Announcers Won't Let Us Watch Games in Peace

I have a secret. Two, actually. They're both pretty embarrassing, but here goes.

I used to watch a lot of sports when I was a kid. A lot. When I was three I could identify each NFL football team by the logo on its helmet. I was three. But that's not one of my secrets.

The first one is that when I watched baseball games I stood in front of the television with a whiffle ball bat and pretended I was the hitter. The second is that I would turn off the volume and pretend to announce games as I watched them. Not that I thought the announcers were doing a bad job, I just wanted to try it for myself.

But now sometimes I really think I could do better.

I was watching the Browns game last Sunday and some unfortunate announcer, following a sack by Cleveland's dynamic rookie defensive end Courtney Brown, said, "That's the biggest man with a girl's name I know."

Wait. I've heard worse.

During the pre-Nomar years I was watching a Red Sox game with my father where Mike Greenwell hit a rope about 10 feet up the wall in center field. The ever-perceptive color man, Bob Montgomery, proceeded to enlighten the greater New England audience by informing us, "Were that wall in center 15 feet shorter, that would have been gone."

Not that the current Sox announcers are a huge improvement. Hey, everyone who consistently tunes in to Boston's games can't help but love color man Jerry Remy, but sometimes he talks about the quality of the park's hamburgers more than he does the game.

Returning to football for a moment, it seems I could single out a hopelessly terrible announcer on almost every crew. The dubious dinosaur John Madden provides the most obvious example for me to pick on. It's bad enough that we have to suffer through NFC East games that maybe were interesting in 1984, but his "Boom booming" and schizophrenic telestrator scrawls got old when the Bengals got bad. Wait, they've always been bad.

If Madden is envisioned by some old-guard network lunatics to be the cream of the football announcing crop, I guess these same people would see Bob Costas as the venerable voice of the baseball playoffs and All-Star game. While Madden's chaotic scribbling sends me running for the Advil, Costas' absurd dramatizations make me want to barf.

Some defend Costas for not "talking down" to the average sports viewer. However, not compromising the use of language doesn't mean one has to sound like an AP English teacher attempting to find the most esoteric way possible to describe a bunt single. At least Costas haters had some revenge during this year's Mets-Cardinals NLCS when Costas said, "Now to the bottom of the Satan," and just barely had time to correct himself before the commercial break, during which he must have absorbed some of the most humorous chiding imaginable from his colleagues.

Nor is basketball exempt from announcing which makes the game nearly unwatchable. Like with the case of Madden, a certain network darling is the obvious culprit. I'll give you a hint -- he's about 6'10" and is more grating than nails on a chalkboard. If you haven't guessed Bill Walton by now you know too many people who are 6'10".

The big man is constantly disagreeing with his eminently more sensible colleagues, much of the time, it seems, just for the sake of hearing himself talk on national television. Someone needs to tell this guy we just want to see Vince Carter dunk. No one needs him to preach about the "hahhhrable" pass Jason Williams made or the "miserable strategy" of Milwaukee's defense - we're smart enough to see it for ourselves.

How are networks to conquer the problem of the inarticulate jocks whose lunacy is broadcast to millions of viewers at nearly every major sporting event? ABC's "Monday Night Football" just may have taken some steps in the right direction.

It was big news when funnyman Dennis Miller replaced ex-quarterback Boomer Esiason in the booth for one of the most heavily watched weekly sporting events. Could a guy who's never broadcast sports and never played professional sports cut it? After more than half a season in the booth, it seems clear that Miller can not only be an adequate replacement for Esiason, he adds a new and refreshing dimension to sports broadcasting.

Yeah, he's funny, but Miller brings a far more human element to the booth than at any time in recent memory. He acknowledges when he stumbles over a word or mis-pronounces something, a minor detail, but something that can help an announcer save face and actually emerge from the blunder with some integrity. He's clearly an intelligent guy who does his research - he immediately pointed it out to the audience when Vikings running back Robert Smith broke his career high in receptions in a game during last weeks Vikings-Packers game - and he's probably the only guy in sports broadcasting who can get away with saying, "I just like the way he glides, man."

I'm prepared to face the inevitable criticism on this one. And I know what the arguments against me will be. He's too colloquial, too sarcastic, too snobby.

There's something refreshing about hearing a guy calling a game who sounds a lot like any normal viewer. He makes fun of his colleagues when they use unintelligible jock jargon and isn't above informing the audience when furious producers are incessantly tapping his shoulder to ensure he correctly and promptly identifies the sponsors. In short, Miller brings the audience into the booth. Instead of isolating us as outsiders, Miller tells us what's going on upstairs instead of hiding everything from us like every other announcer.

So maybe the ABC execs had their heads screwed on right after all when this summer they made the shocking announcement that Miller would be their man on Monday nights. The witless jock sitting next to the corny intellect certainly isn't working for anyone these days. Networks should try and fix this problem before it becomes too rampant. After all, according to Costas it's only the bottom of the Satan.