Joe Faraoni
ESPN 'SportsCenter' anchors, like Michael Yam (l.) and Mike Hill, run down the top action of the day, every day.
The sigh of relief from sports fans when the Olympics ended last Sunday night was so pronounced I?m surprised it didn?t register on the Richter scale.
It?s not that they minded the Olympics. To the average sports fans, four years is just about the right interval to catch up on a little water polo or see who?s big in hammer throwing.
By the time the Olympics ended, though, almost all moderate-to-serious sports fans were salivating to click back to ESPN, whose nightly ?SportsCenter? in particular covers sports the way the Lord intended.
Highlight, highlight, highlight. Bang, bang, bang. In 30 minutes, you?ve got the whole sports day, and if that feels like too long, ESPN distills it again into a two-minute top 10.
There?s no way around it: ESPN defines television sports these days the way Coke defines cola, iPod defines personal music devices and the Cyclone defines Coney Island.
The weirdest thing for sports fans during the Olympics was not watching NBC, even at those moments when NBC made you want to gnaw off your right hand.
The weirdest thing was watching the Olympics reports on ?SportsCenter.?
The hosts were reporting Olympics results, of course, but since NBC had exclusive rights to the film footage, ESPN couldn?t show any of it. All ESPN could do was post a still picture and describe what happened.
This is not how ESPN rolls. The whole deal with ESPN, and a big part of the reason the ESPN brand has encased the sports world like amber, is that ESPN almost always has the action.
You get to a segment of ?SportsCenter? and within seconds you?re seeing live footage of whatever the anchor is discussing, often moments after it happened.
That?s no accident. ESPN has a monster room with dozens and dozens of TV monitors. At each monitor an ESPN employee is leaning forward to comb through video and flag critical plays or interesting oddities.
The result: For what feels like 90% of its stories, ESPN delivers quick, punchy video of the drama the host is discussing.
What ESPN is really doing here is applying the same principle to television sports that a man named Bill Drake applied years ago when he shaped modern top-40 radio.
?Play the hits,? said Drake. ?Play ?em over and over.?
It?s a strategy that drives all-day listeners, and some deejays, crazy. But Drake realized most listeners aren?t tuned in all day. They tune in for 20 minutes here, 20 minutes there, and when they do, they want the day?s top hits.
A sports fan who has 20 minutes for ?SportsCenter? wants the sports day?s top hits.
Source: http://feeds.nydailynews.com/~r/nydnrss/sports/~3/90xKw7Yb8Lw/story01.htm
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