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GUEST BLOG #20: Diane Holloway's Teeny-Weeny NBA Lament
Bianculli here: Watching the unbelievably suspenseful competition on live TV last night, with all that talent and tension on display, was a thrill -- and I'm not just talking about ABC's National Spelling Bee. But while I've found that watching LeBron James and Kobe Bryant and the others in this year's NBA playoffs has been a joy, contributing columnist Diane Holloway insists it's also been "a challenge." Read on to discover why...
Who ARE those NBA Munchkins?
By Diane Holloway
Watching the NBA conference finals games this year has been a challenge.
First, you have to find them. ABC, ESPN, ESPN2 and TNT have all carried games of the Eastern and Western Conferences. The sports-on-TV section in the newspaper has become my best friend.
Then, if the game happens to be in the Nuggets' home stadium in Denver, you've got to squint to see the action. That's because the cameras are mostly floating somewhere in the tip-top of the arena, shrinking the towering basketball stars to the size of Munchkins. Pretty much the only easy-to-see activity from Denver has been slow-motion replays or boring free-throws. The rest is full-court, mile-away shots of those Munchkins.
All of which got me thinking: Some sports are spectacular on TV, others not so much. Is it the number of players, the speed of the action, or maybe even the size of the ball that makes one sport TV gold and the other more like rusty tin?
In the course of my life, I've probably watched more sports than prime-time entertainment. I'm a sports junkie. It's a joy and a sickness. When the Olympics are on, I watch everything from downhill skiing and pole-vaulting to curling and ribbon gymnastics. Networks that spend millions and millions of dollars to broadcast the Olympics generally know how to make any sport look spectacular. Proof? Even marathons can be exciting.
So what's the deal with the iffy prospect of some "regular sports"? Commentary can have a huge impact (Charles Barkley has simply ruined NBA half-time shows for me), but since that varies so wildly, we'll skip the talking heads here and concentrate on technical elements.
Pro basketball has only five players per team (who are, as previously mentioned, large and often spectacularly tattooed) and an enormous ball. So the problem with coverage must have to do with camera location and the speed of the game. I noticed a big difference watching the games in Orlando, where the action was more up-close and personal, and Denver, with its frustrating vision of ants on the court. But even in Orlando, it's sometimes difficult to pick out specific players.
Baseball and football have bigger fields and more players per team (nine for baseball, 11 for football), yet TV manages to make those competitions more intimate -- and thus more exciting. We can see clearly the pitcher throw and the batter swing. We can see a quarterback zing the ball into the hands of a receiver, and we can see (and often hear) that receiver get thwacked by defenders.
Some sports, of course, seem custom-made for TV. Tennis and golf, for example, not only tell the story of a sports match but also spend a leisurely amount of time telling the individual stories of the athletes. I've been watching early rounds of the French Open, and I can already tell apart all the Czech and Russian female players. I can't necessarily pronounce their names, but I know a good deal about each of them.
Yes, I know it's considered deeply nerdy to watch golf on TV, but really, I only watch tournaments with Tiger Woods. (It's a Tiger thing, not a golf thing.) Although I do love the beautiful music and the serene green setting . . . Is there anything more gorgeous in all of sports than the opening shots of The Masters?
Swimming, diving, gymnastics, ski jumping and figure skating -- all make for beautiful TV watching. 
Breathtaking technology advances have been key, from underwater cameras to "super slo-mo." Viewers are engulfed in those sports.
I'm not giving up on the NBA finals, but I sure wish we could see round-ball action on TV with the same precision and intimacy as other sports. When you can't pick out someone as big and obvious as LeBron James in a fast break, there's something terribly wrong.
[So you don't have to befriend your local TV listings right away, the weekend's scheduled games are as follows: Game 6 of the Lakers-Nuggets contest, 9 p.m. ET Friday on ESPN; Game 6 of Magic-Cavaliers, Saturday at 8:30 p.m. on TNT; and, if necessary, Game 7 of Nuggets-Lakers at 8:30 p.m. on ABC.--David B.]
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Diane Holloway was the TV critic for the Austin American Statesman for 30 years, until the downturn in the newspaper business prompted her to take a buyout and early retirement. Retirement? More like between jobs. She's still sniffing out possibilities and sifting through freelance opportunities. Before newspapers, she worked in Washington for the Library of Congress, the American Film Institute and the National Endowment for the Arts. Maybe something entirely different is next. Or not.
While I see your point on the NBA zoom because play is normally predictable, I actually prefer the zoomed out view. When they try to zoom in, I lose sight of the off-ball movement and lose perspective of the overall play. Football may be the worst at this. During live play, you are forced to watch the QB and line with no knowledge of what is occurring in the secondary. Then when the ball is thrown, the viewer has no idea if it was a good decision. So much of the game is lost in a football broadcast that the NBA manages to capture.
The best example of zoom problems occurs with soccer broadcasts. The MLS tends to zoom in, trying to show individual players, but loses perspective and flow of the game. European coverage tends to zoom out, showing more of the field but losing the individual.
I prefer seeing the flow of the game live and waiting to see the individual for the replays. In this way, I feel the NBA has it right and the NFL has it wrong.
