The Highlight Myth-making Machine

Introduction: The Highlight Mythmaking Machine

Today it is almost impossible to access sports media without being inundated with highlights. Regardless of the platform (e.g., television, the World Wide Web, hand-held mobile devices), or the venue (e.g., home, sports bar, stadium or arena), all deliver sports highlights as news, teasers, and programs at an ever-increasing rate. It’s hard to imagine being at a live sporting event or watching the live broadcast of a sporting event without highlights being shown on jumbotrons and television sets.

Highlights have not only become one of the primary means through which sports teams, leagues and media inform and entertain their audiences, but they have also become an intrinsic part of the sports themselves in the form of “Instant Replay,” allowing coaches and players to contest on-field decisions by officials. In this sense, the technology that enabled highlights has changed the way sports are officiated, the way live sports are broadcast, and the way journalists construct news. No longer are sports limited to a three- or five-minute segment that dominated network and local newscasts. With the launching of ESPN in 1979, sports news became a never-ending cycle of scores, updates, previews and promos—all thanks to video recorders that made highlights easily accessible.

Highlights have supplanted the sports pages, sports magazines and radio as the easiest way to follow sports and its stars. Whereas 1920s’ sports writers like Grantland Rice, Ring Lardner and Paul Gallico were the mythmakers of Babe Ruth, Bill Tilden, Jack Dempsey and Bobby Jones, and television brought Mickey Mantle, Johnny Unitas, Bill Russell and Arnold Palmer into the living rooms of most Americans, highlights are what made Michael Jordan, Wayne Gretsky, Andre Agassi and Tiger Woods into the megastars who transcended their sports and became icons of sports marketing. Sports have become ubiquitous in our culture and sports stars have replaced political and business leaders as the most important and recognizable persons on  earth. It certainly wasn’t always this way. 

So the question must be asked: How did we arrive at this juncture in which sports have become the first and foremost cultural capital? How do highlights help create today’s legends and myths? This book traces the many developments that contributed to the evolution of the sportscast highlight as the primary means of communicating about sports and athletes. In this regard the term highlights refers to those texts created with established visual and audio techniques and conventions that generate meaning and create affect. 

Whether one chooses to describe highlights as a news frame, genre or aesthetic form, the sportscast highlight has been, and continues to be, used to communicate narratives about sporting events and the athletes who compete within them. In this sense, highlights are both form and content, serving as both frame and image within which narratives are presented and preserved. Highlights are those segments that capture historic achievement (e.g., world’s record), as well as those sterling examples of individual or team athleticism (e.g., slam dunk) that produce the “wow factor,” and even those oddball follies that defy categorization.

Types of Highlights

Basically, highlights fit into two distinct categories that come together to meld into a third. First, there are those highlights whose images largely derive their meaning from their context. For example, the highlight selected as the greatest in a 2008 Entertainment and Sports Programming Network (ESPN) contest, “Greatest Highlight with Chris Berman,” was Mike Eruzione’s gamewinning goal in the 1980 Lake Placid Olympic Games. Although the goalscoring sequence offered neither outstanding athleticism, nor compelling visuals, it captured a significant sporting moment for an American audience, namely, victory over the highly favored hockey team from the Soviet Union. Even if one did not know that Eruzione’s goal was not scored in the goldmedal winning game or that it wasn’t scored against the USSR’s top goal-tender or that the USA’s other goals by Mark Johnson were more dramatic, what’s important about Eruzione’s goal was that it conveys the ultimate blow of David defeating Goliath. 

Not knowing the Cold War context of a group of erstwhile amateurs going up against a mighty, state-funded juggernaut robs Eruzione’s goal of much of its meaning and significance. Arguably, understanding the context of the “Miracle on Ice” gives that highlight its meaning. Second, there are all of those awe-inspiring images whose meaning is not at all dependent on the context or backstory. For example, Lynn Swann’s acro batic catch in Super Bowl X was a great individual play regardless of the game’s outcome. No context is necessary to appreciate the catch, and the images can be appreciated for the power, grace and beauty of the athleticism. 

