"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.

Fun at Work?

Sports Night, a show that ABC cancelled inexplicably after it won several Emmy Awards in its third season, presents a workplace that is friendly in senses that go beyond anything I've ever experienced. Dan and Casey, the sports news show anchors featured on the show, are best friends. Natalie and Jeremy, both high-up producers, are dating for most of the series. Dana, the executive producer, has a fling with Casey. And between all of that, everyone on the show obviously works in an environment where they're at the office late into the night working on an extremely collaborative sort of project, which seems to create an almost homelike situation in that workplace. On the show, that kind of scenario is downright irresistible; when someone messes up at work, his or her job is not immediately on the line, and everyone helps to fix the mistake. And everyone's at work with their friends, which makes "work" itself seem more appealing. Plus, these people are all doing a sports show, talking and working with the very sort of information by which many of us are distracted at our jobs that have nothing to do with it. I would love working in an environment like that, but none of the workplaces I've seen (or really even heard of) in my lifetime are anything like that.

Let's take as an example the office at Pitt in which I work as a tutor. It's quite an amicable place; all of the staff get along for the most part, and all are quite friendly and professional when at work. But with one very discreet exception, there has been no intra-office romance. And except for Josh and I, no one who works there seems to be very close friends with anyone else in the office. So while the place is great when compared to the average office with at least a few incompetant and/or rude people, it's nothing compared to the idyllic work environment depicted on Sports Night. Of course, I'm willing to throw out there the possibility that I'm completely full of it and that many of those who read this blog work in places that are like the one on Sports Night, but from what many of you have said to me about your various jobs, this seems unlikely.

So when I think about Sports Night, one of the questions is always how a show that depicts something so utterly unrealistic nonetheless manages to be so appealing. And here's what I've come up with. When I'm in one of my offices, there are always escapist moments here and there when I fantasize about what it's going to be like when I can actually leave the office. In addition to a workplace pastime, escapism is often the motive for various entertainment as well. I mean, seriously, why do millions flock to theaters for films like Under Siege and Speed? The average moviegoer likes these sorts of things because they provide him/her with an escape from the constant, nagging thoughts about when he/she will have to return to work. But Sports Night is the ultimate escapist fantasy, one much better than what the aforementioned films provide. It proposes something ridiculously appealing: What if the workplace were so great we didn't want to escape it? Oh, would that it were...