Greetings, everyone. You can use this as the overflow post when comments at the Monday Net Post (yes, Easy Ed McGrogan is back!) hit the magic 1,000 number. I had a busy day, with a planning meeting for the May issue of Tennis, and four videos to shoot for Tennis.com with my comrade-in-arms, Jon Levey.
We had almost 10 inches of snow in game-rich Andes on Saturday night, so my plans to hustle cowboy Luke back to New York early enough to catch the playoff game between the New York football Giants and the Philadelphia Eagles went awry. I had to spend a couple of hours on board the Orange Blossom, plowing snow. Consequently, we didn't hit the road for the three-hour drive until after 11:20 A.M. I was really looking forward to the game, so as soon as I got a cell signal, I called my wife Lisa and a friend, LIz Nevin, to get an update on the game. After about the fourth call (around half-time), I realized that there's a reason cars have radios - the game had to be available somewhere.
Oddly, LIz scoured all three major New York papers, looking for the broadcast schedule, and saw no mention of the radio broadcast. Finally, Lisa Googled the subject and came up with what New York-area readers will recognize as a no-brainer - the official NY Giants network is WFAN (660 on your AM dial). Once I was within an hour of the city, I was able to pull it in.
I'd forgotten what a riveting experience it can be to hear sports on radio. WFAN had a play-by-play guy, and a color man (former Giants All-Pro linebacker, Carl Banks). It was oddly satisfying to listen to and visualize the action as each play unfolded (the commentator even told me, "The Giants are moving left to right on the field, if you're looking at your radio"). This was simultaneously novel (in a good way) and nostalgic; I'd forgotten that radio and prose have one thing in common that makes them far superior (in my mind) to film and television: They invite and in many cases demand that you use your imagination. The color commentary between plays was also illuminating.
Granted, football really lends itself to the radio format, because the intervals between plays are significant and the plays themselves unfold at a manageable pace. But baseball does, too, because of its relatively slow pace. Not long ago, Brad Gilbert told me that his idea of heaven was dialing an Oakland A's game in on the radio and, after putting on the headphones, plopping into his leather recliner and going horizontal to listen to the game, and see it acted out in his imagination. I was surprised by the almost tender way Brad described this subtle pleasure. It seemed so uncharacteristic.
Listening to sports on the radio is much more interactive than any computer game; it allows you to exercise mental muscles and faculties that lay dormant in the television and Internet age.
Baseball and football are ideally suited to radio, but I'm not sure tennis lends itself to the format. Still, the BBC has a rich history of broadcasting Wimbledon, and Wimbledon radio is an ongoing facet of the tournament. I also know for a fact that in the 1950s, during the height of the Australian tennis dynasty, legions of Aussies huddled around their radios (often while at the beach) to listen to live broadcasts of Davis Cup ties, often from the famed White City venue in Sydney.
My own recent experience of tennis commentary on the radio (I tuned in about a year ago) has been mixed. I felt that the habit of describing every point as it occurs made the pace way too frenetic, squeezing out any impulse I might have had to imagine the point unfolding. The commentators never quite caught up to the action, and in the end the act of listening was both exhausting and irritating - kind of like being on a treadmill. I get bombarded by emails from the Radio Tennis folks, maybe I should give them another chance, and perhaps some commentators find a way to solve the pace-of-play issue.
I wrote a new post for ESPN today on the new head of the ATP, Adam Helfant. I'll be back tomorrow with more thoughts on the choice.
-- Pete