Lost on the Air: the Write Stuff

Outlined against a blue-gray television screen, the four hoarse men of the Apocalypse are embarrassing themselves and their profession again.

They are shouting at each other. They are shouting at the smirking, obnoxious host who shouts back at them. They are shouting at you. They are shouting at me.

They are sportswriters by trade, and sportswriters had been behaving this way in press boxes long before Grantland Rice changed his first typewriter ribbon. They shout about the stupid opinion the guy sitting two seats down just shouted. They shout about the poor quality of the free food as they circle back for seconds. They shout about the idiot editor on the other end of the phone who doesn’t understand how hard it is to write with all this shouting going on.

It wasn’t something sportswriters were particularly proud of or willing to confess in mixed company. It isn’t something the newspaper reader really needs to know while plowing through that morning’s account of how the home team blew another close one.

But now it is on the air, all over the place, because after decades of healthy mistrust and mutual contempt, television and sportswriters have hit on a remarkable discovery: Those other guys are just as shameless and pathetic and desperate as we are -- and we know exactly how to exploit them.

The networks are desperate for midday programming that can compete, ratings-wise, with the whirring vacuum cleaner in the other room. They’re looking for something loud and cheap and fast and mindless. In this environment, if you can get a roomful of frat boys to stop pirating music off the Internet for half an hour between classes, you have the makings of an afternoon “hit.”

Sportswriters who appear on these shows are desperate for money and attention, always that combination, always in that order. Some get pushed in front of the camera by editors who believe that trading in the quality, credibility and reputation of their newspapers for a little cheap TV publicity is a good deal.

Periodically, sports editors from across the country will meet and discuss why sports sections are not as good as they once were. All they need to do is tune into ESPN’s daily doubleheader, “Around the Horn” followed by “Pardon the Interruption,” and they will have their answer.

“Around the Horn” exists -- I can only guess here -- because ESPN couldn’t figure out a way to fit all its cameras inside a dentist’s office and properly mike the drill. It is 30 minutes

of hell, orchestrated by a blathering self-important loudmouth named Max Kellerman, who also covers boxing for the

network and got this gig, presumably, because he has experience in talking over a bloody carnage.

Four sports columnists from newspapers from various time zones are rounded up via split screen, from their respective newsrooms, with their respective newspaper logos visible behind them, and, goaded on by Kellerman, are encouraged to act like morons.

Jay Mariotti of the Chicago Sun-Times, Woody Paige of the Denver Post, Bob Ryan of the Boston Globe, Tim Cowlishaw of the Dallas Morning News, and T.J. Simers and J.A. Adande of the Los Angeles Times are the primary columnists in the show’s rotation.

The format is pseudo-game show: Kellerman throws out a topic and the columnists are given a few moments to shout what they think about it. Or that’s what they’d like you to think. The object of the “competition” is not to see if anyone has anything intelligent or thought-provoking to say, because that takes too long -- any opinion that takes longer than 30 seconds to make has no place on this show. No, columnists earn or lose points strictly on the basis of whether Kellerman agrees with their take.

(Sample question: “Who is your favorite old-guy athlete? And there is a right answer.”)

The premise is absurd, of course. And that’s precisely the point. It’s merely a device to get the ball rolling and the writers shouting, so Kellerman can insult them and take points away from them -- points that translate into seconds of air time to be used later for more shouting. Just what we need.

And if the writers don’t shout loudly enough, or don’t shout over each other often enough, or don’t interrupt each other at the right time, they stop taping and do another take so they eventually can splice together a seamless 30-minute blast of headache-inducing inanity.

The show’s only redeeming feature: the mute button Kellerman pushes to silence a columnist for 10 seconds. Unfortunately, Kellerman is not nearly as trigger-happy as he needs to be. Fortunately, home viewers can compensate.

The other day, I directed the perfect “Around the Horn” from my sofa. I hit the mute button on my remote control when the show started and kept it there until it ended.

“Pardon the Interruption” lumbers on right after “Around the Horn,” and, by comparison, it is the Algonquin Round Table. It features Washington Post sports columnists Tony Kornheiser and Michael Wilbon doing the same thing they’ve done inside the Post newsroom for years -- only now, after streamlining it for television, they’re getting paid for it.

It also features a regular segment in which the sparring hosts take time out to interview a sports figure or commentator, apparently so they can catch their breath. The segment is called “Five Good Minutes,” or six more than you’ll find on “Around the Horn.”

Sportswriters-on-TV has seldom been a good idea. One exception: Mike Lupica’s hysterical fits on “The Sports Reporters,” which performed the useful service of scaring scores of journalism students into switching their majors and thereby thinning the prospective sportswriting talent pool. The job market is overcrowded as it is.

Sportswriters belong in front of a keyboard, not in pancake makeup. Newspapers have changed considerably since the advent of cable television and the rise of talk radio, but their fundamental game plan has not -- and that’s to give the people something television and radio cannot.

Television and radio deal in headlines and sound bites. Newspapers and their sports sections have the time and space to work beneath the surface, to look behind the scenes, to report and comment and analyze in greater depth and detail.

Somewhere along the line, the mission has become blurred, if not lost altogether. Shoved along by media mergers and “synergy” charts, the old adversarial relationship has given way to a proliferation of multimedia jacks-of-all-trades -- newspaper columnists with TV or radio gigs -- always at the expense of the newspaper.

How many feature stories and columns would be better written and more thoughtfully executed if the writer weren’t splitting his or her workday pulling long stints in the studio or in rehearsal?

A conservative guess?

All of them.

Shows such as “Around the Horn” chip away further by luring the columnist and his newspaper in because of their reputations, then degrading those reputations with a format that casts them as clowns.

Nostalgia is hot right now in sports, so maybe sportswriting still has a chance. Classic uniforms. Classic stadiums. If we wait long enough, armed in the dark with our remote controls and our mute buttons, maybe everyone will eventually regain their senses and remember what classic sportswriting once was all about.

Jim Murray and Red Smith never had their own television shows.