Media
McConnell, Frank
MEDIA DOWNHILL & SLIPPERY CBS GOES TO THE OLYMPICS It's Saturday, February 26, 1994, and last night in Lillehammer Nancy Kerrigan got a silver medal, Tonya Harding did—uh, something—and CBS...
...MEDIA DOWNHILL & SLIPPERY CBS GOES TO THE OLYMPICS It's Saturday, February 26, 1994, and last night in Lillehammer Nancy Kerrigan got a silver medal, Tonya Harding did—uh, something—and CBS picked up a record 48.5 share of the viewing audience—which is, like, they wake you up and force you to watch the show...
...The network simply obliterated its competition during the games...
...We were shown, at length, Connie Chung, who is to journalism what Lawrence Welk is to jazz, asking intrusive and insulting questions of Tonya Harding...
...But in this case, I think this was really bad...
...It isn't even a piece about sports...
...Alas...
...Neal Pilson, apparently, thinks it's all just groovy: as good as any fiction could be, hey...
...It was the cold war that made the games...
...Like life, it is chancy and, in the words of the philosopher Yogi Berra, not over till it's over...
...Watching base- or any other kind of ball I find about as exhilarating as reading the letters of William James, if that's not unfair to William James...
...This is, however, a piece about the idea of sport, which has obsessed me for years, perhaps just because I am so metaphysically unathletic...
...One thing I've tried to do in these columns is argue for how TV can be good...
...I never learned to swim, so for me Jaws is a they-go-in-the-water-they-get-what-they-deserve movie...
...Don't worry...
...They trivialized the efforts of a lot of earnest, self-possessed young men and women by making their struggles "as good as any fiction could be...
...Blame it on Karl Marx...
...On the next-to-last day of coverage, CBS Sports President Neal Pilson, talking about the first, Thursday night skateoff between you-know-who and youknow-who, announced: "I don't think if we sat down to try to script an Olympics we would have done much better....I think this is as good as any fiction could be...
...this isn't another Tonya-and-Nancy piece...
...Come on: could any other story have shunted Michael Jackson into the slow lane of the information superhighway...
...I leave the den when they start skating because I can't bear to see anybody fall on his or her butt...
...those are my sports, because with them, you can drink and smoke while you play the game...
...What distinguishes a game from a fiction is that you can't make a game turn out the way you want it to...
...CBS turned what could have been a neutral event into a tenday freakshow...
...The claim of the modern Olympics, with its billion-dollar panoply of advertising and endorsement deals, to be a selfless and idealistic international competition is, if such a thing can be, a charming and rather sweet hypocrisy: sort of like your always-snockered maiden aunt who insists that she only occasionally takes a sherry before dinner...
...I don't care if she did know about the Nancywhacking: nobody deserves that...
...And what about the two-man luge...
...And that's very important...
...I don't like sports...
...and as, over the ensuing weeks, it became clear that everybody in Tonya's circle, except maybe Tonya herself and maybe her fourth-grade piano teacher, was in on the whacking, the anticipation was all-consuming...
...Because the modern Olympics is, let's face it, a cash cow of cosmic dimensions, as non-un-watchable as and only a little less overhyped than the Super Bowl or the Academy Awards...
...We were all treated to lengthy segments on what skier's or luger's or bobsleddcr's mother or brother or kitten had recently passed away...
...Chess and straight pool...
...and about how bad was the CBS coverage of the 1994 Olympics...
...When Homer and Virgil took so much time to describe the funeral games of fallen warriors, they were in fact, as aboriginal storytellers, nodding toward the one, crucial transitional stage between the chaos of being and the certainties of myth...
...And in Tonya Harding's last skate, that nightmare, it-is-to-slit-your-throat concatenation of disasters, as she was hyperventilating and weeping and panic-strickenly trying to find a right-size lace backstage, the CBS cameras were firmly, unrelentingly, and unremittingly focused on her agony...
...An intrinsic evil, as far as I can make out...
...Ask the truly sublime Kati Witt if, when she skated for the GDR in 1988, she wasn't thinking about the perks that would come with a gold medal...
...But they don't mix...
...FRANK McCONNELX 25 March 1994: 19...
...And now listen again to brother Pilson on the Olympics: "I think this is as good as any fiction could be...
...Because the game is, psychically, at the midpoint between the monster Life and the benevolent angel Fiction (or myth or story or what you will...
...I assume that our hairier and harried ancestors played games (rock, scissors, and paper, maybe) before they told stories (the guy who killed the saber-toothed tiger, probably...
...And you can whiff the profit-motive like garlic in a Pizza Hut...
...Ever since Nancy got whacked at the nationals, America had been in breath-bated expectation of the Showdown in Norway...
...They cleaned up, of course...
...And I think, as a species, we need them both, and need them desperately...
...Ask any of the top contenders if, as they practice, visions of Wheaties boxes don't dance in their heads...
...The reasoning was, though nobody made it explicit, that since we couldn't really nuke the Evil Empire we could sure whup them pesky Commies on the slopes, on the ice, wherever...
...Chess or mudwrestling, makes no nevermind: the game catches both the sense of order that life misses and the sense of the unforeseen that fiction lacks...
...What CBS did was orchestrate the games...
...And now the Berlin Wall is down, the Evil Empire has decayed back into a tossed salad of internecine, medieval hatreds, and the song is over: but the malady lingers on...
...This year, though, things tipped over the edge: badly...
...Both games and fictions, of course, arc artificial versions of that sloppy monster, Life: they're ordered contests or quests we impose upon the stuff of just living, day-to-day...
...We were given, in short, the Olympics, which at least used to pretend to be a sporting event, as a miniseries...
...Like fiction, it is controlled, with rules and closure...
...Sister Harding deserves some kind of medal for saying, long before the Nancywhacking, that she wanted the gold because it meant Big Bucks...
...But why this quadrennial passion about events that, othertimes, don't even make prime time on the cable channels...
...Honesty can be bracing...
...Do we have the right to examine not just the performance, but the background, the parentage, the internal lives of the contenders—or isn't that detritus better left for "Geraldo" and "Oprah...
...Nancy/Tonya aside, once every four years Americans get all dewy-eyed about things like luge, which is basically you lie on your back on a cafeteria tray and slide down a mountain of ice...
...Exactly...
Vol. 121 • March 1994 • No. 6
