There is big news in the world of sports media. Try to remain calm, but, well, Skip Bayless has moved from ESPN to Fox Sports 1. The first episode of his new show—called Undisputed—ran on September 6, and it was hard to restrain one’s emotions in the face of such a big development. Now, instead of arguing with Stephen A. Smith over whether LeBron James is a greater basketball player than Michael Jordan, Bayless will be arguing with Shannon Sharpe over whether LeBron James is a greater basketball player than Michael Jordan. Along, of course, with other matters of similar importance. It’s the kind of stuff that makes the sun stand still and the very earth hold its breath.
This seems to be the trajectory sports journalism will travel in the digital age. There will be less and less about the games, as games, and more and more about sports as culture and material for Internet trolls. This seems to be what the fans want, so they will get it, to borrow from Mencken, “good and hard.”
Bayless is master of the ginned-up controversy, a vessel into which he and the audience pour vast quantities of emotion—mostly anger—that in the end settles nothing. Who is overrated? How dumb was that call? And then, when it is time to push the envelope, you can ask if some celebrated player is gay. There are, you see, rumors. And the existence of the rumors makes them news. Their exist-ence is sufficient reason to report them. Proof is not necessary. Nor are restraint, decorum, or taste. Trash talk is good, the trashier the better. Hard-edged and personal. The kind of stuff, in other words, that Twitter thrives upon. And that has made Skip Bayless into a media personality described by Lucas Shaw of Bloomberg News as “a provocateur with a populist streak in the mold of Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly.”
Really.
Bayless may well be all of that. He is not, however, much of a sports prognosticator. Shortly before the premiere of his new show, Bayless tweeted out his college football picks: “My final 4: LSU, Ohio St., Clemson, Okla. National champ: LSU.”
In its opening game, LSU lost to Wisconsin. Oklahoma also lost its opener. The predictions, though, are just filler, used to stretch the meat. Which is argument and controversy.
Fans, no doubt, have argued about sports since the hammer toss was a big event. It is some of the fun. You are drinking a beer with a friend, and you get started. Brady or Manning? Greatest World Series comeback ever? Should Notre Dame have gone for it instead of punting? Stuff like that.
This impulse to argument was made into commercial entertainment with call-in radio shows and, on television, ESPN’s long-running Pardon the Interruption, in which Tony Kornheiser and Michael Wilbon discuss the day’s news in sports amid some good-natured back and forth. They are friends and before they became television personalities they wrote about sports for the Washington Post. They tend to speak in complete sentences and going by the evidence, neither is now, or ever has been, a “populist in the mold of Bill O’Reilly.”
After the success of Pardon the Interruption, other derivative shows came along and they turned up the temperature and pushed the envelope and . . . well, supply your own witless cliché. The most recent successful entry was First Take on ESPN. Stephen A. Smith and Skip Bayless going at it, toe to toe, for a couple of hours every morning.
I don’t recall ever watching the show, but I would, now and then, catch a little bit on satellite radio when I was driving. And one thing you couldn’t help noticing was how far the talk had moved away from the actual games and into the sort of difficult social issues from which one typically retreats to . . . sports. And there was, in the bits I listened to, no wit to the talk. No laughs. No charm. And the raised voices and harsh words lacked conviction. It was shtick. Red meat for the audience and utterly forgettable.
Once upon a time, it was a simple truth that the best writing in most big newspapers could be found on the sports pages. The games and the athletes were perfect material for writers like Red Smith and Jimmy Cannon and W. C. Heinz. They could take a ballgame or a boxing match or a horse race and, in 800 words, turn it into something nearly sublime. Red Smith’s “Miracle of Coogan’s Bluff,” on Bobby Thomson’s immortal home run, still stands up. And Heinz’s “Death of a Racehorse” will still raise a lump in your throat.
The urge, today, would be to get a couple of dudes arguing across a table over whether the Giants were stealing signs in that immortal playoff game against the Dodgers. Or what a loser Ralph Branca was and how he could be so stupid in his pitch selection. Smith would be regarded as a wimp, probably, for his closing paragraphs:
Ralph Branca turned and started for the clubhouse. The number on his uniform looked huge. Thirteen.
The Heinz story runs only a thousand words or so. You could read it aloud in less time than there is between commercials on Undisputed. It is the kind of writing that has a way of validating one’s interest in sports and making you feel you are not wasting your time by following those games and being a fan.
But Heinz’s column wouldn’t make anyone angry enough to go to the computer and start tweeting out his rage. And there wouldn’t really be anything for Bayless and Sharpe to argue about. And the listeners tuning in for some white-hot controversy would be disappointed.
So now, we shall have shows based around arguments that are designed never to be settled and trash talk that is never really trashy enough. And it will go on and on. Two-and-a-half hours, every morning, day after day.
Time the listener will never get back.
Geoffrey Norman, a writer in Vermont, is a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard.
