"Da-da-da, da-da-da!"

Everyone knows those unique, theme song-ending six notes, and recognizes that they stand for SportsCenter. While multifarious other shows have familiar theme songs, few themes have such specific and immediate connotations. SportsCenter, with its beginning immortally signified by those six notes, stands for everything that sports fans love about sports; like a well-covered live game, it manages to be simultaneously entertaining, funny, moving, and disappointing.

The first of those characteristics, entertainment, always involves a good degree of escapism. When I watch a Steelers game, I take a break from thinking about the cases I should be reading and the papers I should be grading. Thoughts about all of the work in need of completion, about all of the tiresome pressures of life, fade for three glorious hours on Sunday during the NFL season. Even if the Bengals (Don, you bastard) or the Ravens (you too, Boyer) are pounding the Steelers into the ground, I still watch the game and care about the outcome. Otherwise, I would not be able to tell Bill Cowher in so many violent words screamed into the television what he should be doing differently, nor would I be able to mourn the loss and analyze the possibilities of the rest of the season with the rest of a depressed Steeler Nation the next day. Similarly distracting from the grind, SportsCenter provides a respite of sorts. For that one hour each morning, I get to think about and absorb the day’s sports news.

Part of what makes that escape so good, of course, is the humor. Any good live sports telecast has its share of jokes, particularly if tricksters like John Madden or Bob Costas are in the booth, but SportsCenter is all about being funny. Its commercials in particular set the standard for the dry, absurdist humor of which I am such a fan. First of all, the absurdity of using commercial time during a program to run advertising for that same program speaks for itself. But then, there are the commercials themselves. One of the more recent examples features SportsCenter anchor Steve Levy arriving one morning in the ESPN parking lot. On his way from car to building, he encounters Jimmy Johnson, a notable NASCAR driver. Johnson’s hacking away at a speed bump with a pick, but stops for a moment as Levy pauses to say hello, a quick “Jimmy.” Johnson says, “Steve,” and as Levy walks away, Johnson goes back to work on the speed bump with the pick. There’s no laughter, and no mention whatsoever about what Levy was doing. The commercials are all about the camaraderie and everyday interaction of the anchor and athlete, which I think is perfectly absurd and fabulous.

But apart from the escape and the humor, good sports, and good sportscasting in particular, can be quite moving. SportsCenter must be one of the most moving examples because it inspired a remarkable TV sitcom/drama called Sports Night. The mainstream media in this country are quite fond of trivializing sports, particularly college sports. They often point out the difficulty many college athletes have on the academic side of things as well as the high salaries of pro athletes in order to imply that our priorities in this country are all wrong. But they always fail to mention the benefits of sports, as I have above. Those benefits are not to be taken lightly; the working people of the world need sport to keep them sane and give them something to look forward to when they have breaks from the grind. If it’s either sport or revolution, those mainstream ignoramuses at pro-establishment places like CBS and CNN better be content with sport. Part of what makes Sports Night a good show is that it portrays sportscasters as hard-working and intelligent people with admirable goals and values. It often deals with the issues surrounding the benefits of sports and why they have taken such a prominent spot in American culture. And of course Sabrina Lloyd, who plays Natalie, is so adorable that it’s difficult to look away from the show because that would constitute the risk of missing a glimpse of her being endearingly engaged in the world of sports.

However, the world of SportsCenter is not always all flowers and potpourri. A few nights ago, I saw a SportsCenter special bowl breakdown. Early in the show, a graphic came onto the screen to demonstrate bowl bids by conference. Every single conference was represented on that screen, even “Independents,” who are not really a conference, but a collection of colleges unaffiliated with conferences. Well, every single conference appeared on the screen except the Big East. That’s right: ESPN forgot about one of the BCS conferences, a conference with no less than five teams in bowls. This could not have been on purpose, but it was still quite upsetting to me and I believe that it goes a long way toward demonstrating SportsCenter’s bias against the Big East. For some reason, they never want to cover the teams from that conference, even when those teams are highly ranked or involved in high-profile match-ups. And then when the coverage actually exist, there’s the classic Pitt basketball SportsCenter highlight: they show clips of the other team dunking and making baskets, talk about how great the other team is, and then barely mention that, despite that team’s greatness, they could not manage to win the game. It would seem difficult to cover a basketball game without mentioning the winning team by name or showing a single highlight of that team making a basket, but I’ve seen SportsCenter do this to Pitt several times. Of course, disappointment is no stranger to Pitt fans, and thus I feel at home watching SportsCenter and feeling disrespected.

