NASCAR on television

By DAVID GREEN

It's 10 a.m. (Central Daylight Time) Sunday morning and, in the background, I can hear Kenny Wallace, Jimmy Spencer and others discussing the latest developments in the NASCAR soap opera. I'm not at the racetrack; I'm at home, in gym shorts and a Frank Hawley's NHRA Drag Racing School T-shirt, barefooted, at the keyboard of my home computer. The discussion I'm listening to comes from my television set.

Wow. When I first became interested in this sport, that kind of thing was unimaginable.

In those days, of the major television networks only ABC, with its Wide World of Sports anthology series, seemed aware of the existence of automobile racing. Four or five times a year, I would get to see edited videotape of some NASCAR race, held a couple of weeks earlier at Darlington or Charlotte or some other track. And I was tickled pink to get it.

So, I don't want to sound ungrateful for the TV coverage that's now available. However, after a prompt from Larry in response to my last blog item, I would like to offer a few comments about it.

Take these comments with a grain of salt. They represent one fan's opinions.

As far as I'm concerned, the best thing going on now is Speed's coverage of Formula One. Bob Varsha, David Hobbs and Steve Matchett are the best broadcast-booth trio since Frank Gifford, Howard Cosell and Don Meredith were doing Monday Night Football. Part of the quality of this coverage is in step with the smaller scope of an F1 event -- half as many cars, half as many races, each race half as long in comparison to the typical NASCAR event.

So, the challenge for the NASCAR broadcast team is a greater one. And for the most part, today's coverage is at least as good as the coverage of other sports, if not better.

I'm skipping all the magazine, pre-race, post-race and other ancillary programming to concentrate on live coverage of NASCAR events. Here's what bugs me:

• OVERKILL -- Belaboring of a point by commentators, excessive use of "gimmick" camera angles, over-the-top description or analysis. Some repetition is inevitable, but as we make a point for the 12th or 13th time of the afternoon, let's be more economical with the time we devote to it and let's be a little more creative and less redundant in how we describe it. Let's come to the realization that on-board angles can be dramatic and entertaining but sometimes they offer the worst possible vantage point to show what is happening at the moment. So, let's use them for alternative replay angles or to fill time when nothing compelling is going on. Let's leave the hype to the magazines, pre-race, post-race and other ancillary programming.
• OMISSIONS -- Failing to follow up on storylines that may develop during an event, coming back from a commercial break only to find the caution period ended several seconds (or several laps) ago, failing to show a battle to the finish line for a position other than first. If we raise a point or pose a question, let's follow it up -- or at least tell the viewer why we couldn't answer what we asked. Let's do a better job of working with the sanctioning body and the advertisers to ensure that we don't fail to cover important moments such as restarts. Let's give the audience credit and assume they're capable of realizing on their own that the winner's pit crew members are celebrating; let's show the side-by-side battle for third place instead of the celebration.
• VAUDEVILLE -- If I wanted stand-up comedy, I'd be watching a comedy channel, not a NASCAR race. It's fine to have some moments of levity, but sometimes the yuk-yuk gets a little out of hand. Ratchet it down just a tad, please.
• INFORMATION, PLEASE -- Via audio and graphic display, give me information I can really use. One of the least-useful tools is the crawl across the top of the screen showing the 43-car running order. Instead of the crawl, which shows at most four or five drivers' names at a time, how about showing it vertically, so that one-third or more of the field is visible at a glance? The important information at any point in the race includes the top five cars, the position in which your favorite driver is running and cars out of the race. Until we have fully interactive television, providing information about "your favorite driver" is going to be serendipitous, but there's no reason why we can't have a constant graphic showing the top five cars regardless of what the onscreen image may be. That would be a much better use of the horizontal crawl.

The biggest complaint I have against the announcers is their inability to recognize the difference between subjective and objective pronouns ("between HIM and the second-place car," not "between HE and the second-place car") and similar grammatical misadventures, but that's a malady that affects just about all broadcasters, it seems, not just those who do motorsports. (Interestingly, this seems NOT to be a problem for the Varsha-Hobbs-Matchett combo. Keep it up, guys; at least one English teacher is watching.)

Fox and NBC both do some really great stuff with their coverage. Theirs is a very demanding job, done under the pressure of real-time demands.

I don't envy them in their effort to please the masses, and I thank them for their efforts to bring me my favorite sport -- live rather than a couple of weeks old, and without expecting me to sit through equal portions of figure skating, lumberjacking and track-and-field events before I can enjoy it.