Sports
Look up, obey, repeat
Conventional wisdom likes to say that true sports fans would rather watch a game in person than sit at home in front of the television, that regardless of the distance of one’s seat from the field, the price of one’s hot dog, or the boorishness of one’s section-mates, the experience of actually being at a game is the highest form of sports appreciation and the purest proof of one’s devotion to the game or team one loves.
What a bunch’a nonsense.
And not just because it’s predicated on that most absurd of sports-fan delusions: that I can affect the outcome of a game by my presence, that somehow my favorite players will sense my closeness and my enthusiasm and respond accordingly. No, quite outside of our individual powers of spatial persuasion or the inconvenience of getting to the arena or the irritation of standing next to grown men who have voluntarily painted their own faces or the impossibility of actually seeing what’s happening on-field or on-court from the seats I’m able to afford on a writer’s salary, the real problem with attending a live game goes right to the heart of the mob, right to the jugular of America, right to the crux of the culture, with its never-ending quest to dumb down experience in the name of accessibility and greater profitability. Let’s call it the Calamity of the JumboTron and the Hive Sporting Mind.
It pains me to say this, but I think the NBA – that noblest of all leagues – is the institution most tainted by the presence of the JumboTron. (Hockey as well, I’m guessing, but who watches hockey?) Baseball, soccer, and football stadiums? They all feature JumboTron screens, but the combination of their enormity and the fact that most of them are outdoors (causing a diffusion of crowd attention) means the screens serve mainly as tools for keeping crowds informed or engaged during timeouts with slow-motion replays of injury-inducing collisions and tricycle races between grown men dressed as pancakes.
In NBA arenas, on the other hand, the JumboTron is the center of attention. It hovers ominously right over the middle of the court, like the alien ships in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, a testament to human ingenuity at the expense of human experience. It holds all the stats for all the players on the court, it provides instant replays, it shows highlights from other games, it pumps up the crowd with classic rock songs, it runs advertisements during time-outs, and, most significantly, it tells fans what to do and how to feel and where to stand and what to cheer to most effectively be a part of what is going on down on the court.
At an NBA game, fans look to the JumboTron for guidance, validation, and corroboration.
Which is unforgiveable in itself (who wants to be told what to do by a giant television set?), but the real problem is this: The JumboTron-centered approach to presenting sporting events is absolutely killing fan understanding and appreciation by encouraging ignorance and what we’ll call “passive immersion.” And by this I mean that any lunk off the street with the price of a ticket in dollars bills in his pocket but no knowledge of the game in his head can sit down in one of those tiny seats and, simply by concentrating on the JumboTron and the sound of the arena announcer’s voice and doing what they tell him to do, can play perfectly the role of the dutiful fan doing his part to cheer his team on to victory and boo the opponent on to defeat and shame.
Don’t know what an “And 1″ means? Don’t worry: the JumboTron will tell you if it’s worth a cheer or a grumble. Don’t know what to do when your hometown team has the ball at the end of the fourth quarter down by one? No fear; the JumboTron will tell you what kind of noise it’s best to make to prod your team on to victory. Not sure what to chant when the other team has the ball at the end of the fourth quarter down by one? Why not take a cue from the JumboTron: “De-fense! De-fense!” should just about do it, don’t you think?
So what do you get? An uneducated sporting crowd responding to the entreaties of a giant television screen with obedience but absolutely no feel for the actual organic ebb and flow of a game. The JumboTron programmers took their cues (at one point in history) from the natural responses of true fans in certain conditions at certain points in certain games (standing up for the last possession of any quarter, for example, or trying with all one’s might to distract an opposing player standing alone at the free-throw line). Then they codified those responses, ritualized them, turned them into an elaborate, agreed-upon choreography completely free of honest feeling and stripped them of all meaning.
The last time I went to see the San Antonio Spurs play (during a playoff game, mind you, when the only fans in attendance should have been die-hards with an encyclopedic knowledge of the game and an unreasonable affection for Tony Parker and Manu Ginobili and 15-foot bank shots), the entire three-hour experience was an exercise in predetermined responses and prefabricated enthusiasm. There was no respect given to either our ability to amass and retain knowledge or our instincts for the rise and fall of tension within the parameters of a group experience.
Compare that to a boxing match here I went to recently here in Austin. The evenings were so far apart in kind and significance as to constitute completely different experiences; in fact, the only thing binding them together was the word “sports.”
At the fights there were countless moments of spontaneous crowd engagement – a burst of “ooohs” when a fighter did something particularly dazzling, a collective groan when a punch landed with exceptional force, great roars of approval and applause for two bruised and bloodied men who were just about to finish round 12 in one piece. And all without a JumboTron telling them to “Make Some Noise.” Not only were fans allowed to respond naturally to the goings on inside the ring, at the pace and with the enthusiasm they deemed appropriate, and not only were they permitted to let their own knowledge of and instincts for the fighting dictate those responses; they got to lose themselves in the collective consciousness of a true crowd experience – rather than hand themselves over to the dictates of a piece of technology. It wasn’t a night where the crowd was being herded into action by an active appeal to hive-mindedness but where the basest, most chemical reactions to the brutality, grace, and athleticism on display were expected and appreciated, even demanded.
It was live sports at its finest.
Stayed tuned in the weeks ahead for More Reasons I’d Rather Watch the Game at Home Than Go to the Arena, in which you, the reader, will:
• Marvel at the tale of a full-grown adult male pounding thunder sticks together to the rhythm of every tiny bit of incidental music playing over the arena loudspeaker in a thrilling attempt to keep from thinking for himself about anything!
• Thrill at the sight of thousands of otherwise sentient beings falling all over themselves, their neighbors, their friends, and their family members in a joyous attempt to secure team souvenirs they don’t even want just because they’re free and happen to have been shot out of a T-shirt cannon by professional cheerleaders!
• Wonder at the thought of human beings rioting, setting fires indoors, beating up strangers, getting crushed to death, and otherwise indulging in all manner of drunken mayhem, all in the name of athletic appreciation and team loyalty!
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