Beer and Circus

by Murray Sperber

  The 1978-79 college basketball season changed everything, taking the sport from its twenty-mile-per-hour national popularity to over seventy miles per hour. The superb play and star power of Larry Bird, the rural white kid at obscure Indiana State University in Terre Haute, and the equally great play and wattage of Ervin “Magic” Johnson, the urban black athlete at Big Ten powerhouse Michigan State, became a season-long media drama, culminating in their big game against each other—the final of the 1979 NCAA men’s basketball tournament. The NCAA entered the tournament still at twenty miles per hours—it scheduled the final round in a fifteen-thousand-seat arena on the University of Utah campus—but it exited ready to capitalize on the phenomenal TV ratings for the Bird-Magic matchup.

  After that game, the NCAA sold the TV rights for future tournaments for much larger fees than ever before, and, as important, the association made a special “side deal” with a cable TV network that began operations in the summer of 1979—ESPN. The sports channel agreed to televise all the tournament games that the major network broadcaster, CBS-TV, did not pick up. In addition, ESPN arranged to telecast hundreds of regular season games; this increased the fan base for college teams from local and regional followings to national ones, and multiplied the audience for the March tournament. Conferences like the Big East soon became ESPN favorites, and their basketball programs moved from relative obscurity to national prominence, the TV exposure crucial to their coaches’ recruiting efforts and improving won-loss records.

  From this synergy with television came the NCAA’s major money machine, March Madness. The Division I men’s basketball tournament, before 1979 an interesting competition for regional audiences, became one of America’s premiere annual sporting events, rivaling major league baseball’s playoffs and World Series, and aiming at the NFL playoffs and the Super Bowl. By the mid-1980s, the NCAA received $32 million a year from CBS-TV to televise the tournament (the network concentrated on final regional games and final-round contests), and a few million from ESPN, still doing every game not carried by CBS. However, in 1986, CBS doubled the annual payout and agreed to broadcast many more games, including some early-round contests in prime time. Then, in 1989, CBS stunned the television industry by buying the next seven years of the tourney for $1 billion dollars, and demanding all games, thus ending ESPN’s coverage. (In 1994, the NCAA and CBS renegotiated the fee to $1.7 billion for all tourney games until 2002, and, in 1999, they renegotiated again, upping the fee to almost $6 billion through 2013.)

  In addition to the TV revenue, from the mid-1980s on, the NCAA earned millions in ticket sales by moving the Final Four round to huge domed stadiums. In fact, the association passed a rule that required a thirty-thousand-seat or larger facility for all Final Fours, thus turning a small-sized court game into a circus event. Basketball aficionados protested, legendary UCLA coach John Wooden commenting that “domes are not a good place to play basketball,” but he acknowledged that NCAA “decisions of this sort are made because of money.”

  Also in the mid-1980s, the NCAA increased the entry field to sixty-four teams, generating more tourney games and more entrants with mediocre season records. Jerry Tarkanian, the coach of strong UNLV teams during this period, remarked, “I think the tournament should be a reward for teams, and I’m opposed to a team that wins only 50 percent of its league games getting into the tournament.”

  For all of the money streaming into the NCAA from March Madness, a surprisingly small percentage continued on to the schools participating in the tournament, and even less flowed directly to other members of the association. In the 1990s, 25 percent of the revenue went to the participants and their conferences, with some first-round losers failing to cover their traveling expenses. Most of the money stayed in the NCAA, much of it for the association’s gargantuan “administrative services” budget and payroll. The NCAA also spent millions on “public affairs,” a.k.a. publicity and promotion, including all those halftime TV spots to convince viewers that only authentic student-athletes played big-time college sports, young men and women so devoted to their studies and their sports that they should never be sullied by any of the money that they generated for the NCAA.

  Therefore, who benefited from the tremendous surge in college basketball popularity after 1979? Obviously, the NCAA made out wonderfully; however, member schools, including many of the perennial basketball powerhouses, never managed to staunch the annual flow of red ink in their athletic department finances. On the other hand, any coach with a team in the tournament field could request a raise and a contract extension, and if his squad reached the Final Four, he could generate hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional personal income. Moreover, winning the tournament placed him in the $1 million annual range for the rest of his coaching career. (Similarly, the increasingly popular Women’s Division I basketball tournament lost money for participating schools but aided the careers and bank balances of coaches with successful teams.)

  Do the athletes benefit from March Madness? Most players, particularly those intent on pro careers, love the TV exposure during the tourney, but few make any pretense about keeping up their schoolwork during the many weeks of the tourney. Longtime college basketball reporter Rick Bozich commented, “Put a kid on the road to the NCAA Finals, and the road will take many twists … . Few of the twists will include a pit stop in the classroom.” Football players involved in bowl games—also NCAA approved events—have similar problems, especially acute for them because practices for their bowl game often begin during their school’s final exam period.

