The Three Battles of Wanat

by Mark Bowden

  By the time Fish moved from news to sports in the mid-1970s, the union was complete. Since then, broadcast dollars have helped turn players into multimillionaires and owners into billionaires. The medium has infiltrated the game itself—as with TV time-outs, when players mill around aimlessly on the field waiting for commercials to end; and coaches’ challenges that rely on footage from network cameras to revisit referees’ questionable decisions. On the sidelines, coaches and players scrutinize shots from overhead cameras to study tactics and plot countermoves. Viewers at home see virtual bands drawn across the field denoting the lines of scrimmage and the first-down marker, and they can refer anytime to a floating graphic in an upper corner of the screen that displays the score, time remaining, and down and distance.

  It’s become so hard to imagine NFL football without television that when a power failure shut down all of CBS’s cameras at a packed Ralph Wilson Stadium in Buffalo earlier this season, just minutes before kickoff, the first reaction from Mark Wolff, the stunned producer in the trailer, was, “There’s no way they are playing this game.”

  “Mark, there are more than seventy thousand paying customers waiting for kickoff in there,” I said. “They have two teams, officials, whistles … Why wouldn’t they play the game?”

  “It’s just like a weather delay,” insisted Wolff. “They’ll wait until we have the power back, and then they’ll play.”

  That day, Wolff was wrong; they kicked off on time in Buffalo and played much of the game without power, no doubt because CBS had several other regional games to offer its viewers. But if the same thing had happened on a Sunday night or Monday night, or on a playoff weekend, or, God forbid, before the Super Bowl, when the whole world is waiting with its bowls of popcorn, kicking off without the cameras might well have provoked worldwide rioting.

  Up to twenty cameras and forty replay machines are employed in the broadcast of big games, offering views and replays of the action from every conceivable angle. Even with all this, the networks constantly strain to find newfangled gadgets to distinguish their coverage. Cameras have been suspended from cables over the field or, in one silly innovation, mounted on the players themselves—the short-lived XFL’s “helmet-cam”—which on a running back typically delivered a violently jerky, incoherent swirl of bodies culminating in a close-up of the turf. In the Giants-Bengals game, CBS was experimenting with something called “flow motion,” which employs GPS and replay technology to track the movements of players. Fish had used it the previous month while broadcasting U.S. Open tennis, where it charted the labyrinthine path traced by, say, Roger Federer during a long, hard-played point. But the system turns out to have little application to the gridiron, where the only distances that matter are measured by hash marks in the grass.

  Cutbacks at CBS have reduced what Fish has to work with in regular-season games. There are the three primary cameras, positioned on platforms at the mezzanine level, peering down over the sideline. These are set thirty yards apart, with camera two in the middle over the fifty-yard line. Before each snap of the ball, Fish designates which camera operator will cover the action—generally the one closest to the ball—and the other two operators move their cameras to specific assignments. (One may focus on the defense, for instance, while the other isolates the far receiver.) Camera four is high behind the eastern end zone, and on each play, it frames the middle of the offensive line and then follows the ball, providing another high angle on the action for replay purposes. Camera five sits on a rolling platform behind the visiting bench and moves on a track from one end of the field to the other, giving a field-level view of the action. It is usually positioned about five yards ahead of the line of scrimmage, but when the offense is in the “red zone” (that is, inside the opposing team’s twenty-yard line), it sits even with the goal line to provide a clear look at whether the ball crosses over for a touchdown.

  These are the basics, cameras one through five, that are used to cover every televised football game, college or pro. The rest are specialty cameras. Six and eight are mounted on three-foot-high platforms behind each end zone, to one side of the goalposts. Camera six is equipped with “super slo-mo,” which during baseball broadcasts can capture the spinning seams of a slider approaching home plate at nearly ninety miles per hour. Fish will sometimes instruct these cameras’ operators to focus on specific players—in this game they were Justin Tuck, the Giants’ gifted pass-rushing end; and Bengals receiver Chad Johnson—in order to put together a video package that summarizes those players’ ups and downs during the game.

