Innocence

TOP 10 THINGS HEARD IN THE FIRST GRADE THIS WEEK:

“How much longer until lunch?” (asked at 9:20 A.M.)

“This book has a bad word” (The offending word was “shut up.”)

“Is this gold?” (referring to a shiny fleck in a rock found on the playground)

“Mr. K., Anthony said that Justin Bieber is stupid.”

“You look more like a teacher with your glasses on.”

“I’m going to invite Derek Jeter to my birthday party.”

“Guess what I had for breakfast?”                                           

 “How much do you weigh?” (asked of a heavyset substitute music teacher)

“The weatherman gets paid even when he’s wrong.”

“I forgot what I was going to say.” (said by several students after animatedly raising their hands)

Class Distinctions

Subbing for the elementary-school music teacher last week, I got some good advice from an unlikely source. A sixth-grader came through the classroom door first.

“I’m upset,” he announced.

What was wrong?

“Nobody likes me.”

I was sure that was not true and told him so.

Changing the subject, he asked, “What are we doing today?”

“Your regular teacher left two movies for all of today’s classes: ‘Annie’ and ‘The Sound of Music.’ Take your pick,” I told him.

“You want my advice,” he said (it wasn’t a question), “Don’t give this class a choice. They’ll argue for half the period over which movie to watch.”

“You’re probably right,” I told him. “Thanks for the tip.”

So, “Annie” it was, and there were no problems.

Forty-five minutes later, the sixth grade left and the second grade arrived.

For them, I chose “The Sound of Music.”

“Have you seen this before?” I asked.

They all admitted they had, but shortly I would learn that was not true.

Early in the film, after Captain von Trapp (Christopher Plummer) has left the children in the care of their new governess, Maria (Julie Andrews), a member of the household staff conspiratorially tells Maria that she believes the Captain intends to bring home a new wife.

 “That’s not who he marries, though,” said one of the second-graders in voice-over.

“What do you mean?” asked a classmate.

“He’s going to marry Maria,” he is told.

“No, don’t tell me the ending!” he cried.

For me, the high point of the day came moments later, during the “Do-Re-Me” number, when three little girls in the back of the room sang along extemporaneously but softly with the film’s cast of children.

Earliest Sports Memories

Now that spring has finally arrived here in the east, I see Little Leaguers scurrying home from school, eager to finish their homework (that’s what they claim, anyway) and get to the park for their practice or game. That has stirred memories from playing days of yore and coaching days and nights of not so long ago.

      Over the years, in the course of interviewing athletes and sports business figures and personalities, I occasionally asked them about their earliest sports memory. Here are some of their responses:

      Mark Attanasio, the owner of the Milwaukee Brewers: “Being a Yankee fan in 1964 when I was 7 years old and the Yankees losing the World Series in Game 7 to the Cardinals and walking around the block in the Bronx where I lived and crying because the Yankees had lost.”

      Print and broadcast journalist Peter Gammons said, “Listening to the seventh game of the 1952 World Series when I was seven years old in the barber’s chair. Billy Sambito was my barber, and eventually the sponsor of my Little League team. His nephew, Joe Sambito, went on to be great pitcher and we became very good friends. He’s now an agent. Our families were forever intertwined.

      “I have a tape of that game. It’s so different, because the pitchers all had full windups and pumped over their heads. There wasn’t a lot of base-running. You can watch that and see how Jackie Robinson changed the game. The Yankees used four starting pitchers in relief in that game. It was tremendous.”

      Wyc Grousbeck, the managing partner, governor, and CEO of the Boston Celtics, said that his earliest sports memory was of baseball. “When I was six years old in ’67,” he said, “my dad got to go to a Red Sox/Cardinals World Series game and I didn’t get to go.”

      Likewise Sports Illustrated writer Alexander Wolff’s earliest memory was born out of a missed opportunity. He said that he recalled “being put to bed by my parents in December 1964 and being told I could not stay up late to watch Michigan, with Cazzie Russell, play Princeton, with Bill Bradley, in the Holiday Festival. I was seven years old.”

      Writer and editor Daniel Okrent was the first public editor of the New York Times and the inventor of Rotisserie League Baseball. He said, “My father took me to my first game at what was then called Briggs Stadium in Detroit when I was six years old in 1954. It was the Indians against the Tigers — my team. The Tigers lost, but I do remember specifically Walt Dropo, who was playing first [base] for the Tigers, hit this, what seemed to me, gigantic home run into left field. It was probably an ordinary home run, but I’d never seen one before.

      "My continuing ongoing memory is going to sleep at night listening to Ernie Harwell broadcast games.”

      Debbie Yow, the director of athletics at North Carolina State, said that her earliest sports memory was of “attending my older sister Kay’s high school basketball games. Kay [who passed away in 2009] was eight years older, and when she was a freshman in high school, I can remember going to her basketball games and sitting on a very large barrel while my father talked to men during half-time. This was North Carolina. There was [cigarette] smoke everywhere. Smoke, smoke, smoke. People smoking out in the hallways while I was sitting on this large barrel and waiting to go back in and watch Kay play again.”