Diane,
A serious question for you: Do you love the drama and personalities of sport, or do you love the sports themselves?
Some sports lend themselves to the former. Baseball is very much an individual sport played by teams. It is also a very predictable sport. This makes it easy to set up a camera on the pitcher and a camera on the batter to capture most of the drama and personality. Despite there being 10 players on the field at a time, if one focuses on just two of them -- who are in a predictable position -- you're happy.
Football has 22 players on the field at a time, but the camera really only follows one. The QB during his drop, and then either the RB to whom he gives the ball or the reciever to whom he throws the ball. Again, quite predictable. Linemen are virutally ignored, and defensive backs aren't even in the picture most of the time.
And then there are the truly individual and predictable sports. Swimmers go in the same direction, with the favorites in the middle. Gymnasts work is isolation, and their most active/unpredictable apparatus (i.e. the floor) is rehersed.
And then we get to basketball. To understand what is going on, you need to see the movement of all ten players. While each time might have a dominent player, s/he is not going to intimately involved in every play -- unlike football, in which the QB touches the ball on every play. The ten players move in unpredictable ways, and respond with their whole bodies to what their opposition is doing. You could follow LeBron James the whole time, but look at how much you would miss.
I would be interested to know how you compare the experience of Spike Lee's recent piece on Kobe Bryant -- Doing Work, which was on ESPN -- to watching a game conventionally. If all the cameras are set up to follow the best and most dominant player in a game, is that better?
Frankly, I find the typical football view quite limiting. How can I really understand what a QB is doing if I cannot see what he is reacting to? How can I really appreciate and feel the anticpation of a baseball play if I cannot see how the defense is positioned before the batter makes contact?
Personally, I think that tennis is ultimate television sport. With three cameras, the can capture almost everything. We we see the whole field and movement and feel the anticipation most of the time, and with so few players it is possible to train a camera of the each of them full time. It has defense, and strategy, and tactics, and all the rest, and is well televised.
And back to backetball, I can recognize all they players with the typical shot 95% of the time. Color, shape, size, body language. Maybe you just need a bigger TV.
(That was a joke. I would think that a pro like you has a larger TV than I.)
Okay,
It's an unexpected pleasure to read Diane's commentary again and I want to take the opportunity to digress a bit from the conversation.
First, the Austin American Statesman, Diane's former employer, did away with the Show World( the tv guide section) as a cost cutting measure. Diane was already relegated to her on line blog by that time. That was when we dropped our subscription to the Sunday paper that carried it. I checked with the people I know who also took the Sunday Statesman and they, too, dropped the paper. Then, a few months ago it was announced that Show World would be back in the Sunday paper, for a mere $.25 extra charge. My wife resubscribed.
Well, it wasn't the same. No preview summaries of the week's PBS shows, no show biz gossip, none of the shoe teasers, just the stripped down schedule. We dropped the subscription again. You apparently can't go home again, even if you pay extra.
Second, the picture size. I've siezed upon this, even though it's not the same thing at all. We subscribe to Time-Warner cable. Our tv is a 42" analog behemoth. For some time we enjoyed the tv transition to wide screen, the networks joining the change a few years ago.
Then, one evening, we noticed that CSI was full screen again. So were shows on ABC and Fox and even PBS, programs that had been letterboxed and wide screen only the week before. Only NBC, for whatever reason, still has the wide screen format and, of course, the cable channels. A call to Time-Warner technical support( in Guatemala) got the explanation that the full screen signal was what the local affiliates were sending to T-W and it had nothing to do with T-W.
However, an email from the program director of the local PBS station, KLRU, told us that they sent a wide screen picture to T-W and T-W was responsible for the switch to full screen.
Another call to T-W(sales, this time) got the answer that we needed to switch our digital box for an HD digital box. We did and only got a downgrade in sound level for the trouble.
So, no one at Time-Warner knows anything and we're looking at possibly spending money on a new television. I would as soon drop the cable, time shift a week and watch shows on line, but my wife doesn't care for that idea.
Meanwhile we continue to pay the full T-W subscription price for less product as neither of us sees the point of watching only two-thirds of a picture.
Any suggestions, including other pay-tv services would be appreciated.
-Doug
Thanks for the very thoughtful comments posted to my NBA whining. Always a treat to hear from thoughtful readers.
Patrick: I like seeing the full flow of the action, too, but not from the rafters. We don't need to see the entire court PLUS the first three or four rows of the audience. Players become ants. We really just need to see half the court and follow the players back and forth.
Alex: I enjoy the sports AND the personalities of the players. That's easier to accomplish with individual sports such as tennis and golf, but it should be possible to accomplish with basketball. There aren't that many players, and most NBA guys these days are tattooed, coiffed and media-hyped stars.
Doug: Thanks for recalling the American-Statesman glory days. One note of correction, however -- I was not shipped to online only after our Sunday TV section got scrapped. I continued to write regular weekly columns for the newspaper, in addition to frequent features and news stories. And as to your ongoing battle with Time Warner, I FEEL YOUR PAIN!! I've taken my HD box back twice in a month because of irritating pixilation. Any problems you're having are almost certainly due to the T-W boobs.
Thanks to all for reading ... come back every week for more fun on TV Worth Watching!!
nba for life