From My Vantage Point: Commentators

Sit back, relax, talk about sports, be opinionated, look good on TV, sound smart. This is the life of a television sports commentator. Is there a better job out there? I don't know, I may be the wrong person to ask, but, aside from the pressure of not looking like an idiot in front of a wide audience, it's tough to see the job's difficulties. Here's my first hand account of a commentator's life.

First off, some background information (why is this always necessary?) I work for Time Warner Sports in Albany. I set up the microphones and cameras and help adjust the wiring prior to the game. I break it all down after the game. There are many complicated parts of the job, but it is mostly straightforward. The team does Siena basketball games, UAlbany basketball games, local college hockey games, and local high school basketball games. Each venue is a little different, so we need to be able to adjust our set-up to the environment. At the Times Union Center, where Siena plays its home games, the commentators sit court-side behind a severely rectangular table. The problem is that there is nobody to protect the expensive equipment positioned in front of them from stray basketballs or diving players. This is where I come in. (It's really a good thing that no players dive out of bounds at half court where I sit. Errant basketballs I can handle, errant 6'9" 250 pound Sasquatches may be more of a challenge. Obviously Time Warner picked me for this job because they felt confident that I would not run and hide if a player came barreling my way. They were very wrong. Only a hearty raise could make me reconsider.)

Second, an ironic aside. I assumed everyone would want this court-side spot, neatly positioned between the game commentators and sports journalists, but, to my amazement, nobody else wanted it. NOBODY ON THE TIME WARNER SPORTS TELEVISION PRODUCTION TEAM IS PASSIONATE ABOUT SPORTS! They love cables and TV production. Works out alright for me. (It does make striking up conversation a bit difficult, seeing as I would rather discuss sports and they would rather talk technology. We understand our differences and interact accordingly.)

The commentators for Time Warner are coined "talent" by the production crew. I'm not sure where the term originated, but it took me a while to figure out whom was being referenced. It makes sense. They ARE the only ones who deck themselves out in perfectly tailored suits. They ARE the talent. But if they are talented, does that mean we are incompetent? Do they say things like "We have to make sure the "incompetence" has all the wires hooked up right" or "Doesn't "incompetence" know we need to look our best for national television?" I hope not. Calling them "the talent" has always struck me a little sorely, since we are just as important to the entire process as they are. Maybe it just becomes normal the more you work with Time Warner. Maybe I am sore that I'm not the one being called talented. Nobody else seems to care.

Here's what television viewers don't see: The space that we sit in is more cramped than the space provided by airplane engineers. As TV viewers merrily listen to the soothing voices of their court-side commentators, those same commentators are stuck in what feels like a confessional box. To add insult to injury, the floor is filled with so many wires and plug-ins that you kind of need to prop your feet up in front of you or keep them squeezed under your chair which, due to a step up required to leave the area, is impossible to slide out from under you. It's sort of like being plugged into the Matrix when you sit down. Once you're in, there's no turning back.

Something I get to see that TV viewers don't is the commentator's body language and physical reactions to plays. For instance, when Siena's in a tight game, and they give up an easy basket, the color commentator often stomps his foot and grimaces. It's kind of a knee-jerk reaction. He's followed Siena for a long time, and he hates to see them lose. The funniest part about it is that he immediately tries to cover it up afterward, even though the TV viewers can't see him. On the air, he says "Good offensive possession for _______ and a tough foul call for the Siena Saints". See, I know better. What he's actually thinking is "What a terrible, boneheaded defensive play by Siena, if I were out there playing I could do 10 times better myself. Put me in Coach!"

Commentators have an interesting job. If you think about it, all they do is add words to what everyone sees. In this way, the job is both easy and difficult. Saying something that is in front of you is easy, but saying something that adds insight to or extrapolates on what everyone just saw is difficult. They need to add value to the viewer experience while not saying anything particular opinionated or brash. I suspect that it's a tough balance to achieve.