  Unlike the athletes, many regular students of schools in the NCAA men’s basketball tournament claim to benefit in all possible ways and see no downside to March Madness. In a poll of college student attitudes begun in the 1980s, to the question—“After you graduate from and/or leave your university, what do you think you will remember most vividly about your time here?”—students at universities whose men’s basketball teams reached the Final Four during their undergraduate years often mentioned that event as one of their most vivid college memories, particularly if they took a “road trip” to the site of the Final Four. Frequently they did not obtain tickets to the games—the domed stadiums were sold out—but milling around outside the arena provided them with sufficient pleasure. Most of all, by wearing their school’s paraphernalia and being identified as students from that university, they achieved what some termed “a personal victory.”

  In the history of American colleges and universities, intercollegiate athletics had always been important to students in the collegiate subculture, but, in the 1980s, with the introduction of wall-to-wall media coverage of college sports, many collegians began to define their university careers in terms of the success or failure of their schools’ teams, particularly the high-profile football or basketball squads. This marked a new phenomenon in higher education, one that subsequently became central to student life.

  In a 1980s experiment, Dr. Robert Cialdini, professor of psychology at Arizona State University, discovered that

  After the home team wins a football game on Saturday, … university students at seven major NCAA schools systematically chose to wear apparel to class on Monday that announced their school affiliation. They wore sweatshirts, t-shirts and team jackets with insignias and emblems that designated them as part of the university in far greater numbers after the team won than after it lost. The larger the victory margin, the stronger the tendency to show off.

  In previous eras, public exhibitions of student pride in a winning team usually occurred at pep rallies, games, and postgame celebrations, and did not extend to clothing choices during the school week. But the 1980s expansion of SportsWorld to fit the cable-ready universe transformed all sports, including intercollegiate athletics, into a primary and constant part of every fan’s existence. In terms of university life, one student noted, “College culture today [1990] is a direct extension of sex, alcohol, and rock ‘n’ roll. Now, college sports, thanks to TV, has enlarged the
holy trio to four, and most students like that.”

  At this time, another campus observer, Allen Bogan, used the term fandemonium to describe the growing “obsession with sports teams and star athletes,” with college sports fans exhibiting a particularly virulent form of the “disease.” Bogan based his comments on the work of psychology professor Edward Hirt, and the Miller Lite Report on American Attitudes Toward Sports.

  In the early 1980s, the Miller Brewing Company commissioned, in its words, “The most comprehensive sports study ever conducted.” Miller compared its inquiry to the Carnegie Report of 1929—except, unlike the Carnegie Foundation, the brewery did not want to reform intercollegiate athletics: it sought to understand the fans better and, in so doing, create more effective ways to sell them its beer. The results of the Miller Lite Report and other market studies convinced the brewery to increase its already huge sponsorship of TV sports programming, and to amplify its popular Miller Lite commercials featuring famous athletes.

  The Miller Lite Report also provided useful information on the evolution of “fandemonium.” One key question asked: “When your favorite team or athlete wins, do you feel something important has been accomplished?” Most respondents who identified themselves as “sports fans” and, significantly, most who did not, answered affirmatively—over 90 percent of the former, and over 80 percent of the latter. Thus, even many nonfans assented to the increasing cultural importance of athletics and chose teams to follow at a distance; this paralleled the growing importance of college sports to many noncollegiate students, particularly vocationals.

  Similarly, when asked, “When your favorite team or athlete wins, how often do you feel [that] you’ve gained a personal victory,” only a minority of fans and nonfans answered “rarely” or “never.” The importance of victory and the personal connection to it—even though fans and nonfans have almost zero input into building and running teams—was confirmed by the responses to, “When your favorite team or athlete loses … do you feel depressed?” Sixty-six percent of the fans answered yes. And when asked—“When your favorite team or athlete loses … do you feel as if you suffered a personal loss?”—38 percent of the fans replied affirmatively. Again, this response illustrates the imagined personal bond that many people have with their favorite team or athlete, and it prompts cries of “Get a life.” Miller would prefer calls of “Get a Lite,” and, a generation later, probably many more people would answer affirmatively to these “personal attachment” questions, and also feel that they possessed a full life with beer and sports.

  The main difference between the early 1980s and now is summed up in four letters—ESPN. The twenty-four-hour all-sports cable network began as a small operation in late 1979 and exploded in the 1980s, allowing fans to spend every waking hour within SportsWorld. Never before in sports history was this possible.

  ESPN first attracted widespread attention through its college basketball telecasts, not only with March Madness games and events but also with its regular-season coverage of the sport. For its college b-ball programming, it concocted Big Monday, Super Tuesday, Championship Week, et cetera, and it hired such superenthusiastic announcers as Dick Vitale to provide commentary on the games. A college student in the early 1990s explained, “ESPN generates a level of energy and intensity that is really fun for college basketball fans. I love all the hours that I can watch games from around the country, and how ESPN cuts from a great moment in one game to another in another game.” ESPN both fed and validated this fan’s obsession, and also—as its increasing ratings demonstrated—it generated new fans and caught the attention of nonfans.