The catalogue of these highlights is as wide as the firmament of athletic genius. You can picture them in your imagination: MJ or Doctor J launching from the free-throw line and soaring in for a slam dunk, Bobby Orr or Wayne Gretsky rushing end to end, Gale Sayers taking a punt back all the way. Knockout punches, towering home runs, game-winning goals, touchdown runs and pass receptions are the staples that are delivered as Play of the Game, the Week, the Year. The third category offers great plays at crucial moments. These are iconic sports highlights—game-winners, buzzer-beaters, golden goals: Bill Mazeroski’s ninth-inning home run; Franco Harris’s “Immaculate Reception”; Dwight Clark’s “The Catch”; Bobby Thompson’s “Shot Heard Round the World”; Diego Maradonna’s “Hands of God” goal; Secretariat’s Belmont Stakes run. It is not by accident that many of these plays have their own specific or generic identity (e.g., the Hail Mary pass).

Sportscasts

To trace the evolution of highlights as they were developed and deployed within various aspects of a sportscast, it is useful to differentiate between the two main types of sportscasts: 1) the live coverage (i.e., accounts and descriptions) of a sporting event and 2) news- and entertainment-oriented programming based on sporting events. The first category includes all the national and international, professional, collegiate, interscholastic and club sporting events (e.g., Olympics, World Cup Football, Wimbledon, Kentucky Derby, NFL, etc.) that are disseminated live via an electronic delivery system.1 The second includes all emanations of sports news—film actualities, newsreel sports segments, televised sports news programming, Web site content, and content delivered via mobile devices. These two main sportscast genres have been communicated by a variety of delivery systems. While the changes in delivery systems, or technologies, are important to consider in the evolution of highlights, they function as only one aspect of how media systems operate. Media systems serve within the broader nexus of information and entertainment conglomerates. In short, media use the various delivery systems to not only disseminate content but also help to establish social and cultural practices. So it is equally important to consider the social, economic, legal and material relationships that accompany the dissemination of sportscast highlights.

Sportscast highlights, as both form and content for various media, have changed as media’s protocols have changed. While the delivery systems of sportscast highlights have changed, what has not undergone significant change is the highlight form itself. In short, sportscast highlights evolved from refinements in audio and video techniques, resulting in enhanced production values. Not surprisingly, sportscast highlights have been adapted and appropriated by news organizations, as well as sports teams and leagues, to capture, preserve and embellish not only decisive moments of sporting events and athletic achievement, but also in establishing and maintaining their identity. In so doing, these entities have utilized highlights to carry ideological messages about whose stories and what values are worth communicating while dismissing or obscuring others.

Who is in the highlight is as important, if not more important, as what is in the highlight. Explaining the changes in technologies and protocols that have shaped sporting discourse, transmitted cultural values, and promoted affective economics involves an analysis of the visual and audio techniques that constitute the highlight. Arguably, the most important technique is the creation of a visual shorthand through the use of condensation and remediation.2 Creating the news frame involves editing down hours of footage to find a part that serves to represent the whole. 

The sportscast highlight frame condenses a two- or three-hour sportscast and reframes those images with auditory conventions (e.g., narrative commentary and canned music) to generate a new meaning context. Highlights can be presented in such a way as to guide the viewer to the “correct” interpretation and feeling state about the performance or play, despite the fact that viewers are almost always disparately positioned and rarely interpret the highlight’s meaning in the same way. A towering home run can be seen as a great swing or a fat pitch. 

Changes in the technologies were accompanied by changes in protocols for both sportscast producers and audiences. Highlights changed the way sportscasters and electronic sports journalists performed their jobs. For example, with the introduction of in-game replays in the early 1960s, sportscasters’ accounts and descriptions of live sporting events became increasingly more technical and analytic, lending a greater scientificity to the commentary. The role of the sportscaster changed from one who informed to one who entertained. When videotape recorders allowed for instant replays, montages were used to amplify the spectacle and generate more in-game promotions. In turn, the commercial imperative reshaped institutional values and professional practices of electronic sports journalists. The relationship between sports journalists and the leagues, teams and players was characterized by marketing co-promotion and a vested interest in protecting each other’s financial investments. 

