Playing to the Extremes : With the X Games, ESPN Zooms In on a Week of Daredevil Sports

Feeling a void now that Michael Jordan is on summer vacation? Suffering withdrawal from pucks, checks and sudden-death overtime? Can’t wait 25 days for the Olympics to begin in Atlanta?

Never fear, spectator sports junkies, ESPN’s X Games are here.

They have nothing to do with “The X-Files,” but after watching some of the spine-chilling, death-defying antics of the athletes involved in these games, you’re likely to be wondering if they are indeed from another planet.

The X (short for “extreme”) Games are the Olympics for competitors in such endeavors as sky-surfing, bungee jumping, street luge, aggressive in-line skating, skateboarding, bicycle stunts, rock climbing and barefoot water ski jumping.

ESPN didn’t invent the individual disciplines. Maniacs--er, athletes in these sports had been competing against each other, pretty much in obscurity, for the last several years.

But, looking around for programming to put on its second full-time sports channel, ESPN2, executives at the cable company decided not to wait for someone in the sports world to create an extreme sports Olympiad and then charge them a rights fee to televise it. Instead, they created the event themselves. The first aired last summer. The second, a weeklong extravaganza in and around Providence, R.I., begins today.

“When ESPN2 was getting ready to launch, one of the things we wanted to program were these so-called extreme or alternative sports,” said Ron Semiao, director of programming for ESPN2. “And I thought, rather than try to build up these sports individually, the best way was to put them all together under one umbrella and that way show both the athleticism that goes into all of these things as well as the differences in culture and lifestyle that is also such a vital component of each of these sports.

“You have skateboarders who do amazing things and their idea of nutrition is a corn dog and Twizzlers, and then you have these adventure rock climbers who are absolute health nuts. Getting to see all of that together, beside one another, makes for something really compelling and entertaining.”

Semiao said that one of the reasons he was persuaded to pursue the X Games concept was that extreme sports have been turning up in mainstream advertising as often as buxom models in beer commercials. That meant that these activities have a great appeal, at least to a lot of young people.

But TV commercials use the sports as spectacle, not as true, disciplined, thousands-of-hours-of-practice-required competitions. The consensus of the average Joes watching from their couches at home is likely to be: Only a crazy person would try that.

ESPN, however, doesn’t present the X Games as a bunch of maniacs hurtling toward death. It treats them as legitimate competitions, same as track and field, same as professional hockey, despite that very few mainstream journalists cover these activities as actual sports.

“Sure, there is some cynicism about it from some people who can dismiss it as a bunch of bratty kids on Roller Blades trying to kill themselves, but I have felt that such criticism has tremendously lessened after people saw just what goes into competing in any of these events,” Semiao said. “These people are not Evel Knievel daredevils. They are tremendous athletes.”

Indeed, that’s part of what the ESPN coverage is intended to demonstrate, said Rich Feinberg, coordinating producer of the X Games, who is charged with overseeing nearly 600 people involved in broadcasting the event.

“We will show them as athletes, show how hard this is, do replays, color commentary to tell the viewer who is good and who is not doing so well, and then I guess people can make up their own mind whether it’s a sport or not,” Feinberg said.

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“I can’t change the perception if people want to dismiss it as a bunch of kids with a death wish. But look, ballroom dancing is in the Olympics. Now I don’t know if everyone would agree that is a sport, but I can tell you that the guy who wins the medal for ballroom dancing is as proud and worked as hard as anyone who wins in swimming or running. It’s the same with these athletes.”

No one dies in ballroom dancing, however. One member of the sky-surfing team that took first place in the inaugural X Games was killed last December when his parachutes malfunctioned during the filming of a soft drink commercial. But competitors die in auto racing, too, Feinberg pointed out, and that sport doesn’t often find itself pleading its case for legitimacy.

Feinberg predicts that within a few years, some, if not all, of these sports will find more mainstream acceptance, just as mogul skiing went from a music-video-type curiosity to an Olympic event over the course of about 10 years.

To jazz up the telecast and try to give the viewer the feel of what it’s like to jump off a plane and surf in the sky or to roll down a steep, curvy road an inch off the ground on a street luge, ESPN puts point-of-view cameras everywhere.

“We try to let the viewer experience the event as much as the technology will let us,” Feinberg said. “Since few of us have ever attempted any of these things and probably never will, that’s our challenge, and the way to do that is by using microphones and cameras on the athletes or the equipment to try to show what it feels like to hit a wooden ramp barefoot behind a boat at 70 mph and then fly hundreds of feet in the air. With bungee jumping and street luge, this is an incredibly exciting telecast to watch. Make sure you strap on your seat belt.”

The cost of staging and producing the games outweighs its ability to generate income at this point, but Semiao said ESPN is not taking a “huge bath” on them. The cable network is counting on the event becoming a major long-term prize as exposure and ratings increase. This coming February, ESPN will also unveil the first Winter X Games to fill the sports junkies’ void after the Super Bowl.

And there are other rewards, Semiao noted.

“The best reaction I got last year,” he said, “was a 39-year-old father from San Diego saying that he watched with his 13-year-old son and they had a blast. A lot of these sports are sort of part of a younger culture, and if in some small way it can be a method for fathers and sons to spend more time together, or for a parent to understand why his kid in-line skates down the railing on the porch, then I’m as thrilled as any of these guys jumping out of the plane.”

* Nearly 40 hours of coverage of the X Games will air through Sunday this week, beginning today at 5:30 p.m. on ESPN and 11 p.m. on ESPN2.