Score one -- for feelings
The official motto of these Winter Olympics, the Italian motto, is “Passion Lives Here.” The official motto on NBC -- or the Networks of NBC, as it is now pronounced, to encompass USA, CNBC and MSNBC -- is “Personality Lives Here.”
Kicking off coverage of the opening ceremonies Friday night, the Networks of NBC immediately set the table for who we were supposed to care about: There was a sweetie pie, figure skater Michelle Kwan, but also a nihilist, downhill racer Bode Miller, and a snowboarder, Shaun White, with red hair and a nickname to love -- “The Flying Tomato.”
These were truly the network’s opening ceremonies, never mind that three-hour Cirque du Soleil-like extravaganza in which Yoko Ono mixed her metaphors (“It’s time for action and the action is peace!”) and “NBC Nightly News” anchor Brian Williams rhapsodized: “These Games begin at an interesting, some would say dicey, time in our world; there’s no getting around that. But we also know that sports can have a huge unifying effect on all of us.”
It seemed like he’d flown all the way from New York to Turin just to say that. Sorry, newsman, that geopolitical angle instantly felt like a nonstarter.
Better to preordain the outsized (American) personalities in these Games and then make the whole 80-nation event about whether these three athletes would win or lose -- sponsored by Nike and brought to you by Chevy, proud sponsor of the Chevy Moment.
You can’t fault the Networks of NBC -- it’s hard to know exactly how to sell out the Games, and by Sunday they’d lost Kwan, due to injury.
It left the network without a leading lady amid all those semi-obscure sports to telecast. I know of no luge office pools, no fantasy curling leagues. In an age of reality shows and a traffic jam of options, networks that televise sports demand of the athletes performance off the field as much as on -- the Shaq-Kobe feud to boost the ratings of a regular-season game in the NBA, the soap opera of the impulsive Terrell Owens to get NFL junkies to the next Sunday.
It’s a kind of vaudeville, involving big business and media literacy, much of it predicated on that question athletes are always asked and never know how to answer: “How do you feel?”
As a line of inquiry, it’s a joke because athletes aren’t in their heads; it’s why they’re able to stand at the top of a very giant hill on two wooden sticks and not think, “What am I doing here?”
But we were only 15 or 20 minutes into the 400 or so hours of the Networks of NBC coverage before the subject was feelings, nothing more than feelings.
“How do you put a finger on, you know, on how you feel about this?” NBC’s Jimmy Roberts asked Miller about his challenge in these Olympics.
“I don’t have to put a finger on it,” Miller said. “That’s what’s nice about being me instead of you. You have to put a finger on it. But, uhm ...”
“But you’re the one who’ll complain if I do put a finger on it, though, right?”
It was kind of a “Brokeback” moment -- Jimmy and Bode in Bode’s mobile home somewhere in France, Jimmy trying to tell Bode he couldn’t quit him, Bode saying, look, Jimmy, “I’ve been through a lot of transitions, and I’ve dealt with a lot of challenging situations with authority, with ... being forced into a position where I had to manipulate a system to get what I wanted out of it. And if you don’t think I’m that way with the press or with you guys, you’re simply missing the point.”
Miller’s the anti-up-close-and-personal Olympic profile: The closer you get to him, the more impersonal and phony he suggests it all is.
He’s the guy who grew up without running water or electricity in the woods of New Hampshire, where he was home-schooled before going out into the world to become a skiing prodigy.
Soon, I was unable to quit him, either, going to his “South Park”-like Nike-sponsored website, www.joinbode.com, where I clicked on an outhouse and listened to Bode talk about why he finds alone time in the bathroom so restorative and how “TV and media right now these days are brutally mind-numbing and tedious.”
The kid is a natural-born blogger too?
By Saturday, the Networks of NBC were no longer kidding around: They aired a piece in which Tom Brokaw was dispatched to Utah to interview Robert Redford about the similarities between Miller and the rebel skier Redford conjured for his 1969 film “Downhill Racer.”
Redford and Miller, Brokaw said, “two unapologetic American originals.”
The Olympics, as always, provide an opportunity to educate Americans about the world at large in a context of wide interest: sports (Andorra’s a country?).
And yet, too often, to watch is to feel like an American tourist looking for a local place to eat in Zagreb and ending up at a Hard Rock Cafe.