Technological changes also impacted the protocols of sportscast viewers. In the early 1890s viewers experienced the sportscast highlight form alone, looking through a viewer mounted on the top of Kinetoscope machines, what were known as peep shows. Only a few years later, projectors allowed for viewing in cinemas (i.e., nickelodeons), opera houses, fairgrounds and anywhere a screen and projector could be set up and powered with electricity. Similarly, early television viewing was largely a communal affair as bars and taverns capitalized on the new medium by offering sportscasts to patrons. The home became the primary place to watch when television sets became affordable for individuals and families. 

The viewing experience for home audiences changed again with the proliferation of new delivery systems. No longer did viewers depend exclusively on the television schedule since sportscast pay packages allowed for access almost anywhere and anytime, thanks to personal computers and mobile phones. Media and sports leagues discovered they could generate another revenue stream by delivering sportscast content to an audience of one, bringing the viewing experience full circle. Highlights have a long history. While it is important to acknowledge that illustrations were used in early sporting magazines like Bell’s Sporting Life, Spirit of the Times, and the Police Gazette, highlights as we know them today can best be traced in the context of visual electronic media. Specifically, sportscast highlights start with some of the earliest Edison films, which included staged boxing matches, as well as actualities of live sporting events. Later, newsreels helped to standardize the routines utilized by cameramen and the sports segments created in the production offices by editors. 

Next, early television developed the conventions and production practices used in the presentation of live sporting events and sports news programming. In the early 1960s, televised sportscasts were enhanced with special effects techniques like instant replay.3 The emergence of cable networks like ESPN and the Cable News Network (CNN), which began airing nightly half-hour sportscasts in 1979 and 1980 respectively, saturated the electronic sports media market and introduced the concept of the “sports junkie.”4 Lastly, new media offered yet another set of delivery systems and protocols that changed the ways audiences accessed sportscasts. Each medium made important contributions, not so much as discrete phenomena, but as the relational totality which the term implies.5 Put another way, film, newsreels, network and cable television, and new media are very closely aligned in terms of the technologies and proto cols that contributed to the development and deployment of sportscast highlights.

Why Highlights?

Highlights are important in large part due to the prominent position sports media in general and sports journalism in particular occupy within the political and cultural economy of late capitalism. Significantly, it is within the sphere of culture where the key economic processes of production, dissemination and exchange occur, connecting cultural production to the late-capitalist world of making products, supplying services and generating profits. Since cultural factors are central to economic processes, then sport and sports media clearly occupy a central position in the larger process that is reshaping society and culture. 

Highlights, as media texts, are positioned at the very center of our culture: they may not be material, yet billions of people consume them in quantity, and media corporations expend billions of dollars to supply them.6 Understanding how sportscast highlights became the means through which producers couch the visual and verbal languages of sport affect sheds light on our cultural and media history. The significance of highlights can also be seen in the considerable impact the national and regional sports networks (e.g., CBS, NBC, ESPN, Fox Sports Net) have had on the proliferation of sportscasts. The sportscast landscape changed drastically with ESPN’s presence on cable systems, as its daily newscasts grew from 15 minutes (originally titled SportsNight) to 60 minutes (SportsCenter). Additionally, when ESPN began broadcasting 24 hours a day in 1980, sports programming became an all-the-time feature of American culture. Little wonder, then, ESPN research in 2003 showed an average of 94 million Americans spent 50 minutes a day or almost six hours per week with ESPN media.7 Not surprisingly, ESPN has staked its claim to revolutionizing sports broadcasting and the American experience with sports. 

