Third-and-goal, four minutes on the clock, my recliner one notch off horizontal, and the broadcast cut to a forty-second close-up of a pop singer in a luxury suite examining a soft pretzel like it was the Shroud of Turin. I do not know her name. My grandson Cole knows her name and was disappointed that I did not. I told him I have a finite amount of brain and I am saving it for the snap count.
By the time we came back to the field, the play was over, the ball was on the one, and the sideline reporter was telling us the singer had “flown in directly from Melbourne” as if this were relevant to the down and distance. The pretzel had mustard on it. They showed it twice. They did not show the third-and-goal twice. They did not show the third-and-goal even once.
I called Ray Kowalczyk during the commercial. Ray watches with his sound off because he says the announcers “talk like they’re getting paid by the syllable,” which they are. Ray didn’t even know there had been a third-and-goal. Ray thought the game was still in the second quarter. Ray was, in his own way, having a better Sunday than I was.
Then came the celebrity cam graphic — an actual graphic, with a frame around it, like a wanted poster — and they cycled through six people in suites I’m supposed to recognize. A quarterback’s girlfriend. A guy from a streaming show. A second guy from a different streaming show. Somebody’s father. A podcaster. I don’t know who the podcaster was but I could tell because his microphone was bigger than his head and he was nodding at something nobody had said.
Coach DiMaggio used to make us run a forty for looking at the cheerleaders during a water break. Coach DiMaggio would have set the entire production truck on fire and then run the production truck for cutting away from a goal-line stand. Coach DiMaggio believed, with the conviction of a man who’d seen combat in Korea, that if you were not looking at the football you were betraying the football, and the football would remember.
The parlay graphic came up next. A nice young man in a blazer told me that 78% of the action on a prop bet involving “first player to gesture toward the crowd” had come in on the home team’s tight end, who was, at that moment, gesturing toward the crowd. They went to commercial. I went to the kitchen. I came back. They had cut, again, to the singer. She was no longer holding the pretzel. They showed where the pretzel had been.
My son-in-law Petey says I don’t understand the modern broadcast because the modern broadcast “isn’t a game, it’s an event,” and the game is one of many things happening at the event, along with the brand activations and the courtside-equivalent-celebrities and the betting interface and what he keeps calling the “social conversation.” I asked Petey what the social conversation was saying about third-and-goal. He checked his phone. He said the social conversation was discussing the pretzel.
I’m not asking for much. I’m asking the people getting paid eleven million dollars a year to show me football to show me football. When the ball is snapped, point the camera at the ball. When the ball is in the air, point the camera at the ball. When a man is running, point it at the man. Save the celebrity-in-the-suite cutaway for after the whistle, the way the Lord and CBS intended back when Pat Summerall would mention the weather and let the rest breathe. You don’t need to fill the silence. The silence was the game.
They went into overtime. I missed the kick. They were showing the singer hugging somebody. Cole told me it was “a moment.” I told Cole the kick was a moment. He looked at me the way you look at an old man who has not yet accepted that the world has moved on without permission.
Denise is bringing chili. She says it’s from a podcast.