  ESPN also changed the sport of college basketball in various ways, one of the most telling and innovative was Midnight Madness. In the 1970s, when the NCAA ruled that coaches could begin basketball practices on a certain day in October, Lefty Driesell at Maryland decided to begin at midnight of the designated day “to get an edge, start [as] early” as possible; a few years later, Driesell invited Terrapin fans to watch the early start, and several other coaches imitated the “midnight open practice.” In the early 1980s, ESPN—always having to fill twenty-four hours of airtime with some sort of sports programming—began televising some of the early A.M. practices, hyping them as Midnight Madness. Soon, many coaches joined in, offering ever gaudier shows in the hopes of being on the ESPN Midnight Madness telecast. Thus, instead of the traditional quiet afternoon practice to begin the long season, Midnight Madness took hold—almost every school in Division I now does it—and the new breed of college fan reciprocated, turning the occasions into huge raucous parties.

  With its Midnight Madness programs, ESPN also transformed a sports nonevent into must-see TV for many fans and even nonfans. ESPN extended this concept when it mutated casual athletic endeavors like skateboarding into elaborate sports competitions like the X Games. ESPN became the master magician at turning noncompetitive sports and nonevents—for example, the NCAA’s bureaucratic selection of teams and first-round games for its annual men’s basketball tournament—into required viewing, particularly on college campuses.

  In a late-1980s survey of how college students spent their time, the researchers discovered that, on average, undergraduates watched 9.2 hours of TV per week. Many women followed daytime television soap operas and their evening equivalents, but men preferred sports, both the telecasts of games and, increasingly, ESPN’s daily program SportsCenter. An early-1990s researcher noted that in all-male college housing units, particularly off-campus ones:

  Dinner is frequently eaten in front of the TV in order to watch the 6:30 P.M. edition. For the 10:30 P.M. edition, many males group in front of the large TV screens in the Student Union building or their fraternity houses or dorms to watch. Another large contingent watches in the various sports bars [in college towns]. In addition, many choose to view the program at 2:30 A.M. because they have missed the earlier editions or because, as they explain, they “cannot get enough of it.”

  A large part of SportsCenter’s appeal was (and is) the language of the studio announcers, a combination of traditional sentimentality and hip skepticism. Both forms of sports reporting continued very old styles—the upbeat “Gee Whiz” approach and the skeptical “Aw Nuts” attitude, but ESPN’s innovation, borrowed from such sportswriters as Dan Jenkins, placed the sentimental and the skeptical side by side. When longtime SportsCenter anchorman Chris Berman showed a clip of a home run, he often intoned, “Back-back-back … ,” consciously paying homage to old-time broadcaster Red Barber’s call of a famous drive by Joe DiMaggio in the 1947 World Series. Then Berman would mock a player by giving him a comic nickname, e.g, outfielder Mel “Kids in the” Hall; and Berman’s partner, Keith Olberman, would show a clip of Hall dropping an easy fly ball, and groan a nasty, “Guh!” For long football runs resulting in touchdowns, announcer Larry Beil would yell, “Run, Forrest, run!,” evoking scenes from one of the most sentimental movies of the 1990s, Forrest Gump. But when showing an injured player on the sidelines during practice, announcer Dan Patrick sometimes commented, “He’s listed as day-to-day, but then again, aren’t we all.”

  For TV viewers, the perfect mind-set for watching SportsCenter, particularly when seeing clips from college sports events and knowing all about the corruption in intercollegiate athletics, was (and is) the equivalent of what George Orwell defined in 1984 as “doublethink”: the ability to believe contradictory ideas simultaneously, for example, acknowledging the dysfunction of college sports while fervently following its teams and games. College students were (and are) especially prone to doublethink: encountering intercollegiate athletics firsthand, they often relate inside stories about the jocks on their campus receiving special financial and academic deals, but when those jocks take the court or field, they cheer madly for them, particularly if the team is winning.

  A nationally published guide, How to College in the 1990s, perfectly caught the student doublethink attitude toward college sports, as well as its connections to beer-and-circus,
and the importance of winning:

  Come game time, all this [college sports corruption] seems trivial. When you’re chugging your eighth beer and passing your buddy’s girlfriend up the stadium rows while your football team clobbers its archrival, or [you’re] vacationing in New Orleans while your team plays in the NCAA basketball championships, you couldn’t care less if the star player got an F in Remedial English 1. You’re happy, you’re partying, and he helped you get to that state of mind.

  When ESPN started a print magazine in the 1990s, it focused on college-age readers, and it filled each edition with doublethink (as well as numerous ads for beer and liquor products). In an issue with a syrupy article on a University of Tulsa basketball recruit who had been home-schooled before entering college, ESPN The Magazine also published a feature comparing “Halloween vs. Midnight Madness,” asking, “Two rituals that ease fall into winter, but which best fulfills its promise? Tykes hopped up on sugar. Undergrads polluted on grain alcohol. Let’s see how they stack up.” The magazine formatted the piece as a gambling chart (many college students bet on sports events, and ESPN caters to their habit, see Chapter 17). Among the entries were: