Much to my chagrin, the wide world of sports is becoming even wider, and in the process, more transparent. While the diminishing opacity of professional sports is invaluable for penetrating journalists, documentarians and producers, the casual sports fan is being exposed to the realities of the average athlete, and the picture is not always pretty.
While sports and media have always fostered a symbiotic relationship, the sports world recently embraced the strategy of giving consumers a peephole into the lives of athletes. Grantland.com's Bryan Curtis described the increased access in documenting the daily happenings of a professional athlete: "The leagues have finally realized that players are more appealing when they have problems with their bosses, when they get fired, when they wander around in pink underwear, when they show the world that the guy underneath the jersey is a f*ck-up just like the rest of us."
Curtis' piece outlined the unmatched success of HBO shows "Hard Knocks" and "24/7" in detailing behind-the-scenes storylines, access that had traditionally been granted exclusively to the most trusted journalists. Grantland, an ESPN-owned but editorially independent sports and entertainment website, is not merely a sports and entertainment outlet in name like its parent company. In fact, Grantland has been pretty shameless about fusing the two categories with running shticks like a Reality TV Fantasy League and a play-by-play of "Game of Thrones."
Grantland's editor and founder Bill Simmons is also the creator of "30 for 30," a sports documentary series produced by ESPN. The series attracted critical and popular acclaim on the way to the prestigious Peabody Award, granted for distinguished national service in television or radio. In what has now been well over the originally planned 30 episodes, a different director takes on a compelling historical moment or a prevailing issue in sports.
Last week, ESPN aired the first episode of the second season, which chronicled the turbulent financial transitions (or lack thereof) from star athletes with massive monthly paychecks to retirees living on a fixed sum. The picture, like I said, isn't pretty, but the essence of the problem was conveyed. The drama-producing methods that lead reality TV to stoop to new lows, it seems, have the opposite effect on the sports media. The willing exposure of players, agents and leagues to writers and directors is enabling discussions about systematic threats to athletes beyond finance, particularly in health-related issues.
The power of merging practices in sports journalism and today's television landscape is pretty astounding given how little Americans care about reality stars after their moment in fame. Consider "American Idol" the competition starts with thousands and thousands of contestants, who are then whittled down to less than 100 and ultimately to a final 12 or 16. Now, if you happen to watch "American Idol," chances are slim that you remember more than a handful of those finalists who didn't win. For every Carrie Underwood, there are 20 Julie DeMatos, and who knows or cares where she is?
These finalists on "American Idol" who fail to parlay their appearance into a traditional singing career may fall back on the professional life they developed before being thrown into the fires of Hollywood, but the general public couldn't care less. We move on. When the contestants' counterparts in sports retire and face the idiosyncratic issues of professional athletes, American sports fans have already learned all along about the real issues awaiting these athletes after the stadium empties.
The deeper understanding of sports that has accompanied its growth in coverage isn't just a passing phenomenon championed by Simmons and Grantland. The storytelling capability of sports will be on display in Loew Auditorium at Dartmouth on Oct. 27 with the screening of "Knuckleball!" (2012), a film produced by Ricki Stern '87 and Anne Sundberg '90. The documentary follows the lives of knuckleball pitchers Tim Wakefield and R.A. Dickey, exploring the conditions that led the pitchers to develop their knucklers and the obstacles that arise with the mastery of such an unconventional pitch. Stern and Sundberg don't specialize in sports documentaries, nor do they really care about the knuckleball. The producers were instead attracted to telling the human stories behind the purveyors of baseball's most enigmatic pitch, and judging by the recent past, the American public cannot wait to hear their stories.
