University of Wisconsin Milwaukee UWM Digital Commons Teses and Dissertations August 2015 "Bring the Fan to the Game:" Football, Baseball, and the Transformation of Sports Television into Entertainment Ethan Collins University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Follow this and additional works at: htps://dc.uwm.edu/etd Part of the History Commons, and the Mass Communication Commons Recommended Citation Collins, Ethan, ""Bring the Fan to the Game:" Football, Baseball, and the Transformation of Sports Television into Entertainment" (2015).Teses and Dissertations. 946. htps://dc.uwm.edu/etd/946 Tis Tesis is brought to you for free and open access by UWM Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Teses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of UWM Digital Commons. For more information, please contact “BRING THE FAN TO THE GAME:” FOOTBALL, BASEBALL, AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF SPORTS TELEVISION INTO ENTERTAINMENT by Ethan Collins A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in Media Studies at The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee August 2015 ABSTRACT “BRING THE FAN TO THE GAME:” FOOTBALL, BASEBALL, AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF SPORTS TELEVISION INTO ENTERTAINMENT by Ethan Collins The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 2015 Under the Supervision of Associate Professor Elana Levine This thesis analyzes the growing symbiosis of the sport-television relationship as it evolved during the 1960s. Professional football and baseball are primarily considered they demonstrate the ways television impacted local and national audiences. Football embraced television as a way to disseminate the game to a wider, national audience. Baseball, because of its long history as a local attraction, resisted the encroachment of television. Baseball prioritized the live game over the televised version, while football became more visually descriptive for viewers and took on characteristics of entertainment programming. These changes were technologically, industrially, and economically based, and this thesis discusses the interplay between the television networks and professional sports leagues in these arenas. Critics have decried television’s purported negative influence on fans and sport itself. This thesis instead argues that making sport more like entertainment television has brought a unique viewpoint to games that only became possible because of television technology. ii © Copyright by Ethan Collins, 2015 All Rights Reserved iii TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION..............................................................................................1 Literature Review..................................................................................................................4 Sports Broadcasting History.............................................................................................5 The 1960s’ Innovative Revolution...................................................................................8 Similarities between News and Sports...........................................................................11 The Symbiosis between Sports and Television..............................................................13 Method................................................................................................................................17 Chapter Breakdown............................................................................................................20 CHAPTER 2: SPORTS BROADCASTING BEFORE 1960..................................................22 Sport and Radio.................................................................................................................22 Industry Attitudes in the 1950s..........................................................................................29 Advertising and the Resurrection of Sports Television......................................................32 The Diverging Paths of the NFL and MLB.......................................................................35 News, Sport, and the Public Interest..................................................................................42 CHAPTER 3: SPORT’S TRANSFORMATION INTO ENTERTAINMENT.......................48 The NFL’s Turning Point...................................................................................................48 Roone Arledge and the New Look of Sports Television....................................................52 Instant Replay.....................................................................................................................55 ABC and the Growth of Sports in the 1960s......................................................................60 Monday Night Football.......................................................................................................64 CHAPTER 4: IMPLICATIONS OF THE SPORT-TELEVISION RELATIONSHIP...........73 Criticism from the 1960s....................................................................................................73 Criticism from the 1980s....................................................................................................77 Sport as Business................................................................................................................84 Conclusion..........................................................................................................................86 BIBLIOGRAPHY...................................................................................................................90 iv ACKNOWLDGEMENTS First I’d like to thank my advisor, Elana Levine. She has helped me grow as a writer and thinker immeasurably through three seminars and this thesis process. Her teachings on television and gender have given me new perspective on topics I previously thought I knew a lot about, notably sports. I will be forever grateful for her guidance during my two years in Milwaukee. I would also like to thank the other two members of my committee, Michael Newman and David Allen. Both were not only very helpful in shaping the progress of this thesis, but their seminars were very helpful in honing my academic writing style. I thank the other students in the JAMS program for being supportive throughout my time at UWM. Without a release from the rigors of academia, I would not have been made it through the program in as mentally stable a state as I did. Our times outside the classroom were much needed and a welcome temporary reprieve from schoolwork. Lastly, a big thank you to my family in Upstate New York for their constant support of my graduate school endeavors. Although the physical distance was at times difficult to bear, every phone call, email or text helped ground me and keep my head in my studies. Also, thank you to my parents for your calmness and money during the times of automobile- related crisis. I love you Mom and Dad. v 1 CHAPTER ONE Introduction This thesis argues that the 1960s were a time of great experimentation and change for the sports television industry, and would pave the way for sports on TV to become the behemoth business it is today. During that decade, sports leagues influenced programming and advertising decisions