      Brian Bedol, who founded Classic Sports Network and College Sports Television and is now managing director at Bedrock Venture Partners LLC, offered his earliest sports memory: “Jimmy Brown in his last season with the Browns,” he said. “I remember sitting in a snowstorm with 83,000 other fans.”

      Terry McDonell, editor of the Sports Illustrated Group, said, “I remember being a little boy in my grandfather’s house and being shown an old-fashioned diagram of a Minnesota/Notre Dame football game that my father, as a child, had diagrammed. You know, showing the ball moved from the 10 [yard line] to the 20, to the 23…and I remember trying to do that while listening to a football game on the radio, trying to have the same experience that my father had had many years before. My father was killed. He was a pilot. So, this was a big thing, being given this [diagram] as a little boy and being told that maybe I could do this too. I think I was about 4.”

Point of View

I don’t know about you, but when I attend a sporting event, I like to watch the game in front of me, not the spectators behind me. But directors of televised sporting events are of a different mind. They seem to think that viewers are more interested in anything but the game itself. How else to explain why they repeatedly cut away from live action to show us the fans, the coaches, the bench, the cheerleaders—in short, everything but the game itself?  

    
It doesn’t matter what the sport is. During last season’s American League Playoffs, Fox cut away from virtually every pitch to show us a fur hat in the stands. Those of us in New York at the time already knew it was cold on that October night. And anyone outside the east would have recognized it quickly without the continual shots of the spectators huddled against the chill.

    
Anyone interested in following the New York Jets on TV has his attention repeatedly redirected to Fireman Ed and the large sidekick whose shoulders he sits on for over three hours. We get it.    

    
Last week, with 19 seconds to go in the NCAA women’s basketball championship and Notre Dame down five and pushing the ball upcourt, the ESPN director cut to a shot of the coach. Is there any fan in such a climactic moment who turns away from the climax and thinks, “I wonder what the coach looks like right now?”

    
The same director, at a televised staging of a Shakespearean production, would cut away from Hamlet’s soliloquy to a close-up of an usher in the back row.

    
Circuses have sideshows that provide a variety of amusements for the curious onlookers before the main event takes place. But when the action is in the center ring, everyone is watching the lion tamer and nobody at that moment cares what the bearded lady looks like. If the circus were televised today, the director would undoubtedly cut away from the tightrope walker high above the crowd to a shot of the groundlings looking up.  

    
Maybe it’s an attention-deficit thing. But here’s an obvious clue to those hyperactive directors who cannot keep their eyes on the ball and their cameras still: The stadium and arena seats face the field and court because that’s what fans pay to see. We don’t contort ourselves into positions with our backs to the action in order to give our full attention to fellow spectators. That’s a sideshow nobody wants to see.

Sports Without Advertising

In the 1967 film “Bedazzled,” Peter Cook, as the devil, laments that he hasn’t done anything really evil since he introduced advertising into the world. That got me wondering about where sports would be without advertising. I once posed that question to a number of notable sports figures. Here is a compilation of their responses.

“Never in my life have I thought about that question,” said Roy Spence, the founder and president of GSD&M, the advertising agency responsible for the memorable “Don’t mess with Texas” public service ad and Southwest Airlines’ “You’re now free to move about the country” tag. “But I would say that sports would always be sports. You’re going to have people competing against each other, whether it’s here or around the world, at any level at any time, whether it’s marbles or hopscotch. Advertising has made sports a lifestyle. It’s allowed sports to reach the masses, for good or bad. In the end, I think advertising is a good thing for sports.”

Donald Dell, the founder and chairman of ProServ, said in 2004, “That’s the important question. To me, all pro sports are really a product of two things: television and sponsorships. What does a tennis tour take to be successful?

     “Well, first, it takes good players. Good players get you television. Television gets you sponsorships. At the end of the day, if you’re going to be playing for these big purses, it’s never done at the gate receipts. So sponsorships and television are what make the world of pro sports go ’round. Certainly in tennis….

     “[Tennis and golf are] individual sports. And they are a direct product of sponsorships. If you’re going to sponsor something, you want to make darn sure it’s televised. If there’s no television, you’re not going to increase your sponsorship. If the sponsorship doesn’t increase, the purses don’t increase.”

“That’s a chicken-or-egg question,” said Pam Gardner, president of the Houston Astros. “It’s necessary. We have to have [advertising]. It’s part of our livelihood. As I said before, baseball used to just be a sport, but it’s a sport that’s become big business, and so baseball probably wouldn’t be without advertising.”

“That’s a good question,” said Jerry Colangelo, president of USA Basketball. “I guess we create many things, and some things are created for us. And the fact is, once sponsors identify a market that sports brought to them, that was a market to buy their product, they had to reach that audience. And therefore a whole new business evolved in terms of sponsorships and advertising partners, and it continued to grow into naming rights and major all-encompassing types of packages. It became very unique.”

“[Sports] would be a little less well off [without advertising],” said John Walsh, executive vice president and executive editor of ESPN Inc. “People would make a little less money. I don’t know. Advertising at its best inspires creativity. Advertising at its worst gets in the way of doing your job.”