But in the end, I think that the reason I am so disappointed when SportsCenter does not cover Big East teams or covers them poorly is because I have so much respect for that show and I know that others feel the same way about it. It’s difficult enough to see something you respect and believe to be important get disregarded by a respectable source; it’s even worse to know that all of your friends saw it happen too. After all, SportsCenter sets the standard for sports journalism. If you’re an athlete, you know you’ve made it when you’re mentioned on SportsCenter, where everyone will have seen you. Nonetheless, I love SportsCenter and continue to watch; it’s still funny, entertaining, and at least somewhat informative. Plus, on the rare occasion when I actually see a flattering Pitt highlight, it is so choice.

A Worthy Adversary

There's something unbelievably appealing to me about games of mental skill. In college, I relished the opportunity to compete with others on my floor in Civilization II, a turn-based game in which participants created and managed competing civilizations. There were far-flung commercial trade routes, secret alliances, and brilliant tactical maneuvers carried out in times of war. Imagine commanding an empire over the course of several millennia, from the stone age to the launching of the first inter-continental ballistic missile, all at the age of nineteen from your own dorm room. The length of such games as well as the intelligence of the competitors always proved mentally taxing in a rewarding, adrenaline-pumping kind of way. Sadly, my opportunities for such things have dwindled in recent years. Oh, there is always the odd game of Settlers of Catan with any of the growing number of my friends who play, and I did play a fairly interesting game of Risk something like a year and a half ago with Jon, Lope, and Don. However, those two games, while primarily considered games of strategy, involve luck in the form of dice-rolling more than I would like. And these odd instances of gaming, though extraordinarily worthwhile and fun, do not satiate my yen for extended, hard-core, nearly pure strategy competition. It is through the memory of those dorm floor games of Civ II and my current craving for such turn-based glory that I have come to love The Hunt for Red October.

In that infamous Sean Connery submarine flick, one of the earliest actions of Captain Marko Ramius (played by Connery, of course) is to announce the ship's "orders" to the crew. He says, "...and once more we play our dangerous game, a game of chess, against our old aversary: the American navy. For forty years, your fathers before you and your older brothers played this game and played it well. But today the game is different. We have the advantage, and it reminds me of the heady days of Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin when the world trembled at the sound of our rockets. Now, they will tremble again at the sound of our silence. The order is: engage the silent drive. Comrades, our own fleet doesn't know our full potential. They will do everything possible to test us, but they will only test their own embarrassment. We will leave our fleet behind, we will pass through the American patrols, pass their sonar nets, and lay off their largest city and listen to their rock n' roll while we conduct missile drills. Then, when we are finished, the only sound they will hear is our laughter while we sail to Havana, where the sun is warm and so is the...comradeship." Firstly, the comparison of a military maneuver like the one Ramius has in mind here to chess is quite apt, no? It will involve thorough planning, the prediction of what one's adversaries will think and do, and a certain degree of mental fortitude in order to respond to the inevitable things that will not go as planned. But secondly, what a speech. Here, Ramius is addressing his crew of patriotic Soviet conscripts, an audience not as well educated as he is and far more susceptible to the blind nationalism that characterized the stereotypical, cold war era military personnel commanded by the USSR. For that audience, the mere suggestion of hot cuban women and the use of some form of the word "comrade" several times is more than enough to inspire blind loyalty toward Ramius, however misdirected it might be if the crew really is a group of proud Soviets.

As the film goes on, Ramius and his Russians sweat and smoke through the difficult ordeal of turning over an enormous, cutting-edge sub to the Americans while making the crew think it is destroyed and ensuring the cooperation of those same Americans. And I love it all. But really, it's the end scene that gets me. As they sail the Red October up Maine's Penobscot River, Ramius and Jack Ryan (Alec Baldwin) discuss the Russian captain's motivations for defection. The scene takes place in a blue twilight sublime enough to have post-coital connotations. This discussion reminds me of the post-Civ II glass of Chianti that sometimes happend back in those halcyon days of dorm room gaming glory. For instance, "Damn," someone might have said, "when I saw that caravan from Dhaka just strolling across Europe..." and then the hearty laughter. Oh boy; I'm a bigger dork than I thought.