Press - Vanity Fair: Mixed Media

"Mixed Media"
By: James Wolcott

The newest wrinkle in jockstrap worship is fan radio, ear exercise for blubbo couch buddies from-behind victory. When fans manage to climb to their logy feet, they learn to live by other cues. Beer commercials featuring George Wendt (Cheers) at a flower show or Paul Hogan (Crocodile Dundee) at an art opening function as object lessons in carriage and demeanor. They teach socialization – how to drink upscale and still be a regular guy. Not gal, guy.
Of course, there are millions of female sports fans and a scattering of female sports commentators. (WFAN has an excellent host in Ann Liguori.) But the broadcasting and advertising media prefer to segment an audience to pinpoint its demographics, and they really want those hearty men in search of hearty brew. This explains why the potatoes of the Coors "couching staff" are male; why in the Michelob commercial a spruce dude hesitates in front of a television ball game as his miffed date steams on alone. Commercials drum home the message that men have a funky, primal, Fred Flinstone need to shuck off civilized duty and dig in front of the flickering light. Like beer commercials, fan radio fosters an urban idyll of male bonding, a touch-football game of comradely spirit. (Touch football is as close as most men want to get to touchie-feelie.) Couch buddies have become one of the last, feeble vestiges of sexual separatism. ESPN is their biofeedback. CBS's John Madden is their shouting Buddha. Regardless of marital status, couch buddies are a bachelor's club (a man needn't be a bachelor to act like one), and sports radio is finally bachelor radio. It's aimed at men alone with their sports buzz-the solitary beer gut. But who am I to sound superior? I log a lot of useless hours with WFAN in the background, and I don't even have a couch. Or drink beer. My own susceptibility to WFAN makes me suspect that its formula will click.
Every new wrinkle in broadcasting begins as a novelty before it becomes a fad and then a staple. When New York's all-news station WINS began in the mid-sixties, one of it's initial scoops involved the killing of a circus clown (the station's news manager proudly told The New Yorker, "[We had] the first interviews with the victim's fellow-clowns"). Today, however, nearly every major market has an all-news outlet. All-sports won't be as easy to clone, because few cities have the plethora of teams that New York has. But the spread of national sports consciousness-best reflected in the sports pages of USA Today-plus the overlapping of the baseball, football, basketball, and hockey seasons, helps make the format transplantable. The question is, how much input can even sports addicts take before it all becomes an indistinguishable drone? People winced and hooted when the announcer Tim McCarver compared Game Six of the Mets-Astros play-offs to Beowulf as an epic legend what would long endure. But if McCarver's prophecy proves false, it will be not because his comparison was kooky or inapt (although Game Six seemed more, duh, Homeric to me) but because the steady media wash of our time tends to subsume even peak events into an ongoing transmission. Our eyes become extensions of optic fibers. As sport becomes as intricately monitored as the weather or stock market, it loses its special tang of time and place, its internal breath. Fan radio is just one more sign of how reluctant we are to be alone with our thoughts. How wired we are to distraction.