  Camera seven is roving and handheld, good for close-ups of players and coaches on the sidelines, or of fans in the lower seats, or just to find the eye candy Fish uses to segue into and out of commercial breaks. High at one corner of the end zone is camera twelve, the “slash” camera (since this was just a regular-season game, there was no camera nine, ten, or eleven), which on most plays isolates the slot receiver or, if there is none, the middle linebacker. With the slash camera, camera five, and two of the primary cameras all focusing on individual receivers, it’s pretty much guaranteed that on every passing play, the broadcast will have an isolated shot of the quarterback’s target. On these shots, the camera operators know they should frame the receiver from head to toe, and keep the defender in the picture, so that on replay it’s clear whether the pass catcher’s feet were in-bounds, or whether there was pass interference. (The cameras are operated by a core crew that travels each week with the CBS technicians, and by a handful of local pros who sign on for single games.)

  There are other cameras: one called “all twenty-two,” which shoots the whole field from a fixed position high above; one in the booth for when Gumbel and Dierdorf are onscreen; and for this game, one, providing stunning September-afternoon vistas of Manhattan and northern New Jersey, from the blimp hovering over the stadium. And there’s footage that doesn’t come directly from the cameras—graphics packages, replays, preprepared features about specific players or situations, and so forth—all of which is supervised by Wolff.

  But the cameras are all, of course, just tools. The goal is to tell stories with them. The game itself is the primary story, but within it are dozens of subplots. Hence the importance of the pregame sit-downs with players and coaches, which are essentially fishing expeditions for the CBS team—chances to pick up on potential story lines and revealing details that can be worked into the broadcast.

  The ideal interviewee is someone like Bengals wide receiver Johnson, a ruthlessly candid player who began his session with Dierdorf, Gumbel, Fish, and Wolff by dramatically asking the Bengals’ PR rep to leave the room. The Giants came into that Sunday riding high—counting their march to the Super Bowl victory the previous winter, they had won six straight games—but Johnson’s Bengals were desperate for a win. They were coming off a losing season, and they’d dropped their first two games. In his conversation with the CBS team the day before the Giants game, Johnson quickly served up a dire prediction: “If we lose tomorrow, we have a chance of going zero and eight. It don’t get any easier.” (Dire and prescient: not until the ninth week of the season would the Bengals win their first game, over the Jacksonville Jaguars.)

  Johnson has a genius for drawing attention to himself. The previous week, he had stirred things up by suggesting publicly that his team’s offense was struggling because of poor pass-blocking by the offensive line.

  In the pregame conversation, Dierdorf, a Hall of Fame offensive lineman with deep knowledge of the game, who knew that such comments drive the big men crazy, asked if the Bengals blockers had “gotten their noses out of joint.”

  “They better not. Get mad at what?” Johnson asked. “This ain’t no fucking time to be sensitive! It’s time to play. If they ain’t blocking, my ass is gonna look bad.”

  Johnson, who had yet to catch a touchdown pass in 2008, had also engineered a stunt guaranteed to keep him on the flapping lips of every sports-talk radio and TV host in the country. He had legally ch
anged his name to a Spanish version of the number on his jersey, “85.” He was now officially “Ocho-Cinco,” although the NFL marketing division had ruled that the name on his uniform would have to remain “C. Johnson” unless he wanted to reimburse Reebok for its stock of unsold jerseys with that name stitched on the back.

  Dierdorf and Gumbel pounced on the name change.

  “What do you do when somebody goes, ‘Oh, there’s Chad Johnson!’ How do you respond to that?” Dierdorf asked.

  Johnson just shrugged and smiled.

  “Do you say, ‘No, that’s not my name anymore’?”

  “No,” Johnson said, shaking his head in disbelief. “I’m not that serious about it, man.”

  “What do you want us to call you tomorrow?” Dierdorf asked.

  “It’s on you.”

  “It’s your life,” Dierdorf said. “Your name.”

  “Hey, it’s not that serious!” Johnson protested, dismayed at having to explain the joke. “Call me Chad.”

  “Did you have your credit cards and driver’s license changed?” Gumbel asked.

  Johnson looked pained—a wit trapped in a world with no sense of humor. “No, man, I did it to have the name changed on my jersey, that’s it. And they messed it up. I’m not sure what they’re doing, I just know that they boosted sales of my jersey back to number one. It’s a money issue.”

