Shooting and scoring

How sports broadcasting shapes TV coverage of the war

By Scott Stossel, 4/6/2003

V VIEWERS WHO tuned into CBS to watch the opening rounds of the NCAA Division I Men's Basketball Tournament in mid-March could be forgiven for being a bit bewildered. All the usual elements of game coverage were there. The color commentary. The computerized graphics. The interviews with the tired, sweaty young men. The pre- and postgame analysis by a studio full of talking heads. But something was different. The color commentators weren't retired coaches-they were retired generals. The young men weren't athletes-they were soldiers. The action in question wasn't the March Madness tournament, but the war in Iraq. During the first few days of the war, CBS frequently preempted its NCAA basketball coverage in order to cover it.

Sports and war have long been intertwined. The ancient Greeks established the first Olympic games in part to train male citizens for combat. Native American tribes such as the Algonquin and the Mohawk used an early form of lacrosse (which the Iroquois dubbed ''the little brother of war'') as both training for warfare and a means of settling disputes. In the early 20th century Walter Camp, the father of American football, spoke of football teams as ''armies,'' of the kicking game as ''artillery work,'' and of coaching as ''generalship.'' (''Long range bombs'' account for much of the territory won in both wars and football games over the last 60 years.) Today, sports lingo and war lingo are practically interchangeable. Last Wednesday, CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer described the US military's decision to redeploy the 82nd Airborne at the last minute as an ''audible called at the line of scrimmage.'' After the game on March 22, the Arizona Wildcats' senior forward Luke Walton marveled, ''It was a war out there.''

Sports, it has been said, are the American idiom. But that alone doesn't entirely explain why there are so many similarities between the way television covers sports and the way it covers war. There is something in the structure of the television industry itself that tends to convert everything to a sports-like spectacle.

Of course, television sports wasn't always the high-tech, high-revenue enterprise it is today. The first televised sporting event, a baseball game between Columbia and Princeton, was broadcast by NBC on May 17, 1939. It was not a success. NBC had only one camera, viewers could hardly see the players (let alone the ball), and any action beyond the infield was invisible. But the networks persisted. In the 1940s and `50s, televised boxing-with its low production costs and built-in drama-became the first consistently profitable televised sport. In 1958, NBC's broadcast of the NFL championship-in which Johnny Unitas's Baltimore Colts beat Frank Gifford's New York Giants in sudden-death overtime-reached 40 million people and demonstrated for the first time that sports television could grip a large national audience.

But if there was a single moment that determined the future of televised sports (and of televised war), it was ABC's decision in 1960 to hire a pudgy 29-year old named Roone Arledge to run its football division. Arledge's previous experience consisted of his production work on the Emmy-winning puppet show ''Hi, Mom.'' But before the 1960-61 football season, he wrote a memo to ABC's programming directors proposing a number of innovations-such as directional and remote microphones to capture sounds on the field, split screens, multiple cameras, and half-time analysis-that would revolutionize sports broadcasting. Over the next several decades, Arledge introduced dozens of further innovations-most notably the instant replay, the ''rifle-mike'' that can pinpoint sound, and the short, preproduced segments that lend ''human interest'' to game coverage.

Arledge's ideas became staples of TV sports coverage and produced ratings bonanzas for his two signature shows, ''ABC Wide World of Sports'' and ''Monday Night Football,'' and huge profits for ABC. By the 1970s, NBC and CBS had also begun investing heavily in their own sports divisions. By the 1980s, sports was the engine that drove TV broadcasting, both financially and technologically.

As a result, news coverage began more and more to look like sports coverage, culminating in CNN's groundbreaking coverage of the 1991 Gulf War, which featured such Arledge techniques as instant replays of explosions, computer graphics to illustrate troop movements or missile trajectories, and postgame analysis by retired military officers. The techniques translated well; CNN's Gulf War coverage made the cable network a major player in television news.

Today, after years of co-evolution, there are so many similarities between sports coverage and war coverage that we tend not to notice them. If you watch the NCAA championship game tomorrow night, or the war coverage any night, pay close attention. There will of course be replays (of slam dunks and Baghdad explosions) and computerized graphics (showing where three-point shots and missiles were launched from). There will be postgame interviews (with players or soldiers) in which the interviewees will say, ''It was tough out there but we fought hard and prevailed.''

There will also be the graphical rendition of vital statistics (the height, weight, position, and points-per-game of the players, and of the flying speed, fuel capacity, and throw weight of an airplane or missile). There will be a familiar rhythm to the coverage, alternating from live play-by-play coverage to studio analysis to dispatches from roving reporters on the sidelines or embedded with the troops. Even the network graphics (compare ''The Road to the Final Four'' with ''The Road to Baghdad'') will look and sound the same.

The Roone Revolution, with its strong emphasis on delivering entertainment to viewers, has unquestionably made televised sports easier to follow and more fun to watch. It has now done the same for televised war. Admittedly, war as globally televised sport can be compelling to watch. Yet when war acquires for its viewers all the features and accoutrements of a sporting event, there is an inevitable flattening of moral perspective. War becomes spectacle, as the media theorists would say-just another entertainment option on television.

''The game has just begun,'' said CNN anchor Aaron Brown a few days into the war. Then he paused, caught himself, and said, ''But this is no game.'' For TV viewers, it may be getting harder to remember that.

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This story ran on page C1 of the Boston Globe on 4/6/2003.
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