Sports are not nearly so oral as they once were. The whole world is more visual, after all. Just look how videos changed the music industry. It?s no longer enough just to hear music. Like that, what we hear now from players simply doesn?t have either much weight or lightness anymore.
But all sports once did have a great oral tradition. Road trips led to jokes and tall tales. Now, even the closest teams are divided by iPods and cell phones. Teams are no longer connected at the ear. Perhaps the most evocative reminiscence came from a fine old pitcher named Waite Hoyt, who said, “In the daytime, you sat in the dugout and talked about women. At night, you go out with women and talked about baseball.”
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There were funny players on every team. It was not considered antithetical to a coach?s success for him to also possess a sense of humor. Why, Casey Stengel was the best manager of his time and the most comical, as well. Al McGuire uttered comic epigrams as clever as Will Rogers ever did. Duffy Daugherty and Jimmy Valvano could do grade-A stand-up. Southern country-boy coaches like Herman Hickman and Abe Lemons were about the last of the nation?s cracker-barrel philosophers. One pretty good manager was called Jolly Cholly. By any name, is there even a jolly coach left?
Genuinely funny players like Joe Garagiola, Bob Uecker, Hot Rod Hundley and Don Meredith went on to become first-rate announcers. Their wit was what recommended them. Now, only dull stars are chosen to deaden the microphone with what I call the IO ? the Inside Obvious.
Given this decline of natural spoken comedy in sport, I was genuinely amused when athletes started acting out vaudeville routines ? especially in the end zones. Hey, it was just a sign of the times, a shift from the oral to the visual, the players? expression of the sort of comedy they?d grown up with. When Terrell Owens hid a Sharpie in his sock and signed the football after a touchdown catch, I found it both original and delightful.
Alas, with time, we have discovered that Owens is not at all a funny fellow. He appears to be primarily narcissistic and the very opposite of funny. He is mean-spirited. His ugly public criticism of his last two quarterbacks, Jeff Garcia and Donovan McNabb, was vulgar and unforgivable. He is, simply, all for T.O. ? as he is, to his delight, famous enough now to be an acronym.
ESPN, which has all but ceded responsible news coverage in order to supply nonstop Paris-Hiltonian reportage of T.O., has only fed the beast. We laughed at Dennis Rodman, but uneasily, for we feared he might really be pathetic. I felt no similar sympathy for Owens the other day, when we were dragged through a kinda, maybe, sorta, iffy suicide attempt that was conveniently reported by his personal publicist, with a full-scale press conference to follow immediately in time for the evening SportsCenter. None of it is funny anymore, and he is not worth our attention.
Frank Deford?s column also appears as commentary Wednesdays on National Public Radio?s Morning Edition. Deford is a Baltimore native and an award-winning author who has written 14 books. He can be reached at [email protected].
