One of Roone Alredge's lasting legacies from his days as news and sports director at ABC is the idea of creating storylines, and making the story the focus of a broadcast, with the game and/or news being used as the backdrop from which to tell those stories. While that's sometimes an effective way to cover an event, you have to prepare for the possibility that the game won't turn out like you thought it would, and you may have to go in a different direction. Lately, the people at ESPN (and the creation "ESPN on ABC") seem to have lost sight of this fallback plan.
Take, for instance, the Belmont Stakes from this past Saturday. Da' Tara won the race, a victory which ended Big Brown's hopes of winning the Triple Crown. However, you wouldn't really know that from the post-race coverage. I've rewatched this a couple times just to make sure that I saw what I thought I saw, and the tape confirms my initial impressions. It's a long clip, but worth watching:
Notice anything after the race? How about almost zero acknowledgement of the actual winner of the race?
Within six seconds of the finish of the race, the cameras shot away from Da' Tara and focused directly on Big Brown. Twenty seconds in they mention Da' Tara very briefly, and then it's all Big Brown all the time.
Jerry Bailey and Randy Moss speculating on whether Big Brown was healthy or not. A replay of Big Brown fighting jockey Kent Desormeaux around the first turn. A shot of the very sweaty Rick Dutrow Jr. Jeanine Edwards interrogating Desormeaux about why he eased up Big Brown. An aerial shot of Big Brown being walked back to the barn. Terry Gannon repeating Desormeaux's quote of "I had no horse". Replaying the start of the race to see if Big Brown got off to a rough start.
Over four minutes passed before there was any mention of anything related to Da' Tara; in this case, it was trainer Nick Zito. In fact, the only reason I haven't said when the first mention of Da' Tara came up is because there isn't a mention of him in the clip, which extends more than four minutes past the race finish.
I get that the Triple Crown possibility was a huge draw, and that's why most people were watching the race. I also think they could have been drawn into the telling of the 38-1 longshot, ridden by a 22 year old jockey who'd never mounted a horse in a Triple Crown race, that shot out to the lead, dared the other horses to come match him, and then blew the field away. Instead, they decided to conduct an immediate investigation and interrogation into why the 1-4 favorite didn't run his best race (and have we not learned from the Duke lacrosse fiasco that it might be better to gather some information and then make a judgment after cooler heads have prevailed).
But I guess I shouldn't have expected anything more from the ESPN family of networks, where college hoops games have become a vehicle to talk about Duke basketball, Ray Lewis dominates the camera during any Ravens game on the network (after they finish talking about Michael Vick), MLB games are littered with sidebar discussions of "who's number one" over what's actually going on in the game, and NASCAR races are shot almost exclusively from the perspective of Hendricks Motorsports at the expense of the fans of the other 40 drivers.
Years ago, an interviewer asked one of the top executives at ESPN why people were so drawn to the station. His response was short and to the point: you can't go to the video store and rent tonight's game, you have to watch the game. I think ESPN's forgotten about that statement. Perhaps someday they'll go back to simply broadcasting the game. Until then, let's just hope that the games play out like the story says it should.
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