  Then Ocho-Cinco, or Johnson, or Chad, ever the showman, left, with a tantalizing tip for the broadcast.

  “Here’s a hint,” he said. “The first play of the game. I’ll leave it at that. Don’t tell anybody.”

  The next morning, Fish passed this bit of inside dope along to his camera crew.

  “I will tell you this,” he said. “Whoever is doing far receiver or near receiver, Chad Johnson, whether we can believe him or not, whether it’s the typical player bullshit they give the press, watch for a deep pattern, a deep pass, on the first play from scrimmage…. I think they are going to go deep. Johnson says, ‘Just make sure you cover me on the first play.’ That may have just been blah-blah-blah-blah, but actually, some guys tell you the truth and that actually happens.”

  When the Bengals took possession for the first time in the game, the TV crew was poised. Moments before coming back from a commercial, Fish reminded his camera operators, “OK, guys, let’s watch Chad Johnson on this first play.”

  In unison, the voices in the trailer counted down the seconds to the return from the commercial: “Six. Five. Four.”

  “Stand by,” said Fish. “Slow push in.”

  “Three. Two. One.”

  “Ready five [a close-up of Carson Palmer breaking the offensive huddle],” said Fish. “Aaaaand take five!”

  The music started, and as the Bengals quarterback positioned himself over center, Gumbel intoned, Carson Palmer looking for a breakout game today. He has been very un–Carson Palmerlike so far. No TDs, three picks.

  “Ready three [the play-by-play camera]. Take three!” said Fish, and then, noting the Bengals’ formation, added, “Two wides! Two wides, that’s all.”

  Let’s see if the Bengals try to jump on the Giants in a hurry, said Gumbel, like a man who knew something his viewers did not know.

  The ball was snapped.

  Fish: “Pass! Here it is!”

  Only, here it wasn’t. Johnson was racing deep, but the Giants defensive line swamped the quarterback immediately, dropping him for a six-yard loss.

  Palmer under pressure, trying to get away, and can’t! Gumbel said.

  Fish: “Ready eight [a close-up of Palmer with his face in the turf]. Take eight! Ready two [standing Giants fans clapping and cheering]. Take two! Ready five [a close-up of Palmer getting to his feet]. Take five! Ready four [Giants tackle Fred Robbins, who got the sack]. Take four!”

  Chad Johnson was flying up the left side, Gumbel said. Palmer couldn’t get it away.

  There was no chance of completing a pass, Dierdorf said. He was fighting just to stay up.

  Fish: “Hold four [Robbins lining up for the next play]. Hold four.”

  The Bengals would end this first offensive series backed up against their own goal line, twenty yards behind where they started—victims of a sack, a penalty (on the offensive line), and a second Giants rush that forced Palmer to fumble the ball, which Cincinnati recovered. The frustration and disappointment on the field were mirrored in the broadcast booth and in the trailer, where Cincinnati’s failure to execute had cost them the chance to show how on top of a big play they were.

  The whole thing seemed like the Bengals’ sorry season in a nutshell, underlining the truth of Johnson’s impolitic insight: no blocking meant no throws, which meant no big plays. As the punt team lined up, Fish called for a shot of the Cincinnati receiver and quarterback walking off the field together.

  The biggest fear of any broadcast team is a blowout. The audience changes the channel, and even the camera operators have trouble keeping their heads in the game. “You just want to get the hell out of there and move on to next week, because the game sucks,” says Fish.

  But in spite of the inauspicious start, the Giants-Bengals game turned out to be a terrific matchup, all the more so for being unexpected. “On any given Sunday …,” the adage goes, and in this one the winless Bengals found themselves four points up on the champs, 20–16, with less than two minutes to play. As the Giants conferred during a Cincinnati time-out, with Eli Manning preparing to attempt a go-ahead touchdown, the trailer was humming. Amid overlapping conversations, sound effects, and shouted instructions from the rows of technicians, Wolff primed his broadcasters and replay operators, and Fish, standing now, barked instructions and waved his hands to some rapid internal rhythm:

  “Ready two [Bengals coach Marvin Lewis talking into his headset microphone]. Take two! Ready one [Carson Palmer craning his neck to see the field]. Take one! Ready twelve [Eli Manning walking toward the sidelines to confer with Giants offensive coordinator Kevin Gilbride], Take twelve!”