In a 2004 book published by ESPN, titled ESPN25: 25 Mind-Bending, Eye-Popping, Culture-Morphing Years of Highlights, author Charles Hirshberg argues: And it did so by adopting, and perfecting, an underutilized, unappreciated method of communication: the sports highlight.... ESPN has made highlights the primary means by which the patterns and stories of sports are revealed. It’s a perfect medium for modern America.8 Hirshberg’s contention that sportscast highlights have been “underutilized and unappreciated” is patently overstated, given the very prominent use of highlights in both journalistic and non-journalistic sports programming since the very beginning of film. Additionally, the contention that the highlight form is “a perfect medium for modern America” raises questions about whose stories are told and what values are being promoted through that particular media form. Although ESPN has doubtlessly changed the landscape of sports broadcasting, it’s important to consider the changed context within which American electronic sports journalism has been organized and produced, as well as the changed model of consumer behavior shaping programming and marketing strategies. Electronic sports reporting has arguably changed from one that predominantly informs to one that primarily entertains by employing highlights to present increasingly dramatic and spectacular sports images. The greater the affect, the easier it is to maintain audience satisfaction. 

If Hirshberg’s description—“A good highlight is at once a poetic distillation of athleticism and a carnival barker’s holler for your attention, a shameless effort to keep you from pressing that damned remote”—is even remotely accurate, then this “shameless effort” to maintain the audience not only dictates which highlights are presented, but also skews the aesthetic techniques toward more spectacular and viscerally generating highlights.9 Operating within a postmodern market culture, sportscasts create rather than satisfy needs. This can be referred to as the sport of desire—the non-stop parade of new products, increased sensations and market branding. The media constantly feeds this desire but never quite allows the consumer to feel fulfilled by the images.10 With highlights, the communication system captures, in this case, sport reality in its entirety so that the viewer becomes fully immersed in a virtual image setting of slam dunks, towering home runs, vicious sacks and fist-pumping athletes. 

Not having seen the live broadcast doesn’t matter because experiencing the highlights becomes more real than the actual event. Ultimately, however many highlights are shown, the viewer is never satisfied, instead being fixated on a perpetual present of a constantly revolving array of myth-making narratives— game recaps subsumed within pastiches of spectacular plays removed from game context, hyped promotional images untethered to any meaning other than what to watch next. By pandering to what Hirshberg calls “Incredible Shrinking Attention Span and its cut-to-the-chase-and-show-me-what-yougot values,” networks like ESPN may have found an easy way to rationalize their form of broadcast journalism, but calling it the “perfect medium for modern America” trivializes the product it purports to celebrate.11 Lastly, issues of representation remain central to electronic sports journalism, as well as political, economic and international affairs. 

This stems from the idea that sport and mediated presentations of it operate within a discourse permeated with symbolism and metaphor. In order to analyze the extent to which mediated presentations of sport impact the formations of race, ethnicity, gender and national identity, it is necessary to consider particular social, cultural and historical contexts. Rather than applying universal theories of sport, ethnicity and racism, particularly when examining the production and consumption of electronic news reportage of sport, it should be noted that a clear linkage of relationships connects the roles played by media, sports leagues and audiences. 

The positioning of the sports world in the social construction of news within both the layout of newspapers and the segmentation of local television news programs offers an important clue about our culture and a direct bearing on the coverage of sport, race and ethnicity. In major newspapers, sports are strategically set apart from other types of news, a world unto itself with its own set of priorities, its own set of news values and a self-sufficiency that other types of news only wished they could duplicate. The newspaper sports section and the televised sports segment have their own internal ranking of big and small stories, their own climaxes, fillers, features, brights and commentary. 

This positioning within electronic news media reflects the general place of sport in our culture as a well-defined enclave, one of whose major attractions is that it has little or no relation to the rest of the news. With the arrival of cable sports news programs, televised sports journalism truly set itself apart from the rest of the news. These programs have had an immediate impact on local stations and the way they cover sports, since programs like SportsCenterserve as the linchpin for local sportscasters in much the same way that network news programs serve as models for local newscasters. Many local network affiliates, especially those in metropolitan areas that have professional sport franchises, have created their own sport-specific programs modeled after those on ESPN. Not surprisingly, highlights provide the means to attract and maintain an audience. Thus, tracing the evolution of the sportscast highlight provides historical perspective on what might appear to be a distinctly postmodern aesthetic. The better we understand this important sport news frame, the better we can understand the way sportscasts have been, and continue to be, deployed to shape cultural and social values.

