February 2006 Archives

As I'm driving into work today, a TV crew -- van; antenna fully, um, engorged; the whole bit -- is set up on the rocks along Pacific Coast Highway. A body, I think? Somebody found something in the water? What gets a cocaine-addled local news reporter out of bed and on location -- live! -- other than a high-speed car chase? Ah, yes. It's supposed to rain today.

StormWatch!

The camera was pointing north, at the vaguely grayish clouds, and would undoubtedly be providing up-to-the-second information on the latest Biblical apocalypse to visit itself Los Angeles: water falling from the sky.

My secret hope is that the cocaine-addled (and, inevitably, poncho-bedecked) spokesmodel, reporting -- live! -- with the storm as a backdrop, stumbles on the rocks and falls, smashing his and/or her pretty little head to pretty little pieces. Then, hey, a body would be found in the water, and it would be news.

Good thing they'd already have the camera there.

Is it just me or do the medals at this year's games look like something someone picked up at The Warehouse after the shipment of real medals got lost in the mail?

"Congratulations. Here's your gold medal."

"Thank you... say, why does this say 'Journey: Greatest Hits?'"

"Uh... shut up is why, medal boy."

A thought about NBC's coverage of the Nordic Combined event, while it's still burned onto my brain: I think it is safe to say that we, as a nation, are as well-versed in our cross-country skiing/ski jumping competitions as we probably should be. I mean, I watch an estimated 132 hours of sports on TV each week, and I'm fairly certain that none of that was devoted to the Nordic Combined prior to yesterday. I do not log on to the Internet to get my daily fix of Nordic Combined results. I do not spend hours chatting with my buddies about the turning point in assorted Nordic Combined events. I did not draft Hannu Manninen for my Nordic Combined fantasy team. I don't even know if Nordic Combined fantasy leagues actually exist.

So I don't know much about what's going on with the Nordic Combined, and I must rely on NBC to help me make sense of it all, in a way that I would not if this were a Cubs-Brewers game or the John Deere Classic or any one of the other sporting events I've wasted the best years of my life watching. And in explaining the finer points of Nordic Combined to me, NBC came up markedly short.

Put it this way: A graphic that I need to sit down and examine the way I might a medical chart or topographical map is probably a bit too convoluted for an Olympics telecast. And NBC's Nordic Combined graphics are a blur of Scandinavian names, plus and minus symbols, and numerals rendering in eye-straining 7-point type that look something like this:

Georg Hettich GER 1:23:50 +0:33
Petter Tande NOR 1:23:56 +0:39
Jaakko Tallus FIN 1:23:57 +0:40
J. Lamy-Chappuis FRA 1:24:01 +0:44

I spent a few minutes staring at these numbers from several inches away from my TV screen, and I think I finally cracked NBC's code. I'm also know legally blind. Thanks, NBC. Anyhow, the Nordic Combined stats seem to display the name of the competitor, the country, their time, and how far they are behind the leader in the cross-country skiing portion of the event. Seems pretty straight-forward, huh? Yes, except that as a new competitor comes into view, he knocks one of the older competitors off the list, so that the names are constantly scrolling up and off your TV screen. The effect is like you've suddenly been deposited on the trading floor of the Oslo Stock Exchange, and you're trying to trade all your shares in Jaakko Tallus before his ticker symbol disappears from view.

NBC also apparently hasn't figured out that one lithe Northern European in a skin-tight body suit pretty much looks like any other lithe Northern European in a skin-tight body suit, since there is no attempt at differentiating one competitor from the others. No captions. No thought bubbles. Not even culturally insensitive icons. ("Oooh, a beret... must be the French guy.")

This may be the first time this sentence is ever uttered in public, but NBC would do well to follow the lead of Fox Sports. Take a look at Fox's coverage of NASCAR. Now, I know about as much about stock car racing as I do Nordic Combined -- and yet, when I flip by Fox during the occasional motor race, I don't need to break out a protractor and a mechanical pencil to figure which hillbilly is leading the rest of the pack. There's a running ticker showing the order of the racers. There's floating graphics showing which sponsor-festooned car is which. If the only thing you know about NASCAR is that it's a never-ending series of left-hand turns, just a few minutes of watching Fox's coverage and you'll be reasonably up to speed.

So if Fox can effectively use graphics to tell me what son of the soil is leading a particular race, why can't NBC do the same for some Norwegian?

So I was nodding off on the rock-hard, unyielding bed of the extended-stay hotel that fate has consigned me to, while NBC's Olympics coverage droned in the background. It was the individual Nordic combined -- an event designed to send people off into dreamland, if you ask me -- and a member of NBC's announce crew was enthusing about the Nordic combined prowess of some random Finn, hailing him as "the Babe Ruth of this sport."

Yes, yes -- quite the insight. Back to my dreamy little dreams.

Only right after the Nordic combined -- which was not won by the Finnish Babe Ruth, incidentally -- NBC cut over to the men's luge, a sport I do happen to enjoy watching. So I awoke from my map, just in time to see Georg Hackel -- who seemingly has been competing in the Olympics ever since the invention of the luge -- about to take his first run. For the viewers not as well versed in the luge as me, NBC's announce crew helpfully identified Georg Hackel as "the Babe Ruth of luge."

Well, that sounds vaguely familiar.

Just in case you think I'm being unfair to NBC, the luge segment began with the roving report explaining how the sport works with this original opener: "Webster's dictionary defines "luge" as..." I would fill in the rest of the sentence, but I believed the lethal doses of banality caused me to momentarily black out until a chambermaid could revive me.

So I guess Dick Ebersol made a Costco run and cleaned out the cliché supply -- that's what I'm saying here.

For those of you not up on your over-used sports metaphors, I've compiled this handy cliché-to-translation chart so that you can watch the Winter Olympics without having to run to your desktop for a furtive Wikipedia search just to make heads or tails out of what Tom Hammond is saying. And for any NBC personnel scouring the Web for ways of trying to make ski jumping and two-man bobsled relatable to the casual viewer, go ahead and work these little phrases into your telecast. We'll settle on a payment schedule later.

• The Babe Ruth of his sport: A beloved figure who set a cherished record and is the standard by which all others in his sport are judged.
• The Hank Aaron of his sport: The guy who actually holds the cherished record.
• The Barry Bonds of his sport: Probably goofed up on horse pills.
• The Roger Clemens of his sport: Will you just retire already?
• The Terrell Owens of his sport: Mouthy.
• The Lance Armstrong of his sport: This athlete was spotted at a Turin nightclub with a newly available Sheryl Crow. Also, horse pills.
• The Ty Cobb of his sport: Kind of a prickly pear when it comes to discussing race relations.
• The Wayne Gretzky of his sport: His wife has 40 large riding on the outcome.
• The Moose Skowron of his sport: We have no idea what to say and are just picking names at random to fill the dead air space.
• The Kobe Bryant of his sport: Forced a teammate to be traded to another nation's Olympic delegation.
• The Bo Jackson of his sport: Ah... but which sport?