Jackson--Voice of Concern in a Changing Booth

When Keith Jackson broadcasts a sports event, it doesn’t have to be important to sound important. He has that urgent Voice of Authority that can make fourth-and-goal seem as significant as the outbreak of World War III. It was the voice that gave an illusion of credibility to the United States Football League. It was the voice that could take a manufactured piece of fluff like “Super Stars” and transform it into a quasi-legitimate athletic competition. Only Walter Cronkite could have done it better.

In 33 years as a sports broadcaster, Jackson has covered everything from the Olympics to auto racing. He is best known as the play-by-play man for ABC’s college football telecasts, highly respected for his clear, crisp reporting and pertinent observations. Although he is usually high on enthusiasm and low on opinions during broadcasts, he certainly has no reservations about speaking his mind when the mike is off.

From his perch in the press box, he has witnessed many changes in sports over the years, and he hasn’t really liked what he’s seen.

When Jackson replaced Chris Schenkel as ABC’s top college broadcaster 12 years ago, he literally was the voice of college football. There were no cable telecasts, no independent networks. ABC held the exclusive right to air college football games, and the big game was always handled by Jackson. When you tuned in ABC and heard Jackson’s voice, you knew that something major was going on, that this game was actually meaningful. Today, on one of those any-given-Saturdays in the fall, you can spin the dial and seemingly find a football game on almost every channel. Jackson and ABC still do a big game, but it just doesn’t mean as much as it once did.

In June, 1984, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Texas and Georgia and took away from the NCAA the right to control telecasts of sports events. As a result, individual colleges were able to complete deals with anyone who owned a video camera.

With an open market for their games, it seemed as though the major colleges would experience a financial windfall. But, apparently, the opposite has happened. The glut of telecasts has diluted the product. Ratings are down, advertising revenue is down. Perhaps some major colleges are making more money than they ever have, but overall, Jackson said, about $30 million less was spent for college football rights this season than in seasons past.

“I’m a little bemused by the lack of intelligence on the part of those who are supposed to think for the future,” said Jackson, sitting in his Sherman Oaks home, which overlooks the Valley. “They want to call it exposure, but you have to be an idiot not to realize that it’s saturation. You’re seeing empty seats in stadiums now that you never saw 20 or 25 years ago.

“The worm turned when the universities decided that football and basketball were prime revenue producers. It’s like the old homily. To get elected to political office you have to compromise all the principles that made you a candidate in the first place. When those college presidents decided that they were going to rely on revenue from football and basketball, they compromised away their principles.”

Jackson blames college presidents for not heeding the warnings of those who wanted the NCAA to get antitrust exemptions from Congress. “They were told that anyone could blow them out of the water, but the college presidents sat in the ivory towers of academia and scoffed at that,” Jackson said. “Now, saturation is going to wear out--kill--a piece of Americana I care about very much. But so be it. I’m not going to cry tears for it.”

Jackson sipped on a glass of red wine, then walked over and stoked his fireplace. In the corner of his living room stood a well-trimmed Christmas tree. Tradition means a lot to him.

“Remember when UCLA and Notre Dame played a basketball game and the whole country stopped for two hours?” Jackson said wistfully. “Now you sit down on an average Saturday in January and February and you can watch 20 or 40 college basketball games if you’ve got a satellite dish. You lose something with saturation. You lose the special moments. It was kind of fun to look forward to one special game.”

What’s happening in college athletics reflects a commercialization of sports, says Jackson, who forsees a bleak future.

“Down the long road, unless there is a some sociological or philosophical change,” he said, “we will just destroy it.”

The problem with professional sports, he says, is the infusion of seemingly limitless TV money, owners who buy franchises as “playthings” and fans who apparently are willing to keep paying exorbitant ticket prices.

“But there isn’t a damn thing going on in sports that isn’t going on in our generic society,” he said. “Sports just happens to have a greater glare of media than any other thing.”

It is in the best interests of Madison Avenue to keep sports alive and well. But Jackson doesn’t have much faith in the advertising masterminds of the world.

“Madison Avenue is not populated by a bunch of Phi Beta Kappas,” he said. “Look how many people are flying around trying to promote William (the Refrigerator) Perry. And he is not that good of a football player. He’s just lucky and he’s got a gimmick. But gimmicks don’t last. You can’t build a society on a gimmick. Where is the value of a gimmick?”

