This essay is excerpted from culture writer Chuck Klosterman’s new book, “Football.”
Television defined the last half of the twentieth century, outperforming all other mass media combined.
This was already understood by the onset of the 1970s, prompting countless network executives to kill themselves in the hope of creating something impeccably suited for sitting in front of an electromagnetic box and remaining there for as long as possible. This typically entailed thoughtful consideration over the content of TV: what a program was about, how it was written, and what personalities were involved. But what’s even more critical, and far harder to manufacture, is the form of the program: the pacing, the visual construction, and the way the watcher experiences whatever they happen to be watching. How a person thinks about television is a manifestation of its content; how a person feels about television is a manifestation of its form. And there’s simply never been a TV product more formally successful than televised football. This was an accident. But it turns out you can’t design something on purpose that’s superior to the way televised football naturally occurs.
Football is a purely mediated experience, even when there is no media involved. It’s not just that you can see a game better when you watch it on television. Television is the only way you can see it at all.
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I realize I’m making an aesthetic argument many will not accept, particularly if they start from the position that football games are boring, meaningless, or both. The merits of televised football as a formal spectacle are immaterial to someone who hates the thing being televised, in the same way the harmonic simplicity of Miles Davis is immaterial to someone who hates jazz. Appreciating the TV experience of football requires some casual interest in the game itself. But what makes the TV experience of football so remarkable is how “casual interest” is more than enough to generate an illogically deep level of satisfaction. The way football is broadcast manages to obliterate any difference between an informal consumer and a face-painting fanatic. This is due to many factors, the most critical being that football is always, always, always better on television than it is in person. The televised experience is so superior to the in‑person experience that most people watching a football game live are mentally converting what they’re seeing into its TV equivalent, without even trying.
(Penguin Press)
The only sport universally understood to be better when watched in person is hockey. In the same way football is always better on TV, hockey is always better live. With almost every other sport, the difference is debatable. Baseball is sometimes better in person, because it’s nice to sit outside in the summer (the weather and the park have more influence than the game). Basketball becomes more compelling if you sit close to the court and less compelling if you’re in the rafters, though the prime seats in any NBA arena tend to provide ticket holders with the same viewpoint they’d get from a TV broadcast. Live tennis and live golf offer details that can’t be captured on television, but there are rules of decorum and big potential for monotony. Soccer is exclusively about atmosphere and identity, so the experience of being in the crowd and the experience of the game itself are only nominally associated, in the same way going to see the Grateful Dead in the late 1980s was only nominally about music. Live boxing and live auto racing deliver palpable electricity with subpar sightlines. In all of these non‑football examples, the debate boils down to how effectively the televised depiction of an event can translate its in‑person actuality, which is why hockey is an outlier (the ambient feeling of bodies colliding with plexiglass is not digitally transferrable). Televised football is an outlier to an even greater extent, and for a much stranger reason: The TV experience doesn’t translate the live experience at all, in any way. The game happening in the physical world only exists to facilitate the broadcast version of the game, even if the game is not being televised. Here again, it must be reiterated: Football is a purely mediated experience, even when there is no media involved. It’s not just that you can see a game better when you watch it on television. Television is the only way you can see it at all.
With football, the psychology of fascism works.
Football fans attend football games for lots of different reasons. However, one of the expressed reasons can never be “A desire to see what’s really happening.” If that was someone’s true desire, they would stay home and watch it on TV. No one inside a football stadium — including the coaches on the sideline and the players on the field— can see the game with the consistent clarity of a person watching remotely. The announcers have the game happening directly in front of them and still watch the action on TV monitors, in part because they want their commentary to match what the home viewer is seeing but mostly because the camera is the perspective that matters.
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