It's harder than ever to find actual sports on the sports network that started it all. It's easy to find Disney-influenced profiles, ESPN's coverage of itself, and famous people with no easily identifiable connection to sports. Meanwhile, baseball games and tennis finals get shoved to the Deuce, or skipped altogether.
In today's corporate world, it's all about branding, and ESPN remains an undeniable success in that respect. It's gotten to where people at the watercooler are talking about ESPN itself, not just the sports events it shows.
During this slow summer, ESPN's apparent reluctance to focus on sports instead of personalities has final started to become news. Salon sports columnist King Kaufman has been all over it. San Jose Mercury-News columnist Tim Kawakami has initiated a one-man boycott because of the growing gap between what he calls "good ESPN" (i.e. Outside the Lines) and "bad ESPN" (anything with Max Kellerman).
You can't help but notice it, and nowhere is it more evident than during the crown gem of ESPN: SportsCenter. When was the last time the Top-10 didn't include something like a rooster-crowing competition or toe wrestling? Those used to be occasional -- stress, occasional -- breaks in all the serious stuff on a slow day. Now, a slow day has three of those "non-sport" Top-10 moments. Toe wrestling made the Top-10 twice during the last week of July.
Then there's the Hot Seat: why are people like Ben Stiller and Donald Trump on SportsCenter? If those guys are guests on Cold Pizza, that's one thing. If we're supposed to believe that Stiller counts as sports programming because of "Dodgeball," that's another.
This column has been in the works for over a month, but during the last week of July, ESPN was at its worst. SportsCenter was on 76 times (11 per day, nearly half of ESPN's programming). I like SportsCenter, but isn't that a little excessive?
It's also worth mentioning that about 10 minutes of each show were devoted to music. Most of us don't tune into ESPN expecting to hear a live performance by Alanis Morissette, or athletes mangling the Star-Spangled Banner and "Take Me Out to the Ballgame." And if the network really wants to show things like that, maybe a one-hour "Music and Sports" special on ESPN2 would do the trick instead of slipping it into SportsCenter.
Complaining about how often SportsCenter was on is silly, though, compared with what else was on ESPN during the last week of July. Something called Streetball -- I think it's like the NBA with more trash-talk and less talent -- was on ESPN 12 times (and ESPN2 for another hour and a half). ESPN showed a combined three hours of Stump the Schwab and Around the Horn, plus seven hours of poker (which is almost impossible to categorize as "sport") and two and a half hours of fishing.
This wasn't because of a shortage of actual sports, though. During the same week, ESPN2 broadcast 27½ hours of tennis -- including Lindsay Davenport's victory over Serena Williams in the final of the JP Morgan Chase Open -- the 2004 Cooperstown induction ceremonies, two boxing matches, six hours of MLB games, two hours of the WNBA, and two showings of Outside the Lines. None of that was good enough for ESPN?
What makes Kawakami's boycott article resonate is his distinction between "good ESPN" and "bad ESPN." In the past, sports fans could at least choose which programs to watch and which to avoid. Over the last few years, though, and especially in recent months, "bad ESPN" has infiltrated previously "good" shows: SportsCenter anchors who think the show is about them, not the sports they cover; panel members and other "experts" who shout, make deliberately controversial statements, or are blatantly biased in favor of certain people or teams; logos and catchphrases that block part of the action.
Obviously, ESPN can't show every sporting event that happens. But it can be better, and instead, it's getting worse. I watched SportsCenter almost every day last summer, and I never saw Alanis Morissette or toe wrestling or Donald Trump. The people in charge have apparently made a conscious choice to devote less coverage to sports and more to pop culture. It's getting hard to tell ESPN from MTV, no matter what program you tune into. That's a loss for all sports fans.
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