Not Just Pretty Faces

Don't talk to me about cable TV. I don't get it. Oh, I understand it fine, and I like it, but I don't receive it. My community isn't wired for cable, and dishes aren't allowed, so I live with blinders on, disgruntled, edgy, like a farmer without land. Is it just my impression, or do a lot of the best sporting events occur on cable? To see the games that I love, I have to travel to friends' houses or go to bars. Any cabled American knows more about sports than I do. He flips on his living-room tube and relaxes in front of the games, while I drive through the night looking for acquaintances with wired homes, order drinks in smoky taverns, suffer fools who think jukeboxes were put in bars to drown out the play-by-play.

None of this would matter if I weren't on cable TV. But I am. I'm on a sports talk show with three other men-Bill Gleason of Chicago's Southtown Economist and the South Bend (Ind.) Tribune; Bill Jauss of the Chicago Tribune; and Ben Bentley, a career p.r. man and former ring announcer. The show is called The Sports Writers on TV. It's taped every Monday at noon in a studio in Chicago, sent into cableland over Sports-Channel America and picked up at various times during the week, I'm told, by more than nine million subscribers and untold pirates nationwide. But not by me.

I have seen the show, but not on cable TV. For this article I sat in an editing room at SportsChannel's local head-quarters in Oak Park, Ill., and, for the first time ever, watched hours and hours of the show—a good portion of the program's nearly three-year run—on three-quarter-inch tape. I saw my bald spot grow. I heard myself say ridiculous things. I watched adult males become enraged over beach volleyball, boxing cutmen, marathon swimmers, raccoons. I saw strange hats and hideous clothes. I saw Jauss's suspender clasp flip off his pants, vault over his shoulder and land in his coffee mug. I heard Bentley, our moderator, call Arizona State basketball coach Bill Frieder "Bill Fielder" and Bo Schembechler "Bo Schlemblechler" and Packer lineman Tony Mandarich "Tony Mawkalotch." I heard Jauss call me a fascist. I heard Gleason call two owners of Chicago pro sports teams terrorists. I saw a fire in the ashtray build until it nearly touched off the felt on our poker table. I watched myself tell about the time I caught a sea gull while fishing for perch. I saw pounds of cigar smoke settle on four of the most remarkable-looking heads ever grouped together and taped for public viewing. Slack-jawed, I thought, People watch this.

After the first few hours of viewing, I walked in a daze to a diner and ordered breakfast in midafternoon. I felt like an empiricist. If a show is on TV but you never see it, I wondered, does it exist? Then I asked, What is good TV and what is bad TV? How do you know? And finally, When everybody on earth has cable, can the apocalypse be far off?

Show No. 1: March 9, 1987
TOPIC: THE NCAA BASKETBALL TOURNAMENT

Gleason: The dark horse of the tournament is New Orleans. Watch that team.

Bentley: I got a dark horse-DePaul.

(New Orleans would be eliminated in the second round, DePaul in the third.)

As I continued watching The Sports Writers on TV, I fell into something resembling a trance. The world we perceive and the images that flicker on a television screen are so similar that we're tricked into seeing them as a unified whole. But TV is weird; you want to pick apart the things you see on it. I've got a mole on my left cheek that's going to be removed, I guarantee you. I'd never noticed it before seeing myself on TV. As a viewer, I'm saying, "Hey, Telander, nice tumor!" and I guess that's because it seems the guy up there—me—can take it.

"Hey, bozo!" I go on. "How many pro hockey games you ever seen, you limp-wristed jarhead! Three?" Well, yes, that's all I have seen. Three NHL games-and maybe two complete ones on TV I don't know anything about hockey. Icing, blue lines—honest to god, I couldn't tell you how many hockey players are on a rink at one time, before the fights. Still, I think there's something important about our show, something that transcends rhetoric, even gibberish. The screen somehow endorses whatever appears on it—even us.