The proliferation of sports events on television--and the spread of cable stations--has been a boon to one segment of society: sports announcers and color analysts. It seems that anyone who doesn’t stutter can get a job in the broadcast booth. Jackson is embarrassed by the electronic media’s answer to the newspaper hack.

“The mediocrity is rampant, absolutely rampant,” he said.

And thanks to an increase in televised games, the so-called expert commentator has more opportunities than ever to show why he flunked English 101 in college. Practically nothing riles Jackson more than the seemingly inalienable right of every ex-athlete to step off the field and into the booth.

“It’s against all the basic precepts of, quote, journalism,” Jackson said. “I resent the hell out of it because it’s my profession. I resent that Roone Arledge has brought people off the playing field who are utterly uninformed. All-Americans and all-pros who don’t know their own game. Since 1963, I’ve probably worked with 550 of them--every kind, color and creed--and probably three, five at the outside, have been worth a damn.

“I wind up carrying them. The producer sits in the truck and doesn’t know how to train them. Roone sure as hell isn’t going to do it. And neither is the damn network sales department. So who winds up with the burden of these horses’ asses? The old working-stiff announcer.

“That’s a cocklebur under my saddle. Never did like it, don’t like it now, never will like it.”

An exception, a commentator who isn’t a cocklebur to Jackson, is Frank Broyles, former football coach at Arkansas and his current partner in the booth. Broyles was a natural, Jackson says, but “he was also coachable, and he worked, worked, worked. Never let the game pass him by.”

Although Jackson has a lot of views that he’d like to share with people, he doesn’t express them on the air because of network television’s financial relationship with sports. He once was a reporter in the journalistic sense--he broke a slush-fund scandal at the University of Washington and “crawled around on my belly during the Watts riots” when he worked for ABC radio. But when he became a network sports announcer, he could forget scoops, investigations and journalism.

“A newspaper reporter goes to cover an event and isn’t beholden to anybody,” he said, “but a network has to buy the rights, which costs millions. Now, does a network go out and pay millions for the rights to present a product on the air as entertainment and then have the announcer go on the air and kick the hell out of it? I have no choice but to present the game in its best light as entertainment.

“My philosophy when the red light goes on is basically this: You’re a banker, doctor, truck driver. You turn on your set to see this particular college contest. I bet you don’t want to hear that the running back is getting $38 more a month than the right tackle, or that he’s shacking up with the dean of the English department’s daughter. You just want to watch the game, be entertained, get away from it all. So I just give it to ‘em, let ‘em enjoy it, and be done with it.”

Not that Jackson doesn’t criticize.

“I don’t mind criticizing a coach--not the way Howard would do it; my technique is not Cosellian--but I certainly will make my point, just as I made my point very sharply in the Notre Dame-Air Force game when I thought that Notre Dame was ill-prepared, poorly coached and not ready to play Air Force. What I try to do is explain to the viewer why Notre Dame is failing or why Air Force is winning. But does that a journalist make? I think not.”

But even if the networks would start giving sports the hard-news treatment, the public, Jackson contends, does not want controversy or off-the-field adventures in sports.

“Howard Cosell is an example of a cogent sports journalist,” Jackson said. “Think what you will of him, but whether you like him or not, he tried, particularly with ‘SportsBeat,’ but nobody watched it. There have been many instances where people try to do some tough stuff on TV, but the public isn’t interested.

“CBS and NBC are not going to say anything negative about the NFL, even though there’s a place”--on pregame shows--”to do some real rough stuff, some truth seeking. But it is not going to happen.”

There was a rumor that the USFL insisted on ABC assigning Jackson to its games to give pro football fans the impression the league was first-class. Jackson doesn’t believe the rumor was true.

“I was under contract to ABC,” he said, “and they came up with this package. I was entertained by the idea. Was football strong enough to compete with Easter Sunday, Mother’s Day, crabgrass and dandelions?”

What Jackson and the USFL learned, of course, was that pro football couldn’t make it in the spring. And what are the USFL’s chances next fall, when it goes head to head with college football and the National Football League?

“They’ll get buried,” he said. “They have no chance. They can’t compete in the lion’s den. And you know damn well, if the USFL were to become a viable factor in the entertainment-dollar marketplace, the colleges would slam the door on them, because now the USFL would be taking money out of their pockets.”

And money, Jackson knows, is the real name of the game.

“If I was the czar of sports,” he said, “I’d take the TV money out for a while to bring the price of everything back to a rational level. It’s the TV money that has led to a distortion of values and a severe escalation of the cost of everything.”