Jocks ‘n’ Yocks: The Sportscaster as Comedian

Viewers demand no journalism from sportscasters. And in most cases, nothing is exactly what they get.

The cupboard’s bareness is especially visible on a local level. A brief history of the genre:

The early, pre-color days of television brought Phase I: sportscasting yokels who wore crew cuts and bow ties as they sat in front of a camera and did little more than give the scores and regurgitate wire reports.

That was followed by the era of ex-jocks, who were hired because their reputation as athletes implied--usually falsely--that they were perceptive about the inner workings of sports. Those in sports may be the least perceptive about sports.

This dissolved into the epoch of sports buddies, when local sportscasters went out of their way to position themselves as close and loyal pals of the teams and athletes they were supposed to be covering. Stu Nahan, when he was at KNBC Channel 4, and Jim Hill, now at KABC-TV Channel 7, come immediately to mind in this category.

With the age of enormous rights contracts having arrived, and each side relying on the other for significant revenue, TV and sports were getting increasingly cozy and unwilling to see themselves as adversaries in any way. Nowhere was their ever-deepening, incestuous relationship more evident locally than in the proto-typical stand-up routine, consisting of the sports buddies clowning in front of the camera:

As the sportscaster tries his best to do a live report in the field, a member of the team being advertised by the sportscaster disrupts him by tugging at his pants or making faces behind his back or--when the creative urge can no longer be suppressed--pouring a soft drink on his head. The sportscaster protests and feigns frustration, but is inwardly swelling with pride and thrilled that viewers are witnessing this expression of playful kinship that shows him as a lap dog for his news sources.

New times demand more inventive forms. Various phases tend to overlap, of course, but many big stations are now revving up for the 1990s with a newer, livelier breed of sportscaster. He ridicules. He winks. He smirks. He mocks. He jokes. He is . . .

The comic.

Some explanation is in order here. On both a national and local level, there have always been sportscasters who made you laugh when they weren’t trying to make you laugh. During HBO’s coverage of Monday night’s middleweight title fight between Michael Nunn and Iran Barkley, for example, Sugar Ray Leonard observed: “This is an interesting fight so far because of the style Michael Nunn has selected to choose.” A well-chosen selection of words.

On KABC-AM radio recently, Nahan lightheartedly noted that when the Dodgers stage their annual game with their kids, the kids somehow always win. Nahan added: “There must be some coercion going on.” Or perhaps collusion.

When it comes to shrewd observations by sportscasters, however, nothing tops what happened some years ago on a regional telecast of a basketball game between an all-black Marquette team and an all-white South Carolina team on the latter’s home court. Some pushing and shoving during the game exploded into a massive brawl between blacks and whites that came close to being a full-fledged race riot.

Describing the chaos on the floor, the announcer buoyantly declared: “That’s what makes college athletics so great!” And lynchings.

There are comics and there are comics, however. Unlike many of their predecessors, the new sportscasters intend to leave you smiling, their humor becoming a metaphor for the narrowing gap between TV news and entertainment.

You have to hand it to both wholesome Fred Roggin on KNBC Channel 4 and acerbic Keith Olbermann on KCBS-TV Channel 2, who not only say funny things, but are extremely adept at assembling artfully wacky highlight packages that are almost always amusing and sometimes even hilarious.

Olbermann works largely as a solo. But with Roggin working almost back-to-back on Channel 4 with weather wit Fritz Coleman--well, listen, you have a very funny, very breezy newscast that offers an escape from reality.

It was surely Roggin’s popularity, in fact, that recently prompted Channel 7 to drop Hill from its declining 11 p.m. newscast in favor of a gimmicky newcomer who comes on like a three-alarm fire and is about as enjoyable. His name is Todd Donoho.

Ho ho.

Segueing to Donoho from such sober news as a story on murdered American hostage Col. William R. Higgins, as Channel 7 once did, is not merely awkward, it’s repulsive.

Few things are more pathetic than someone who thinks he’s funny, tries to be funny, but isn’t funny. Donoho has moderated his act somewhat since his opening nights. As he delivers his sports report while standing in front of a big screen, however, he still reminds you of the guy at the party who screams jokes with a lamp shade on his head.

Besides himself, his main gimmicks are a trivia question, which Channel 7 anchors are able to answer with suspicious regularity, and an off-handed commentary segment titled “Take a Hike.” He cites the offense, then tells the offender to “take a hike.”

On Monday night, he took aim at NFL teams who charge as much for exhibition games as regular season games. It was almost identical to comments made a half hour earlier on KCOP Channel 13 by Vic (The Brick) Jacobs, one of the deans of the sportscaster comics and someone who expresses his negative feelings on the air by throwing a foam rubber brick at the camera.

All of you guys. . . .

Take a hike!

Meanwhile, while feasting on the free, overwhelmingly positive publicity it gets night after night on local TV, it’s the sports industry that continues getting the last and loudest laugh.