Next time: Court-side Journalists

Games of Epic Proportions

As I watched the final seconds of overtime tick down in what is now known as the Albany Cup, I came to the conclusion that sports are, for lack of current creativity, da bomb diggity fo sho. Here I was, in downtown Albany, with about 9,000 rowdy Albanian college students, alumni, and innocent bystanders, enjoying the competition in front of me. It took a moment like this to realize how excitement and contentment are completely relative to the environment. I will now attempt to decipher that last sentence with more sentences. Starting... now:

To start: The Albany Cup is a regular season, division 1 basketball game between Siena College, a regular NCAA tournament participant with a growing reputation, and UAlbany, a regular league doormat with little national exposure. Slightly David and Goliathesque, these two make up the highest level of basketball in town. The Times Union Center, a building with too much capacity for it's market base, rarely gets more than 4,000 or 5,000 spectators. Arguably, Albany only gets excited about basketball this one time every year.

So, to summarize: Once a year, Albany, a city with no professional sports teams and a couple of mid major level college athletics programs, gets rowdy and excited over this one basketball game. To anyone outside of the Capital Region, the game means nothing, but to everyone in the arena, it's the game of the year.

Which brings me back to the original point. We, as Albanians, don't have access to Madison Square Garden, humongous football stadiums with pro teams, or all the excitement that comes with highly successful local teams, but because of this, we get excited for something of minuscule proportions. Does the small stature of the event on a national scale make it worse? The answer is no, because relative to the other home games each team plays throughout the course of the year which are mostly low-key affairs, this game has a boisterous, energetic atmosphere, and although it's only a bunch of people packed into a sort of small stadium watching mediocre teams play each other, it's still the most exciting thing around. I don't think it's a stretch to say that fans at this game felt MORE emotional contentment at it's completion than plenty of spectators do at pro events.

As I watched fans filter out of the arena from my court-side seat (more on the reason for this arrangement in the near future), it dawned on me that a great game had just taken place and that most fans were leaving the arena satisfied (the game was so good that I'm making a huge assumption that the losing fans were okay with it. HUGE assumption.) Fans weren't satisfied because the game had great national implications, but because they had attained a feeling of satisfaction from watching Albany's singular important college basketball competition go down to the wire, with David pulling out the upset win. It warmed the hearts of only a relatively few people, but that was good enough for them. Or, better put, us.

Flash Gym

A perk of volunteering time in Siena College's Athletics Department is that I am granted access to their gym. I take advantage of this kind gesture by moving heavy metal objects up and down and side to side for free, and consider it fun. I even found a little side room with plenty of machines and free weights, a spot where people sightings are rare. We'll call it "Sanctuary" from here on out, because it's almost always quiet, mellow and relaxed.

Well, the other day I was happily throwing around pounds in Sanctuary when I noticed a few guys with matching shorts and t-shirts loudly amble into the room. I was concentrating too hard on the start of my next set to pay much attention to them. A few seconds later, I was also concentrating too hard on getting through the first couple of reps to notice the entrance of 30 more uniformed bros. And I was working so hard to finish out the set that I didn't notice when someone turned on the surround sound stereo system that was blasting some techno-rap conglomeration. Finally, I finished my lift, and looked up to find myself in a jungle of matted hair and butt slaps. Lax Bros.

Lax Bros. The worst kind of bro. They had infiltrated Sanctuary by the sneakiest of means. Had I not been in the middle of a lift, I could have seen, smell, heard, and probably tasted them coming. Alas, I was caught off guard. But I couldn't leave. No group of grunting men forces me out of Sanctuary. Not on my watch.

So I hung in there, dodging what felt like 25 pound weights flying by my face. Sanctuary is not a big place, and certainly not big enough for 30 fully grown Lax Bros. Considering the combination of noises, including music, belching, and ceaseless Lax chat, I'm somewhat surprised we didn't blow the roof off of the building. I tried to focus on my lifts, but found it difficult to concentrate when woolly mammoths all around me were springing forward, grabbing 80-pound free weights, doing 3 bicep curls, dropping the weights on the ground and on each other, and then bellowing at the top of their lungs. It's just a tough lifting environment.

And then, just like that, the hair-whisking, fist-bumping, pro-spotting machines of human nature were gone. I couldn't believe it. They were like a swarm of hungry fire ants that got full. It reminded me of one of those flash videos that you see on YouTube where people just start dancing in department stores, for the soul purpose of catching it's workers off guard and confusing everyone in the store. It happens really quickly, and then it's over. We'll call it a Flash Gym.

And I now consider it fact that Sanctuary has magical powers, namely the ability to vanquish the most terrifying of mythical creatures, including the fearsome Lax Bro.