I grew up with television sports. We had one channel at first,
then two, then three. Live sports events appeared only on Saturdays
and Sundays, mainly baseball and football. The NBA was strictly
nowheresville, a small-time enterprise. Wilt Chamberlain’s famed
100-point game was not filmed at all, played as it was in a dark
school gym in Pennsylvania somewhere. (Snippets of a radio
broadcast survive.) A baseball fan in the Midwest might be forgiven
for assuming that the only important team was the New York Yankees.
In football, television made its first big breakthrough with the
1958 NFL Championship Game, called “the greatest game ever played.”
Nobody called it “The Super Bowl.”
That game, between the Baltimore Colts and New York Giants,
survives in a remarkably well-made video. I say “remarkably”
because it dates back to the time when TV cameras weighed as much
as a Volkswagen, when they couldn’t readily be moved, and when
instant replay videotape did not exist.
Technology dictated the sports we watched and how we watched
them. A TV camera could be posted at home plate, at third base, and
at first base. That was how we saw baseball. The new, more
flexible, more mobile equipment made its most significant impact on
football. With mobility and re-play capacity, the game — which is
essentially a repeated series of set pieces, with short intervals
between — could be broken into isolated segments for better
understanding and higher drama. Result? The NFL brand of football
overtook baseball as “America’s National Pastime,” such time being
passed increasingly in front of a television set.
THIS CHRISTMAS SEASON MARKS the breakthrough in the consumer market
for high-definition, big screen television sets. Prices are
dropping fast. TV insider Max Robbins, the editor of Broadcast
and Cable Magazine, said recently in a radio interview that
consumers should “Wait till after Christmas” to buy — i.e., that
prices would come down even further.
Digital and high-def could conceivably change not only the way
we watch sports, but which sports we watch.
It took time for the first video revolution to take hold, the
NFL’s ascendancy being only the most obvious. That revolution
blossomed throughout the 1970s, with ABC’s Roone Arledge exploiting
it most fully. ABC’s Wide World of Sports, especially its Olympics
broadcast, took complete advantage of portability and replay to
educate the television viewer in a whole passel of new sports,
sports that are with us to this day: skating, gymnastics, skiing,
bobsledding.
No futurist, so far as I know, predicted the offshoots those
sports gave birth to, namely the “trash sports” like the X-Games
and the Gravity Games. And no one can predict the impact of an
unexpectedly influential personality, like Muhammad Ali in the '70s
or Tiger Woods in the '90s.
WHAT CAN WE ANTICIPATE from high-def sports? What will be new? What
will be popular?
In 1958, perhaps no football insider could have appreciated it
the changes to come. A video technician might have. Let’s try to
look at sports the way that video nerd would look at them. High-def
big-screen TV will, above all, make certain elements of sport more
visible (or indeed, visible at all). Those sports with small balls
or pucks moving fast against large backgrounds, with many
fast-moving players involved in complicated plays, stand to gain
most from digital visibility.
Most obvious, hockey will probably get much more popular. Set
against other major sports, hockey still looks innocent and vital.
I hope to see more of the international variety of hockey, with its
fast passing and highly coordinated team play, rather than the
brawling NHL game.
With a new generation of American kids having played the game
throughout their school years, soccer may come into its own in the
United States — just about the only major market it has not
penetrated, compared to the rest of the world.
For the rest, the world offers a remarkable cornucopia. Rugby?
Australian rules football? Bowling? (Hi-def won’t add much.) Horse
racing? (I’d bet on British style steeplechase, absolutely.)
Boxing? (Not without cleaning it up.) Auto racing is already more
fun on TV than in person. So is golf, other than once in a while.
(It’ll be great to see the ball fly from more than one angle.)
Jai-alai? Interactive TV features make fast-paced gambling
easy.
But some things you just can’t predict, and some TV has nothing
to do with technology at all. ESPN hit a mini-jackpot with pool.
And nothing, to me, accounts for the popularity of broadcast
poker.
High-def could boomerang, too. Does anybody want to see the
personalities of today’s NBA — up closer and more personal?