Preview of Chapters

What was the history of sports highlights? What were the conditions of their production and reception? This book details the significant technolog ical, legal, social and economic factors in the evolution of this news frame from the earliest days of film until the first decade of the twenty-first century. Throughout this long period of time, highlights remained an important journalistic tool that served important functions. Chapter 1, “Knockout Rounds and Rounding Marks,” explores how early sport film actualities contributed several key components to the evolution of the highlight form—an operational aesthetic that established production practices for the presentation of sport, the popularization of a performance culture that relied on spectacle and sports celebrities, and the marketing, packaging and diffusion of sport content in the form of highlights for cultural consumption. With its ability to capture movement, whether in the form of a horse race, yacht racing on the water, or boxers in a ring, film proved highly popular with the public before the turn of the twentieth century. Significantly, producers quickly learned how to package and promote the most important action and use it to attract an audience. 

Another key aspect related to film’s operational aesthetic was its use of an on-stage narrator or commentator. Although this development stemmed from the tradition of illustrated lectures, it was used to legitimize sports. For example, having a commentator diffused boxing’s unsavory aspect by suggesting that the exhibition could be appreciated for its “genteel style of presentation.”12 Ultimately, however, film actualities featuring boxing became a victim of their own success and of a racial ideology that would not allow the wide presentation of film showing a black champion. Racial ideology was fully realized with the filming and exhibition of the 1910 world heavyweight championship bout between Jack Johnson and James Jeffries. 

Chapter 2, “The Habit of Highlights,” explains the importance of routinization and standardization in the ways newsreels were produced and viewed. Newsreels built on the advances of film actualities by nationalizing sports within an ideology of hegemonic masculinity, by refining audio commentary, and by increasing the sense of spectacle in capturing the activities of cheerleaders and fans. Sports became one of the three basic kinds of news for newsreels. Sporting events fell into the category of scheduled events, and could be readily counted upon for content, an important consideration when newsreels went to a twice-a-week schedule. With commentary provided by the era’s leading sports radio announcers, newsreels contributed to building a national identity in which sport had a central place. That central place was occupied almost exclusively by the dominant male white culture. Chapter 3, “Bad Habits,” delineates the way highlights were employed to create a national culture that focused on the accomplishments of white ath letes. 

Blacks and women were marginalized in most newsreel coverage of sports. Black athletes were to a large extent rendered invisible. Portrayals of women athletes upheld an ideology of hegemonic masculinity in which contact sports were exclusively a male preserve. While this was not a direct product of the aesthetic form of highlights, it points to the impact producers had in shaping the ideology that form manifests. Ultimately, with the advent of television, newsreels lost their hold on viewers, who increasingly watched sporting events as they unfolded on their home sets. Chapter 4, “A Dream of Carnage and the Electronic Monster,” analyzes early sportscasting as an exclusively live medium, transmitting images and sound from one space to another in real time. 

Viewers watched telecasts that originated from a studio or remote locations, and broadcasters developed the conventions of live coverage of sporting events. Considerations related to the production of sporting events had implications in the development of sports journalism’s institutional structures and professional values that shaped the representation of national identity, gender and race. Because coverage of live events was the preserve of the networks’ news divisions, conflicts and institutional jealousies within broadcasting arose almost from the very beginning of television production of live sporting events. Thanks to the use of kinescopes, television networks contributed to the development of highlights for newscasts by constructing programs that offered the viewers highlight packages, profiles of sport stars and in-studio interviews. Many of the program formats that remain in vogue today were developed between 1947 and 1960. 

