of their minds. And, you know, you get an avalanche of people in Twitter like, you know, I'm high and the guys that were me back in the day watching. But they didn't, I don't know. I'm not in the revelation business. When Warner Wolf looked into a television camera in 1968, he was in the revelation business. And that was obviously key to the highlight. We could write funny highlights. We could write clever highlights.

we could cut together great game footage. But revelation was at its core. We stopped loving the highlight when we were no longer surprised by what was in it. As Keith Oberman used to say, a good craftsman never blames his tools. He thanks his producers. Mine are Joe Fuentes and Tate Fraser.

And for the ace research work, thanks to Megan Schuster, Riley Magatty, and Caitlin Blosser. This is the Pressbox podcast. I'm Brian Curtis. Thanks for listening.