Firing of Musburger Case of Overexposure

You sit in mild shock, reconstructing what has happened in the wake of Brent Musburger’s uncoupling by CBS.

What you have is an uncomplicated case of a television guy getting bounced. What has resulted is an earthly crisis, leaving you to ponder several points, none of which is important, but all of which tend to show intriguing interest in television reporting.

Sports events on TV today seem to pale in importance to the way they are announced. Show us a viewer and we will show you a formidable authority on the broadcasting art.

The attitude may be an extension of what one finds in newspapers, now grown serious in their appraisals of how someone calls a match on television.

A bum in the booth would seem to be television’s problem, not ours.

Newspapers review television, but television doesn’t review newspapers, maybe a break for newspapers. The upshot is, if Red Smith, or Grantland Rice, or John Lardner, late giants of sports print, were writing today and got bounced, eyebrows might arch. But you announce the removal of Brent Musburger, American colossus, and the republic quakes.

Brent isn’t a bad fellow. We first encounter him as a baseball writer in Chicago, enjoying a spectacular paucity of success. Discouraged with his job, he starts dabbling in radio, then in television, quickly to rise as a large personality in the industry, earning wages in seven figures.

When this happens to Brent, he can’t believe the outrageous nature of TV, rewarding people with such treasure, for such labor. Brent goes along, tittering.

And this is the way many begin in broadcasting. Then an interesting transformation occurs. The money is soon taken for granted and the principal gets serious about himself and his functions. He is moving in an orbit of luxury hotel suites, dinners at Lutece, limos, even chartered jets.

Outside stadiums, autograph seekers besiege him. Solicited for talk shows, he tells long stories about his flight from New York--like an actor. From a listed telephone, he goes to unlisted, from where he shifts to an arrangement whereby one telephones a second party, who contacts the third party to see if he will return the call of the first party.

The first party isn’t always successful.

In the case of some who rose to executive producer, they wouldn’t even return calls to their announcers.

Executive producers ordered documentaries, dramatizing for viewers the work of their staffs and themselves. One wound up such an epic removing his headphones on camera, lighting a victory cigar and telling his group, “Great show, guys.”

So sports television, at the network level, is no business for one whose head is readily turned. Dazzled by the glamour, the adulation and the money, he sets himself up for a mighty depression when the foot arrives.

For one who pulled the string 15 years, Musburger comported himself better than most, always conscious of the circus in which he performed, the absurdity of the pay and the frailty of the job.

It wasn’t until a few days after his canning that Brent slipped, appearing on two networks to tell viewers of his unfair deal. He was forgetting the wisest of maxims, namely, only suckers complain.

Brent was forgetting, too, about the 15 years he fooled ‘em.

Certainly Howard Cosell, most distinguished in broadcast journalism to land on his organ of hearing, forgot. Howard decimated just about everyone--producers, directors, colleagues in the booth and noblemen of the press.

In a cultural exchange one time with your venerable correspondent, Howard shouted:

“I have had the most hostile press in America. I have been called a company pimp, a prostitute and a man with no trace of decency or morality. I have been vilified by people who have made no effort to look into my background, my education and my honesty.”

He then added, thoughtfully:

“And I know your story will make me look like a horse’s ass.”

His genius for prophecy was impressive.

But Cosell had a rare gift in his industry. He not only was the talent, but the agency that promoted the talent. And the agency had a devotion to the client that warmed the heart.

No one in the business rose higher than Howard and he, too, was destructible, vanishing into the pack, whence he came.

Everyone in sports broadcasting should remember the deathless words of the late Harvey Kuenn, who said of baseball managing, “All of us are going to get fired. It’s just a matter of how long we can last until it happens.”

The Musburger firing flabbergasts you, not for the atrocity of the act, but for the commotion it has stirred. What has happened is, in TV, a tribute to form.