In Chapter 5, “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Communication,” videotape’s deployment as a means to create instant replays is considered, illustrating its immediate and profound impact on sportscasts. The videotape recorder, developed by the Ampex Corporation in 1956, allowed network and local television stations to incorporate highlights more easily into sportscasts. However, it wasn’t until 1963 that Tony Verna of CBS developed the means to incorporate instant replay into a live sportscast. Verna’s contribution revolutionized the industry and provided the technology that would make the highlight form a means of paramount importance for all live and news-oriented sportscasts. So pervasive did the use of videotape technology become that it changed not only what fans could see of a game, but it also altered the role of announcers from color commentators to analysts. Even more significantly, the technology changed television’s role in relation to the sports it covered. That participation occurred in the way that the technology literally became a part of many sports (e.g., football, hockey, soccer and tennis) in terms of on-field officiating decisions. 

Equally important from a journalistic perspective, videotape changed the way sports news was packaged and delivered. Until the arrival of videotape, scores and statistics were the primary discursive ingredients of the sport newscast; with videotape, highlights became the focal point. Chapter 6, “Sports Junkies, Junk Journalism and Cathode Ray Sterilization,” explicates cable television’s role in saturating the television schedule with sports, fragmenting the audience, driving ratings down, and creating Friday afternoon fire sales for advertisers. The result was predictable: by the mid– 1980s no station, cable or broadcast, was making money telecasting sports. Competitive bidding invariably drove up the broadcasting rights for major sporting events. 

With the advent of cable, television’s use of the highlights changed not only the way events were telecast, but it also impacted the stadium and arena experience, long regarded as the last bastion against television’s encroachment on the sporting spectacle. Additionally, cable television changed the way sports journalists performed their jobs—both in terms of coverage of live events and in the reporting of sports news. Most notably, the presence of women journalists in the press boxes, announcing booths and locker rooms altered the dynamic of the sports-media relationship. By the time ESPN celebrated its fifteenth year of broadcasting in 1994, the boundaries demarcating sports journalism as information and as entertainment had been blurred beyond recognition. The sports junkie’s loyalty was largely predicated upon an operational aesthetic in which the highlight form had become the networks’ sui generis. Chapter 7, “The Little Shop of Highlights,” explicates ESPN’s appropriation and commodification of the highlight form as SportsCenter became the network’s flagship program. 

While SportsCenter doubtlessly made highlights its primary means of communication, SportCenter’s ubiquitous place in American sports journalism is considered in terms of its formation and development, its constitutive elements, and its offshoots, namely, the “This is SportsCenter” advertising campaign and a reality show, Dream Job. Chapter 8, “The Real Virtuality for an Audience of One,” explores the developments in new media that reshaped the sports mediascape by providing new technological means of delivering and accessing sportscast highlights. Over the past two decades, sports broadcasters, fans, athletes and the leagues have all been impacted by the changes, especially those precipitated by the development of new delivery systems (e.g., World Wide Web and mobile devices). However, because the integration of new media with coverage of major sporting events involved not only changes in technology, but also social and cultural practices, it is important not to attribute too much to technological changes. 

To comprehend the dynamics of the new sports media landscape, it is necessary to consider the changed context of sportscasting and the changed model of consumer behavior or affective economics, a model “which seeks to understand the emotional underpinnings of consumer decision-making as a driving force behind viewing and purchasing decisions.”13 In this model, cultural protocols and practices related to media can be seen as dynamic for both producers and consumers. Today, new alliances between broadcast and cable networks, technology companies, and wireless mobile phone providers have forestalled television audience fragmentation and helped to build a new fan base for sports by offering Internet pay packages, enhancing production values for live coverage of major events, and providing more infotainment, especially highlights. Chapter 9, “Highlights and History,” delineates the major factors that contributed to the emergence of sports highlights, and it considers the importance of highlights in terms of the formation of a cultural hegemony, the standardization of sportscasts, the commodification of highlights, the codification of a canon, and the impact of changing viewer protocols.