Hank Gathers--TV Eulogy for a Sportsman

You can say this about television coverage of Hank Gathers: For once, the hero was a good guy.

First, backtrack.

TV’s drug has always been conflict. In sports, that means anything from someone throwing a tantrum to someone throwing a hockey stick.

Sportscasters at once look askance at the aberrant conduct of some sports figures and exploit that behavior. They give it the old tsk , tsk , then show the footage anyway--revel in it, wallow in it, feed on it, get stoned on it--because they think it’s good TV.

They’re simply wiped out when hockey players intentionally clobber each other on the ice, but recover in time to show the carnage in bright, vivid, living gore.

They tell you what a snot John McEnroe is for losing control, then wait, hope, pray for him to come apart on the court because human explosions make the screen throb and come alive.

They show you the basketball coaches who become psychopaths during games. They show you coaches challenging each other to fights. They show you Georgetown Coach John Thompson getting thrown out of a game, show you Temple Coach John Chaney having to be physically restrained on the court during a snit that went off the Richter scale. They show you Oklahoma Coach Billy Tubbs using the public address system to castigate officials on his home court, thereby further inflaming the rowdy crowd he was purporting to restrain.

They show you people out of control and, at least as they appear on TV, out of sync with civilized behavior.

They show you players taunting each other, show you boxers playing to the crowd by standing over their vanquished foes and gloating.

They show you all of this, lift an eyebrow in mock displeasure, then wink at it as if it’s cute and all right--in effect toasting conduct that’s unacceptable outside of sports but is tolerated here because it’s thought to be a good show.

No wonder then that so many young athletes get the wrong message. They see who gets TV’s eye, see the kind of behavior that attracts attention, and then they act accordingly. And when they do receive the media attention themselves, again and again and again, they get such an exaggerated sense of their importance that they begin to believe that society’s rules don’t apply to them.

In these cases, TV celebrates and helps shape false heroes and bad role models.

That is why the Gathers coverage stands out as being, in the main, as refreshing as his death was tragic. The judgment seems unanimous--he was a swell person whose fatal collapse during a game Sunday ended not only the life of a fine athlete, but also the life of someone of substance who had a profound impact on those who knew him.

Sights and sounds told all.

The grieving--from Gathers’ old pal and Loyola Marymount teammate Bo Kimble to Temple Coach Chaney back in Gathers’ hometown of Philadelphia--was a eulogy of tears as achingly true and heart-rending as anything we will ever see on television. To be loved like that. . . .

When it comes to content, most of the coverage has been admirably restrained.

In reporting the story initially, it was not only proper but also essential for stations to use that ESPN footage of Gathers collapsing seconds after a powerful dunk and then going into convulsions. As awful as they were to watch, those pictures told a story.

Now that they’ve been seen repeatedly, however, it’s time to pull the plug on that instant replay before it winds up being reduced to morbid sensationalism.

For the most part, the Gathers family’s privacy was respected too, although CBS and KCAL Channel 9 were both guilty of showing a distraught family member at the hospital, crying into a phone: “Oh, God, what are we going to do?” What are we going to do with media voyeurs who insist on butting in on private grief?

Inevitably, there were other excesses too.

The death of Gathers was “so unexpected,” Channel 9 anchorman Jerry Dunphy said Monday night, “that even death was caught off guard on this one.” Whatever that meant.

Every local newscast in Los Angeles did a Gathers tribute Monday night, most very nice, a few as pretentious as Gathers himself apparently was unpretentious. It was KCAL, in the premiere of its new three-hour, prime-time news block, however, that almost seemed to elevate Gathers to head-of-state status by opening its 8 p.m. newscast with 14 minutes on his death (including a live report from the empty auditorium where a memorial was to be held the next day). There were substantial follow-ups later in the hour and during the station’s subsequent newscasts that night.

Despite all the stories and all the effusive words (“We were just borrowing Hank Gathers, folks, just borrowing him,” said KCAL sportscaster Joe Fowler), it’s somewhat ironic that no one on TV has really defined exactly what it was that made Gathers so special, put him a cut above the other good guys of the world and earned him such lavish coverage in death.

Perhaps just being a good guy was enough.