Are you ready for some foopball?

by David Benjamin

 

 “On TV the people can see it. On radio you’ve got to create it.”

— Bob Uecker

 

MADISON, Wis. — I’m not Ohio State.

I’ve been an avid Green Bay Packers fan since I was twelve, but, despite repeated suggestions by TV color commentators like Daryl Johnston, I am not—personally—the Packers.

Nevertheless, there are dozens of sports “analysts” in television-land who operate helpfully on the contingency that I just might be one—or both—of the teams on the field during any and every particular broadcast of football, baseball, basketball, ice hockey, tennis … pickleball? These “experts” dispense their advice to me—on how to do something I can’t possibly do—by way of the syntactical device that I think of as the “sportscaster second-person subjunctive.”

Here’s a hypothetical example, in which I’m cast involuntarily as Ohio State. We hear the voice of, say, Kirk Herbstreit: “… I mean, you’ve got a powerful back and a dominant O-line. What you wanna do is just trust your big guys to tee off and bulldoze the D—if you’re Ohio State.”

Y’see? There it is. I’m not Ohio State. Not one of us passive TV viewers is, even in a metaphysical sense, Ohio State. This accusation is untenable and—to all who do not “identify” with the football factory in Columbus—slanderous.

To repeat: I am not, goddammit, Ohio State.

I am, however, a lifelong observer of the craft of sportscasting. Among my childhood heroes in this realm was Earl Gillespie, “voice” of the Milwaukee Braves. I would lie abed at night, tuned into the Braves radio network, as Gillespie—both laconically and vividly—limned the flow and drama of a game from Frisco against Willie and the Giants or from L.A. versus Sandy and the Dodgers. 

Gillespie was among those homespun announcers who bonded the matter-of-fact with the lyrical in a casual, comforting monolog, meanwhile keeping me up to the moment, pitch-by-pitch, on balls, strikes, outs, innings and the occasional bit of esoterica like the difference between hit-and-run and run-and-hit, and the outfield terrace at Crosley Field in Cincinnati. Gillespie’s peers in that era included Ernie Harwell, Jack Brickhouse, Mel Allen and the magisterial Vin Scully. Gillespie’s Milwaukee successor was the funniest radio guy in baseball history, Bob Uecker, a former Major League catcher (lifetime batting average, .200) who once said, “When I came up to bat with three men on and two outs in the ninth, I looked in the other team’s dugout and they were already in street clothes.”

My mentor for football play-by-play was the Packers’ voice, Ray Scott, who knew the game was on TV and needed no superfluous verbiage to embellish what viewers could see for themselves. Scott’s coverage of a running play would unroll like this: “Taylor … six yards … 28-yard-line … Second down.” Afterward, Scott’s “color man,” former Packer halfback Tony Canadeo, might enhance the play-by-play by naming the guy who tackled Taylor. But maybe not. Neither Scott not Canadeo was inclined to fill sweet silence with drivel.

Things are different now. I’ve watched ESPN baseball broadcasts in which three stooges in the booth (an “announcer” a “color” commentator and an “analyst,” with input from the blonde on the field with a microphone, a handheld, a sound guy and a quick touch-up from the makeup crew) talk through the end of an inning and the beginning of the next about baseball players, baseball teams and baseball issues that have nothing to do with the two teams playing actual baseball right there. What’s the count? How many outs? Who’s on first? Please!

This fashion for digression, logorrhea, irrelevance and second-person advice to viewers who are not either team on the field, is how sportscasting is done now. Blithering and preening seems normal and tolerable for any viewer who does not remember Earl Gillespie, Red Barber or—God rest his golden voice—Vin Scully. 

I’ve adapted, too. When I hear “on-air-talent” launch into the second-person subjunctive, I know that this “analyst”—let’s stick with Herbstreit—is not addressing me directly. He’s dispensing a lesson about what he would do in this situation if he were me and I were the coach. The problem, of course, is that I’m not the coach, and the actual coach is not listening to Kirk’s advice.

Moreover, the advice being pitched here by Kirk, or Tony Romo or the terminally annoying Troy Aikman (yeah, I know, I miss John Madden, too!), is almost always wrong.

Instead of bulldozing the D and sending the big back into the anticipated hole, the Ohio State (or Packers, or Alabama) coach fakes the handoff and sends a tight end sliding from right to left, bypassing the linebackers, catching a soft toss from the QB and waltzing untouched into the end zone. 

“Golly, Troy, I didn’t see that one comin’.”

“Well, Joe, you should’ve anticipated the play-action and dropped the will backer into zone coverage—if you’re the Packers.”

If you’re watching, and you’re actually you—and not the Packers, Buckeyes or damn Yankees—you will hear, at least four times in every game, the words “incredible,” “unbelievable” and “phenomenal.” These terms apply to successful plays that Ray Scott, for example, would have referred to as “good” or, in an excess of enthusiasm, “very nice.” 

Our current firmament of broadcasters has become so addicted to hyperbole that they’ve effectively drained all meaning from the concept of “belief.” “Incredible and “unbelievable” are, of course, synonyms. “Phenonemal,” which is not, has been turned into a synonym through ignorance and constant misuse. In all cases, sportscasters regularly rave that a play just watched by millions of people is beyond belief. Yeah, it just happened. But we’re told, by the expert in the booth, not to believe our lying eyes. To declare this moment “unbelievable” is to suggest, contrary to the evidence—and a half-dozen instant replays—that it did not happen at all, and that it could never happen again.

It’s water into wine. It’s Lazarus rising from the dead.

Trouble is, Troy, it’s gonna happen again—probably in the same damn game. A great play in any sport, a leaping catch, a 100-yard kickoff return, a 450-foot homer, a twisting underhand kiss off the top of the backboard, happens often. It is exceptional, excellent, extraordinary, remarkable, dazzling, lovely, acrobatic, good, great and very nice. It is, indeed, a phenomenon, like a lunar eclipse or the isolation of a virus. But because it’s possible and it actually occurs in full view of countless witnesses, it is not—ever—incredible. 

Seeing, after all, is still believing.

Inevitably, after the game, the blonde on the field will interview a player, usually beginning with the word “how.” For example, “How excited were you to score the winning touchdown?” or “How glad are you to be back playing foopball after that terrible injury last year?”

The key word here: “foopball.” Listen closely. Players and the media have largely replaced the “t” in football with a “p.” The physical process here is that the speaker’s subconscious anticipates pronunciation of the labial “b” and hurries the tongue to the speaker’s lips, bypassing the palate, where the “t” would normally sound and simply doubles up on labials, with a “p.” Hence, “foopball”. 

To actually put a “t” in “football,” after years of lazy usage has supplanted it with “p,” would require a moment of thought—about language—by the foopball player. Or the blonde on the field. Or, it would require the broadcast community to expect, from an NFL-bound Buckeye who couldn’t find a classroom building with two docents and a campus map, to exercise linguistic precision. This would be, in the accurate sense of a moribund adjective, incredible.