ESPN, The Cult of Personality, and "Who's Now"

In the late 1990s, the brilliant playwright/screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, who had been previously known for crafting the script for the play "A Few Good Men," began his career in television (which would lead to the magnificent "The West Wing" and the flawed but intriguing "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip") by creating a sitcom that centered around the ups and downs of the cast and crew of a flagship sports highlight on a 24-hour sports network. The sitcom took its name from the sportscast central to the show: "Sports Night." (If you've never seen it, seek it out on DVD.)

By the time this sitcom aired, the show and network from which it drew inspiration - "SportsCenter" on ESPN - had already been airing for nineteen years. During this time, though, ESPN was experiencing an unprecedented boom-time. Between the years of 1990 and 2002, the network secured exclusive deals with all four major American professional sports (baseball, football, basketball, and, yes, hockey). As these deals fell into place, ESPN gained viewership at an unprecedented rate.

Ultimately, the growth (and resultant success) of ESPN during this 12-year period was contingent on the sports which the network was covering. The network attempted to build on this success this by, in 1994, launching the "This Is SportsCenter" series of commercials, which presented the anchors and reporters of the flagship program as more than just news presenters, but stars in their own right.

For better or worse, ESPN anchors became "names" - people like Chris Berman, Dan Patrick, Craig Kilborn, Stuart Scott, and Keith Olbermann were given exposure on a level that had been heretofore reserved for athletes. In fact, the plots of the commercials featured the athletes and anchors interacting as peers. It was truly the beginning of a "cult of personality" era for ESPN - a time where the people participating in and announcing the sports were treated with more and more reverence than the sports themselves.

Additionally, ESPN has gone above simply covering sports events - they have actually created sports events and assigned them a significance on a par with established sports. Most prominent of these was the 1995 creation of the X-Games, a sports festival of "extreme" sports like motocross, skateboarding, and BMX bicycling. This was joined with the 1997 introduction of the Winter X-Games, which featured snowboarding and snowmobiling. Additionally, ESPN has been instrumental in the coverage of fringe sports like women's professional basketball and arena football - these are sports which, in my opinion, have been covered on SportsCenter primarily because of ESPN's stake in broadcasting them - and as such, have been assigned an "importance" which they hadn't really earned prior to their broadcasting contracts with the network.

As time has gone on, ESPN has continued their emphasis on personality over action. Sports anchors have been given the free reign to let their personalities seize the emphasis in their presentation of the highlights. Commentators have been given extra screen-time, in packaged, sponsored features like "The Budweiser Hot Seat." The highlights - the sports themselves - have taken a backseat.

This summer, in lieu of presenting an actual sports highlight show, SportsCenter has featured a "contest" called "Who's Now." Presented by the ubiquitous, cyclopsian Stuart Scott, it has been a a chance to pit 32 athletes from all sports against each other in a tournament. The point of "Who's Now" -at least as they have stated it on ESPN - is to determine a pecking order based on on-field performance and off-field clout.

The 32 athletes selected by ESPN for this tournament, however, indicate the probability that something else is going on - among the athletes chosen for "now" status are individuals from fringe sports like women's softball (Amanda Beard), ultimate fighting (Chuck Liddell), surfing (Kelly Slater), and snowboarding (Shaun White).

Why would these athletes be chosen for this type of tournament? Does anybody at ESPN seriously believe that snowboarding and surfing are on a par with tennis and golf, let alone the four major sports? My head tells me "no." So, why are they there?

Ultimately, my suspicion is that "Who's Now," a journalistically-shaky competition on all levels, is essentially a focus group. A focus group for what? Well, let's look at it this way: ESPN has obviously been major dabblers in the cult of personality for quite some time. The X-Games, which have been considered the centerpiece of the extreme sports culture for sometime, are an ESPN property. In placing extreme athletes up for consideration with individual athletes in major individual sports (tennis stars Roger Federer, Serena Williams, and Maria Sharapova and golfer Tiger Woods) and star athletes in team sports (footballer Tom Brady, baseball star Derek Jeter, and basketball's LeBron James), they can gauge how they're doing. The X-Games are theirs, and the stars that are central to these events are the stars that ESPN have created and showcased.

With that in mind, it's hard not to think of "Who's Now" as a state of affairs check-up for ESPN - it's a way to see how what they do in the business of creating stars matches up with what they do in the world of broadcasting the highlights of established stars. It's a logical step for a network that refers to itself as "The Worldwide Leader" - to use its resources to see how successful and influential they truly are.

It makes me yearn for the days of the late-1990s, when it was easy to think of ESPN as being a hands-off network, the type that would inspire characters on "Sports Night" like Dan Rydell (Josh Charles) and Casey McCall (Peter Krause) - the type of characters that gave you the hope that your sports-news personalities were ethics-and-responsibility driven, instead of working (as folks as questionable as Stuart Scott and respected as Michael Wilbon seem to be) for the benefit of the advertisers and the almighty buck.

In the great Living Colour song "Cult of Personality," lead singer Corey Glover sings "You gave me fortune/you gave me fame." Which seems to fit the world of ESPN. He then takes it up a notch: "You gave me power...I exploit you, you still love me."

Is that too harsh? Possibly. Does it fit the way ESPN does business? Boo-ya.

Correction: My friend Scott Jennings has pointed out, correctly so, that Amanda Beard is a swimmer (and not a softball player, as I asserted). I stand corrected. That being said, she remains absolutely irrelevant to most Americans, aside from her appearance in "Playboy" magazine. Spank bank material? Probably. A "now" athlete on a par with, say, the leadoff hitter for the New York Mets? No.