For Thursday, September 21, 2000 Drummer Column, Gibbs, 710 words

Olympic surfing

I'm watching the Olympics. I'm also escaping the heat as our downstairs TV room is the coolest in the house. It's unusual for me to watch any television show consistently because I get restless. I channel surf and hate doing that. My wife walks out. She'd rather get involved in an Infomercial on gum remover that flash through 60 channels.

I'm watching the Olympics. However, I'm not real interested in the overall scores or metal totals. I just want to watch the competitions. My channel surfing skills have helped me do that. I jump back and forth between Channel 4 NBC and Channel 58 CNBC.

Their coverage approach is quite different. CNBC isn't as rushed as NBC, nor as Ameri-centric. CNBC runs for hours showing events across the spectrum, many of them not involving the USA. If you want to see a Nigerian boxer knock out an Iranian, CNBC is the place to be.

I believe they programmed CNBC coverage to play well in bars. The screen is filled with lots of action, great visuals, and very little narration. I can watch CNBC with the sound down and talk to my wife on the phone without missing an important chore or knock-out punch.

NBC is too dramatic and overpackaged. Before it gets going on any event, we must first watch full-scored footage of the athletes from age 4 up to present day, including inspirational sunrises. We see home movies of budding athletes tapdancing on daddy's chest or pedaling a unicycle. We listen to the grueling details of the prolonged training schedule, and hear interviews with brothers, parents, coaches, competitors, family pets. Cut to commercials. Return to a cameo montage of mug shots and stern poses by the athletes who have obviously been visited by network photographers well prior to the games for hours of publicity shots.

Watching an event on NBC is like one of those joke Christmas presents that hides the gift inside a box inside a box stuffed with wrapping and tape, wrapping and tape. The reason to watch NBC is because they do feature the showcase events involving American athletes. Also, I'm humanitarian enough to once in a while appreciate the struggles of a young Chinese athlete who begins rigorous daily training at age 5 and leaves home for year-round gymnastics camp, or the story of American Tom Dolan having a milk chugging race with his father. However, mostly I want action.

Here's another example of how the channel coverage differs. On Monday night a CNBC anchor came out early in the evening and said frankly and in passing that the USA got shut out in gymnastics. Then she cut back to women's weightlifting action. An hour later I flip to NBC to see they are just beginning gymnastics coverage. They don’t announce frankly that USA is out. Instead, they let the events unfold with drama, biographies, and plenty of commercials, and we don't discover until near bedtime that we miss metal.

I guess it's like taping an afternoon ballgame and not listening to the radio on the way home from work.

For this column I visited a few Olympic Web sites to give them a sampling. Informative as heck, they are, but little to no action, even with my DSL. There's the official olympics.com (the cleanest and easiest to browse), nbcolympics.com (too complicated with too many options and visual distractions) and foxsports.com (hi-tech with lots of Java and animation), to name three. I didn't spend much time on these sites, only long enough to view the metal counts and overall standings. Also, my computer is in the hottest room in the house.

In fact, I'm sitting in that hot room right now, typing this column, dripping sweat down my collar, still wearing my school clothes, annoyed by the desk fan because it provides a breeze but is drying out my eyeballs. I'd much rather be sitting downstairs in my recliner watching tonight's events in a darkened room with my ceiling fans purring overhead. I can imagine it now, ah, reclining. Wait. My right thumb is beginning to twitch -- 58…4…58…4…58…4. I'm popping my shirt buttons and releasing my stomach. I'm not long for this room, I can tell. It's off I go. I'm watching the Olympics.