I'm All Ears: Let Athletes Have Their Say
During Saturday’s better-ball segment of the 2020 Ryder Cup cameras caught a lively debate between American Jordan Spieth and the caddy for Europe’s star Jon Rahm. They were disputing where to place the a ball after Rahm’s drive had gone into the penalty area.
While the pantomime of flapping lips and agitated players continued, the NBC announcers talked over the chatter with their cursory version of the events— but not much beyond the technical issue at hand. Why did NBC not gag its own talking heads for a moment and open up live audio to hear the voices? Surely the journalistic value was in going open mikes. (There’s a seven-second delay so any profanity could be excised.) The players were incensed with each other.
Later we saw Spieth, Rahm and the caddy making peace— again silent for the audience. With a few exceptions— a lengthy ruling on whether Brooks Koepka’s ball was impeded by an irrigation device— NBC largely kept us from the lively banter and occasional flare-ups on-course between players and caddies or players and fans. And when they grew nasty over putts not conceded the on-course interviewers never mentioned it to the players themselves in post-round interviews.
Instead, announcers often referred to reading the lips of players. Why? The repartee is the secret sauce in such events, beloved by fans.
Perhaps NBC has its hands tied? But then why did we get the occasional windows into strategy or club selection? Lord knows, we heard plenty from the announce team in the lengthy event. Salty characters like Phil Mickelson (coaching during Ryder Cup), Tyrrel Hatton and Ian Poulter are worth tuning in for.
This is not to single out NBC. CBS and ESPN are similar in curtailing audio beyond club choices. The public is craving the inside audio scoop, yet these events are carried as if it were still the 1990 Masters. Ditto for almost all team sports outside of the CFL and curling. (Rugby allows audio from referee’s video decisions.) It’s like watching a silent movie.
The success of Netflix’s F1 documentary series Drive To Survive (now showing its third year) is a perfect example of the public’s demand for the inner sanctum of sport. Drive To Survive has plenty of the Nuke LaLoosh blarney from athletes and owners. But it also has enough free-wheeling about the bitchiness between drivers, the headaches of team managers and some of the greatest video from the pits to intrigue even the least serious fans.
We have long resisted the excitement of F1 and other motor sports— in spite of the live driver/ pits audio provided. It was difficult— especially when covering the racing for a living— to reconcile sport with people you’d interviewed dying on the track. But F1 has managed to make the driving less lethal. Following the death of legend Ayrton Senna in 1994 measures were introduced to slow the cars, including bodywork aerodynamic limitations, a pit-lane speed limit and grooved tires.
The last death was Jules Bianchi who died in July 2015, nine months after sustaining severe head injuries during the 2014 Japanese Grand Prix. While there are still spectacular crashes captured in Drive To Survive, this allows the focus to be less on the history of the circuit and more on the current star power of the sport.
So cameras and microphones capture owners threatening to fire drivers, drivers telling each other to go “suck balls”, rivals acting like scorned school boys after crashes. There is a brutal honesty about the financial travails of owners who are arrested and lose their teams (Force India) or sponsors (Haas) in midseason.
In one Season 2 clip swaggering Aussie driver Daniel Riccadio laughingly calls the Netflix team “c**ts” and dares them to put the clip in the series. Clearly this has brought F1 a whole new audience of fans cooped up by Covid.
Not everyone in F1 bought into this candour. The top two teams— Ferrari and Mercedes— were conspicuous by their absence from Year 1. But the overwhelming global success of the series convinced them to join in Year 2— although less eagerly than teams like Renault, Haas, Sauber and Williams.
In short there is a huge appetite to hear as well as see the action. The NFL has broached it with the documentary series Hard Knocks, but games are largely silent. As we wrote in August 2018, they’ve got a ways to go before being like the CFL.
“For all the shade cast on the CFL, you have to give credit to the league and its exclusive broadcaster for having the nerve to defy the industry’s reluctance to go full-audio. In doing so they have stayed ahead of their cousins in the NFL on such technological and viewing innovations. The use of video replay to reverse (or call) penalties is the sort of insight that fans want— even if it makes coaches, GMs and owners blanch.
Perhaps the best way to get the NFL, NHL, MSL and NBA to follow the CFL’s lead is to introduce a profit motive. As we’ve suggested for many years now, fans would probably be amenable to paying for a special channel with unlimited audio. Pay a special fee on top of your NHL Centre Ice or NFL Red Zone subscription and get full live audio from games.
The effect might be like what happened when Hollywood converted from silent to talkies. Instead of scandal they’d have a new generation of viewers interested in their product. You can just see the promotion: “Fans, you’ve have seen their favourite sports stars for years. Now hear them live for the first time.”
It’s just crazy enough to work. But that’s the CFL. Sometimes it's crazy like a fox.
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster (http://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com). The best-selling author of Cap In Hand is also a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, his new book with his son Evan is called InExact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History is now available on http://brucedowbigginbooks.ca/book-personalaccount.asphy