It was, I think, in the early 1990s, but it may have been earlier, that the great leap forward in sporting media coverage was made.
An eager young up-and-comer ran to his superior’s office at the network, and breathlessly reported the results of his great project: a comprehensive longitudinal study of viewer habits and preferences.
It was clear, he said excitedly, that sports fans wanted one thing from their sports broadcasts: commentators being dickheads.
The shift was seismic. Everywhere producers issued the order to their commentary teams: dickhead it up. And a new age of athleti-tainment was born.
These days, with cable, satellite, streaming video and social media, sports lovers have an unprecedented range of choice when it comes to dickhead commentary. Just look at my career for a start. But elsewhere we can choose from James Brayshaw and Michael Slater dressing as Disney characters and selling mass-produced memorabilia, Channel Ten polling us about what colour shirt we like best, Ray Warren constantly neglecting his medication, Phil Gould demanding death penalties for referees, Bruce McAvaney experiencing ever-escalating levels of sexual arousal, Drew Morphett’s strange buzzing noises, and many many more.
Indeed, we are rapidly approaching the point where sports coverage can be conducted without the presence of a sport at all, which is obviously the ultimate goal.
But with such a dizzying array of wankery to choose from, it might now be time to consider pruning some of the less necessary elements of the gitfest that is the 21st century’s sports broadcast landscape.
Bearing that in mind, how about we start with the post-match interview?
This curious invention has come into focus this week, as it usually does, thanks to the Australian Open and its maddening tradition of on-court chats with winning players. Commentator Ian Cohen’s request to Eugenie Bouchard, that she twirl for the audience, has attracted the most attention, perhaps because it’s one of the stupidest things a grown man has said in the history of grown men saying things.
Please imagine, for a moment, the extent of neural misfiring, the subterranean depths of cerebral collapse, that would have been necessary for Ian Cohen – a man who is not currently under the care of any institution – to think, “What people want is for professional tennis players to twirl.”
Of course, what he was actually thinking was, “Haha woman is here. Woman like clothes. Talk woman about dress. Tell woman twirl. Hahaha woman wear nice dress. Woman have legs.”
No ordinary person thinks this way, of course – it takes a commentator.
There was another minor brouhaha in the post-match interview sector at the Open, when Australia’s Nick Kyrgios was berated for his supposedly arrogant and sarcastic responses to the questions posed of him after his win over Ivo Karlovic.
Apparently Kyrgios was being insufferably rude in that interview, despite the impression which some observers may have formed that he was in fact doing his best to be polite in the face of questioning that reached such a level of inanity that it would have been quite within the bounds of reasonable behaviour to flick the interviewer in the eye with a rubber band.
How a less cocky young man may have replied to someone asking them in public about their father’s shirt, and pointing out to them the stunning insight that when each player has won two sets, it leads to a fifth, I have no idea.
It does illustrate something, though. The twirl request to Bouchard was widely criticised as insanely sexist – mainly because it was. As was the question to her last year about her ideal date. As it was when Billy Brownless a few years ago asked Alicia Molik about her breasts. As it is when cricketer Alyssa Healy is quizzed on her relationship with Mitchell Starc rather than her cricket. As it is so often when a male commentator is foolishly allowed to talk to a female athlete.
But sexism is just one of the biggest slices of the dickhead cake that commentators gorge on on the regular, and the Kyrgios interview shows that. A post-match interview with a woman is almost certain to be sexist, but a post-match interview with a man is going to end up unspeakably awful as well, just in a different way. Commentators are often chauvinist pigs, but if you deny them the chance to be chauvinists, they’ll be pigs anyway.
And this is only exacerbated in the heat of the moment after a game – or, as in the ill-advised and invariably dull and uninformative chats with just-dismissed cricketers in the Big Bash League, during a game. And if you can find me a batsman who can honestly say one of his favourite things to do when dealing with the disappointment of getting out is having a microphone shoved in his face, I will happily have that batsman committed.
When you take a sportsperson, exhausted, exhilarated, adrenalin coursing through their veins, the euphoria of victory meshing with the aching weariness of flesh and bone pushed to its limit and the mind racing with thoughts of what was done right, what was done wrong, what must change and what must improve next time out…
Who the hell ever thought that was a good time to gain thoughtful insights into the athletic mind? Did someone somehow gain the impression that a footballer would be at his most articulate 30 seconds after an Origin clash? Or that a cricketer would have the clearest view of the match situation the moment they stepped over the boundary rope? Or, of course, that a tennis player’s mood would be the most amenable to moronic questioning when their bag was still slung over the shoulder?
The post-match interview is the perfect storm, the matchless intersection of a player’s lack of suitability to be interviewed and the interviewer’s essential and inherent idiocy. In an ideal world, they’d all go like this. Or this.
But in this imperfect world, they run the gamut from banal and pointless to cringeworthy and offensive.
And as I said, it’s not like we’re starved of opportunities to watch and listen to commentators being dickheads. Take away post-match interviews and we’ll still have statements of the bleeding obvious, absurd over-hyping, nauseating cross-promotion, and Brian Taylor. But it would spare us a certain amount of awkwardness, and spare the players a large amount of personal aggravation and a significant amount of wasted time.
How about it? Would the world end if a top-10 ranked star were allowed to go have a shower and get to bed rather than having to stay on the court at 1am talking to a cretin about her skirt? And given the general standard of post-match interviews, even if it did, wouldn’t the end of the world be worth it?
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