  He’s pretty cool for someone so young, Gumbel said.

  Well, it’s in his DNA, Dierdorf replied. (Manning, as most NFL fans know, is the son of former New Orleans Saints quarterback Archie, and the kid brother of Indianapolis Colts star quarterback Peyton.) I don’t think we should be surprised. This is a regular-season game. They are two and zero.

  Fish: “Ready eight [Lewis from a fresh angle]. Take eight! Ready four [Manning trotting back out to the field]. Take four! Ready five [a field shot from ground level]. Take five! Ready … aaah … eight [Manning from another angle]. Take eight! … Ready four—five [another shot of Lewis]. Take five! Ready three [play-by-play camera]. Take three. Nice shot, Pat!”

  As the Giants lined up over the ball, Wolff wanted attention paid to wide receiver Plaxico Burress, a likely target. “Cover seventeen! Iso [isolate] seventeen!”

  Fish: “Where’s seventeen?”

  Wolff: “Far-side receiver.”

  Fish: “Far receiver on camera two!”

  But the pass wasn’t to Burress; it was to tight end Kevin Boss, who caught it in the end zone. From outside the trailer came the roar of jubilant Giants fans. Inside, the touchdown ignited a frenzy as well. Fish machine-gunned a mosaic of the scene, leaning toward his array of monitors as the cameras swung violently, finding one telling visual after another, his high-pitched voice squeaking at the upper reaches of its register:

  “Ready five [close-up of Manning jumping for joy]. Take five! Ready two [close-up of Boss, still carrying the ball, mobbed by joyful teammates in the end zone]. Take two! Ready three [rejoicing New York fans]. Take three! Ready four [beaten Bengals strong safety Chinedum Ndukwe trotting off the field]. Take four! Ready eight [Marvin Lewis looking forlornly up at the scoreboard]. Take eight! Ready twelve [a pan of cheering Giants fans in the upper deck]. Take twelve! Ready two [another close-up of Boss]. Take two! Ready five [a close-up of Manning leaving the field]. Take five! Ready eight [close-up of the shell-shocked Chad Johnson]. Take eight! Ready three [anot
her crowd shot]. Take three! Ready two [a close-up of Boss, reaching the sidelines, still carrying his touchdown catch]. Take two! Ready twelve [Bengals huddling on the field before the extra point]. Take twelve! Ready six [close-up of Manning accepting a pat on the helmet from Gilbride]. Take six! Ready four [close-up of Lewis, shaking his head with disgust]. Take four! Ready five [more high fives for Manning on the sidelines]. Take five! Break! Extra point! Ready four [a high shot in the end zone behind the goalposts as the Giants line up to kick].”

  Wolff: “Fish, I’m going X, Y, Silver, Moe!”—the lineup of upcoming replay shots of the touchdown. (The replay machines are given letters, to differentiate them from the numbered cameras.)

  Fish: “Ready two [Boss on one knee on the sidelines, having been mildly shaken up on his touchdown play, trainers crowded around him]. Take two! Ready four, aaaand take four!” The extra point was booted.

  Wolff: “Are you listening?”

  Fish: “Yes! X, Y, Silver, Moe!”

  Wolff: “I’ll talk you through it.”

  Fish: “Ready two [another shot of Boss on the sideline]. Take two! Ready X. Aaaand take X! Here it is!”

  The replays of the touchdown followed, each from a different angle, the last an isolated shot from an end-zone camera showing Manning celebrating after the play. Then it was time for another blizzard of calls from Fish.

  This frenzied movement after the Giants touchdown seemed to mark the conclusion of the symphony, a game-ending flourish. But the game was far from over. “I want to see Carson Palmer’s career comebacks!” Wolff shouted to his graphics technicians, who summoned up a graphic showing that the Bengals QB had an impressive record of bringing his team back from late-game deficits. And sure enough, the scrappy Bengals mounted a last-second drive and kicked a tying field goal in the closing seconds, forcing the game into overtime, in which the Giants marched into field-goal range and won it, finally, 26–23, with a well-directed twenty-two-yard boot.