at the networks, and television executives collaborated with team owners and commissioners to make games more conducive to recording. The symbiosis that developed between sports and television proved lucrative and influential beyond anyone’s imagination, and helped connect a nation of fans to their favorite athletes and teams like never before. The most important developments during this time revolved around professional football and baseball. Analyzed together, these two sports showcase the major influence television had in changing attitudes about sport. Both leagues used television to reach fans, but the degree to which they embraced television was very different. Baseball emphasized a minimalist broadcast because it believed the live game was sanctified and needed to be protected. This developed as a result of its long history as a local sport, which made some owners uncertain about the need for national exposure. Football, contrastingly, fully embraced television and understood how the medium could help the league introduce itself to many new people across the country. While baseball discouraged the use of new broadcast techniques so fans wouldn’t become complacent with home viewing, football grew profoundly more popular by using new technology to enhance its broadcasts. Professional football and baseball diverged in their approach to television coverage during the 1960s, and those decisions have had a lasting impact on the attitudes about each sport. 2 Two key trends mark the 1960s as a transitional decade in sports television. First, the style and techniques used for broadcasts started as experimentation, but became solidified by the end of the decade. Vast improvements in technology in the early 1960s allowed producers to try new ways to give the home fan a better view of the game. Videotape became much more accessible and easier to use, allowing for the creation of instant replay and slow motion. Satellites gave programmers greater flexibility in what to air and audiences more exposure to geographically distant events, which became especially notable during Olympic 1 broadcasts. By the end of the decade, the experiments in style and breadth of coverage became the norm and had drawn many more viewers than most network executives could have imagined. Sports programming arranged itself to fit the contours of television, and the result began a very lucrative arrangement between the networks and the sports leagues. The second trend marking the 1960s as a transition al decade was the shift in focus from local to national. Before satellites, radio and television audiences were only exposed to teams and games in their immediate geographic area. Team own ers had always been uneasy about radio because they feared the medium’s broadcasts would cut into ticket sales. They couldn’t see their enterprise as anything but a local attraction, and continued to feel this way about television even into the early 1960s. However, after seeing the large sums of money that could be had through collective bargaining with the networks, a shift occurred that saw owners and leagues attempt to reach the broadest possible audience. This shift was especially prominent for the NFL, the history of which was marked by little fan interest and minimal legitimacy because college football was so well regarded. The lack of history as a local attraction, however, allowed the NFL to easily transition to the national stage by way of television. MLB (or professional baseball more loosely), on the other hand, had a long and 1 John R. Catsis, Sports Broadcasting (Chicago: Nelson-Hall Publishers, 1996), 35. 3 rich history embedded in local communities across the country. The switch to a national, visual focus went against the well-established tenets of baseball, something the NFL didn’t have to worry about. The switch from local to national is also a metaphor for the transition from MLB to the NFL as the most prominent and popular sport seen in the media. Moreover, this national audience mentality coincided with the worldwide broadcast of the Olympics and a subsequent rise in nationalism. Sport became entwined with patriotism in the midst of the Cold War, and American professional leagues benefitted financially from increased prestige. Moreover, the broadcast innovation and emphasis on a national audience immensely helped the fan experience. Television viewers were privy to many more games than they would have been otherwise and became connected to teams across the country they would never have been able to see in person. Fans could move away from their favorite team’s market and still have access to televised games. The technological innovations gave producers the tools necessary to transport the fan onto the field of play and into the locker room like no fan had before, and certainly not anyone in the stadium seats. Sports television in the 1960s provided unprecedented access to the home viewer because producers could offer new types of content impossible to encounter at live games. Fans are the lifeblood of sports and enhancing their experience will keep them loyal to certain leagues and teams. Producers in the ‘60s showed that catering to television fans could be a huge boon for networks and provide certified cultural phenomena like the Olympic Games and Monday Night Football. However, some scholars like Garry Whannel and Benjamin G. Rader see television as cancerous to sport. For them, television has corrupted sport, turning it into a commercialized frenzy for ratings and profit. The amateur ideal of playing for love of the game is long gone 4 as athletes hold out for larger contracts and parade around in the celebrity spotlight. Furthermore, critics support their argument by claiming that sport is an activity separate from entertainment and therefore should not be manipulated just to adhere to television’s filmic practices. To these critics, the fact that television has transformed sport into a spectacle akin to other entertainment programming is an act to admonish. These critics are nostalgic for a type of sport that never fully existed, but more so they are ornery about the medium of television. Underwriting all the criticisms of televised sport are the problems elitist and sexist scholars have always had with television. Arguments about mass culture and the domestic sphere are subtextually attached to criticisms of sports television commercialization. The problem, for critics, isn’t so much that sport has changed to conform to television production but that television is an intellect-sapping, feminine medium trafficking in lowbrow content. In this thesis, I refute the arguments of these critical scholars (both overt and subtextual) by showing how technological innovation made the fan experience more exciting and intimate, and by exposing the aspects of pre-televised sport that are forgotten when critics idealize the past. Furthermore, I show how sports leagues have changed the television industry in many ways, and are not, as critics assume, passive entities succumbing to the voracious commercial network machine. Lastly, I argue that sports are entertainment, and any critic claiming the two are separate entities is inherently revoking the agency of audiences and seeing television as a low form of culture because of its ties to women and the home. Literature Review