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STOP THE MARCH MADNESS
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Stop the March Madness
by Daren Foster
I promised myself it wouldn’t happen. I made a vow. The agreement was, I could watch it but as soon as it was over, it was over. I’d click off the television and wouldn’t give it another thought.
Apparently, my word is as flimsy as.. the flimsiest agreement ever made. As flimsy as the dress of the prom date who is determined to do it at least once before heading off to college. My fingers were double crossed behind my back, which makes absolutely no sense since it was a deal brokered between me and, well, me. You’d think my left hand would’ve known what my right hand was doing and let the rest of me know that I wasn’t being at all honest with myself.
You see, the problem is, I’ve already written about it. The terrain’s been trod on after last year’s World Series and then again post-Super Bowl XLII. The topic’s been broached. What’s left to say? Plenty, it seems. In fact, I can hardly contain myself. It’s an itch I just gotta scratch.
Once more, like the proverbial snake that swallows itself (if such a thing exists), commercial television lays waste to the very product it broadcasts.
In order to maintain readers who aren’t sports fans, I’ll endeavour to keep the synopsis brief. The subject? NCAA college hoops. The championship game and culmination of that strange American springtime ritual, March Madness. A near non-event up here in Canada even for the most diehard of sports fans as it tends to interfere with picking and choosing playoff hockey pools. This year’s game featured the Jayhawks from Kansas against the Memphis Tigers.
Was it the greatest championship game ever played? No, but it was pretty darn good. Kansas overcame a 9-point deficit with 2 minutes to play, topped off with 3-point shot with just over 2 seconds left to send the game into overtime. On paper it reads like a thrilling nail-biter, an edge of your seater. In reality? This viewer, for one, was left unmoved and irritated, fighting to keep from turning off the TV and going to bed.
Why, you ask? Assuming you’re asking why did I find the game so unsatisfying and not, why didn’t I just turn off the television and go to bed. The quickest response to that question is, like anyone who’s ever been involved in a lengthy, destructive relationship, how do you just walk away? So much time has already been invested.
But why did I find this year’s game so underwhelming?
Join me in singing the chorus if you’ve heard this one before: the pervasive, unrelenting, ceaseless, non-stop, inexorable, tiresome barrage of commercial interruptions. It’s like that old joke about going to a boxing match and a hockey game broke out. Last night, I sat through 2+ hours of commercials occasionally interrupted by a basketball game.
Not to belabour the point (or maybe to do exactly that), college basketball games consist of two twenty-minute halves. Toss in last night’s five minute overtime session and you’re looking at forty-five minutes of actual playing time. Most regular season games that I’ve watched are done and finished within two-and-a-half hours. The tip-off for this year’s championship game was at 9:21pm EDT and Kansas was crowned champs at nearly 11:45pm. You do the math but I’m calculating almost an extra hour for nothing more than advertisements.
Commercial television needs to die. It has overstayed its welcome and must be put out of our misery. I want to live long enough to dance on its grave, to watch its buildings shuttered up and its chattel repossessed. While making athletes, anchormen and actors fabulously rich, it has drained their respective professions of anything meaningful except for the bottom line. Commercial television has pimped out sports. It has twisted and perverted the dissemination of information. It crushes any artistic impulse under the heavy heels of marketers and advertiser concerns. The whole enterprise deserves no less an end than Mussolini received; its bloated corpse hung upside down and dragged through the public square for all the villagers to spit on.
I was having dinner last week with a friend of mine. We were talking about just this thing although from a different angle. My friend is a chunk younger than I am which means two things: he is much more tech savvy and possesses a far sunnier outlook about the future. His hopes and aspirations have not yet come crashing down around him. When our litre of house red reaches the midway mark, my friend sees it as half full while I panic, sense the end is near and scream out to the waiter for another.
It seems that in my friend’s utopian view of the not-too-distant future, technology will have advanced to such a degree that the tiniest of devices, say the cell phone, will be imbued with the magical powers of not only downloading content but of projecting it in increasingly better resolution. In another scenario, a single computer hard drive will take care of a household’s entire entertainment/informational needs, spitting out everything from electronic daily planners to the latest episode of your favourite television show directly to that 90-inch plasma screen hanging on the wall. No further need for the middlemen like broadcasters and cable providers, you see. The future so bright, we’ll all have to wear shades!
Bring it on, I say, to both my friend and the waiter when the red wine gets perilously low. Here’s hoping. But I can’t help throwing cold water on the proceedings and point to the music industry (as I have in previous posts). The old guard has held on awfully tight, keeping the “inevitable” march of progress mired down like a Napoleonic Army slog through Russia. The late-90s frenzy of synergy was only a temporary bust. The old media had no idea what to make of the new media but gobbled it up anyway so that when some genius figured it all out, they’d have their fingers firmly planted in the pie. Recent stories of ISP conglomerates (many who are also cable/satellite companies) actively interfering with their customers’ internet affairs -- deliberate bottlenecking -- suggest that the corporate giants aren’t going to simply implode in the face of this technological revolution. There’s going to be plenty of unpleasant surprises as the battle wears on, I’m afeard. Hopefully, that’s merely a symptom of my aging badly.
Of course, if we were just talking about college basketball games -- which is how this diatribe started -- or music and video downloads, it would simply be opiniated blather about essentially inessential matters. However, it seems to be the precursor to more critical issues. Almost from the get-go, the old media has been able to control what you see and when you see it. Through their near monopolistic hold on television, radio and newspapers, they’ve dictated the terms of the debate. Not in an Orwellian sense of telling you what to think but rather what to think about. The open access internet has challenged that primacy. Unfortunately, unlike the little man Toto revealed standing behind the curtain, these aren’t powerless figures playing with the levers. Such vested interests are going to put up an ugly, nasty fight to keep control over their domain.
You might not be able to coax the genie back into the bottle or squish toothpaste back into the tube but you most certainly can keep both in your possession and dole out access to others as you see fit. Let’s give them their broadcasts of commercial-laden basketball games. Come more vital matters, news from the battlefield, say, or the wheeling-and-dealings behind the doors of government, it is imperative we challenge just how all that’s parcelled out for public consumption.
Wow. Sometimes I take myself so seriously. How be we end up on a more frivolous note. Jayhawks are #1!!
Wow. Sometimes I take myself so seriously. How be we end up on a more frivolous note. Jayhawks are #1!!
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