The Center : It’s ESPN, Where Irreverance Means It Must Be 11 O’Clock

It’s 11 o’clock. Do you know where your sports pig is?

Chances are he’s there at that trough again, burying his head in ESPN’s “SportsCenter,� the one-hour cable television show of taped highlights, news, commentary, interviews, smart-aleck banter and a testosterone level so high the cameras should be on stilts.

The music intro is over, the tease is over, the show begins and the talent is cued. Kenny Mayne narrates a videotaped baseball highlight of a home run hit by Cecil Fielder of the Detroit Tigers:

“I’m not sure what that pitch is, but it tastes like chicken, it’s outta’ here.�

Absolutely.

The combined result of all the chicken-plucking going on is fairly impressive. “SportsCenter� is to the sports highlight show what Deion is to football, Jordan is to basketball, Griffey is to baseball and Freud is to analysis.

According to Nielsen figures, the nightly 11 p.m. “SportsCenter� is seen by 15,201,000 different households in an average month. If that sounds like a lot, it is. Let’s put that number in perspective. It’s only slightly less than an earned-run average at Coors Field. Impressive, isn’t it?

It’s sort of difficult to explain the attraction of “SportsCenter� to viewers except in the most basic terms.

We like sports events.

We also like videotaped highlights of sports events, basically because we have the attention span of a fruit fly.

But apparently what we really like are videotaped highlights of sports events presented in a manner that is often less than serious.

The player is pitcher Ismael Valdes of the Dodgers. The announcer is Rece Davis, who is narrating a videotaped highlight of Valdes:

“He’s tough as a batch of Elly May Clampett’s doughnuts.�

Now, Jed, go on down to the cement pond and find Granny, will you? Anyway, the announcers on SportsCenter wear ties and sport coats. They have nice hair. And they have, well . . . is attitude the right word?

Sort of, said John Walsh, the show’s executive editor, who contributed a word of his own.

“We’ve always felt that esoteric communication is the best form of communication,� Walsh said. “And this place runs rampant with it.�

Of course, one person’s esoterica can be another person’s cliche. Whatever “SportsCenter� is, it isn’t afraid to say something, anything, and that’s the fun of it.

It has kind of a chummy, sitting-on-a-bar-stool familiarity to it. For instance, when Brett Haber narrated some hockey highlights featuring Florida Panther goalie John Vanbiesbrouck, not once was Vanbiesbrouck called by his surname. He was called “Beezer� five times, though.

Former major league pitcher Bill Lee is a regular “SportsCenter� viewer who has no problem with the words being delivered, only when the message is too negative.

“I don’t like people commenting on people who don’t know people,� Lee said. “Unless you’ve gone up San Juan Hill with them and swapped spit with them, then you shouldn’t be commenting on them.�

Fair enough. Maybe this will be taken into consideration sometime.

The two most famous names behind the desk at “SportsCenter� are Keith Olbermann, who seems to have a perpetual smirk, and Dan Patrick, the guy with the straight face who looks as though he just put the whoopee cushion on your chair.

These are the two guys the sports pigs probably dig the most because of what they say and the way they say it. One night this spring, Olbermann narrated a videotaped highlight of an NBA playoff game involving the Houston Rockets. A Rocket player hit a big shot late in the game and the team began celebrating, although the Seattle SuperSonics wound up winning.

Olbermann said the Rockets were guilty of “premature jocularity.�

It was a “mildy 10th grade, bathroom humor, risque� reference, Olbermann said later, but what the heck? Nobody got hurt. “It’s an attitude,� Olbermann said of the show’s approach to delivering the sports. “Sports are, whenever possible, they are to be enjoyed. There is enough grim news.�

Patrick may be best known for his regular use of Spanish words when he is narrating videotaped highlights. The ones he uses most often are “en fuego,� or on fire. Olbermann said Patrick used to say “el fuego� until a Spanish teacher corrected him.

Apparently this Spanish thing is catching. Mayne called a grand slam by St. Louis Cardinal outfielder Willie McGee a “grande quadrangular.�

Then there was Davis, who teased to an upcoming videotape highlight of Detlef Schrempf of the SuperSonics by saying “Achtung, baby! Detlef is dealing on the Rockets.�

On closer inspection, this may be a great new trend forming. Where else can you watch the sports highlights and learn a foreign language at the same time? Maybe Berlitz can be a sponsor.

In the meantime, it’s fun to listen to the narration, knowing the announcer usually is seeing the videotape for the first time as he describes the action. This is doing it cold, so cold it could lead to frostbite.

Olbermann calls the experience “like a tightrope-walking skill.�

The show’s producers and coordinating producers approve whatever scripts there are, and it seems the philosophy is pretty liberal. As far as television sports reporting, it’s a ‘90s thing, Olbermann said.

“It’s the latest stage in the evolution,� he said. “I would hope it’s not going to go much further.�

Take a quick look at where we are now:

The Punny

Brett Haber: “Ostertag, you’re it,� referring to Utah Jazz player Greg Ostertag.

Mayne: “Deserting Beserkley� after basketball player Tremaine Fowlkes transferred from California.

Haber: “Daal 8, long distance� after pitcher Omar Daal gave up a home run.�

The Obscure

Mayne: “Some say the year 2000 will bring about the end of the world. We know it will bring about the end of Dave Wannstadt’s new contract.�

Jaren Jackson: “Are the Rockets playing possum?�

Davis: “Well, if they have one more loss they’ll certainly be hanging by their tails.�

The Home Run

Davis: “Clucks when you cook it,� “Yard job,� “Job,� “Dong,� “Tater,� “Master of his domain.�

Olbermann: “In orbit.�

Patrick: “Gone,� “Left the yard.�

The Transition

Davis: “Ice Capades now,� introducing hockey highlights.

Jackson: “Time to get chilly,� introducing hockey highlights.

You get the idea. The Miami Dolphins are the “Fish,� unless we’re talking about Laura Davies winning a golf tournament and being paid “180,000 fish,� which hopefully means dollars, for Davies’ sake.

But whatever they mean on this show, the message is getting through. Dr. Nathan Weinberg of the sociology department at Cal State Northridge is an expert in popular culture. He isn’t surprised by the show’s popularity.

“It’s very now,� Weinberg said. “The colloquial jargon, it’s hip in the sense of being very current. All the metaphors, that’s part of what you’re listening for. It’s very witty. A lot of the straight news isn’t very witty because it’s necessarily serious.�

Wayne Wanta of the journalism and communications department at the University of Oregon conducted a study of sports cliches and tried to trace their origins. Wanta found some cliches were rooted in food (“hot potato,� “piece of cake�), agriculture (“paydirt�) and the military (“bomb�).

Wanta concluded that TV sports reporting cliches are not only popular, but also expected.

“If you gave viewers a couple of cliche-free reports, they would think the program was too antiseptic, too clean, that the announcers didn’t know what they were talking about,� Wanta said.

“On the other hand, you can go overboard. How many home runs do they show each night? A dozen? If each one is described as “Gone,� pretty soon the viewers will be gone too.�

It’s a heady time right now on “SportsCenter.� There are 22 live editions of “SportsCenter� each week, and more than 18,000 telecasts have been sent out there into the stratosphere since the very first one, Sept. 7, 1979.

As for those television viewers hungry for sports reports served up with an attitude, it seems clear they’re not going anywhere, thank you. No, they’re hanging around, waiting for Elly May to cook up some taters and a clucking chicken en fuego. Adios, baby.