Television and Sports: Miracles, Liveness, and History
When the Pittsburgh Penguins won the Stanley Cup last year, I was, well there are many words and phrases to describe my state at the time the game ended, decided as it was in the final minutes of an hour’s competition: regardless, I was blackout drunk, three sheets to the wind, heavily inebriated, sloshed to the gills, etc. I’m not romanticizing my foolhardy actions that night, but a combination of a difficult time in my life, a scant salad for lunch, and nervous imbibing had me shouting obscenities in the general direction of the screen, my friends at the bar, tables at the bar, the West Coast daylight shining through the bars door, amongst other things.
In spite of all of this and my understandable nebulous recalling of the evening’s specificities, I remember clear as day the moment we scored the first goal of the game, giving us the lead in an opportune moment that assured either a definite victory or a collapse that would have left the entire city in a depressed state from which they surely would never recover. I recall the moment in my mind when our forward retrieved an errant shot behind the net, turned to the goal, and flipped a shot towards the back of the momentarily-confused goalkeeper, bouncing off his back and finding its way into the net. After 58 scoreless minutes, a strange goal from an impossible angle released the game’s boiling pressure. I remember watching this and I remember watching it live on television.
As the television was expanding over the course of the twentieth century, understanding its novelty and its potential led theorists to settle on liveness as its defining characteristic. Unlike film, which then was the visual produced by the playing of a pre-recorded reel, or radio, whose liveness was purely auditory, the way in which the television literally beamed an image onto a screen made it feel inherently live. Owners of the device could now see actions happening across the world presented as live, endowing faraway actions with the significance of presence.
While television still often produces this effect (affect?) of liveness in its viewers — i.e. we feel as though what we see is as live as any action occurring in our immediate surroundings — for myriad reasons, this is obviously an exaggeration at best and, in many ways, a lie. Just as the mere concept of virtual reality relies the reality one wishes it will provide, the transmission of liveness and presence in television is by definition, not actually giving its viewer true liveness and true presence, but, in reality, their transmission and mediation through the apparatus.
While liveness was often lauded as television’s saving grace — its unique characteristic that would salvage the trash it so often showed twenty four hours a day into households across the world — it also became indicted in a form of presentism, a sort of societal pathology of attention deficit disorder: the poor viewer, inundated by an unending flow of images that hypnotize them as they futilely attempt to turn off the screen, is soon lost in a state of immediacy in which only the last image holds domain over their consciousness, until the next one replaces it, and so and so on, day after day, effecting a universal forgetting and privileging of the now.
But, let’s play the devil’s advocate with my drunken memory and explore the ways in which liveness and memory are both equally important in the formation of meaning surrounding the television viewing experience. Let’s say that, in fact, I was in fact too inebriated to accurately remember that goal (or the next one, or the raising of the Stanley Cup — the other two images I distinctly “remember”) and that, in fact, my memory was constructed through the endless repetition of this brief clip (seconds long, yet of substantial importance) in the days and months following. Thus, in this hypothetical, my miraculous recollection of this specific moment, far from an act of divine intervention on my drunken memory, was actually a fabrication forged in the repetition of the live event, making it “memorable” (individually), “historical” (socially).
Such misrememberings, this conflation of the seeing the live with constructing a historically momentous event, however, do not exclusively belong to drunken twenty-somethings watching hockey games at empty bars thousands of miles from home. The whole city of Pittsburgh participates in one such event, aptly titled The Immaculate Reception: in an act of salvation worthy of the good book, a misbegotten, last-effort pass by the Steelers ricochets of a body, nearly landing on the ground, before it’s inexplicably caught by a young running back, who takes the ball all the way to the opposing team’s end zone to win the game. Almost as famous as the lore and controversy surrounding this moment in sports and civic history is the fact that no one in Pittsburgh that December afternoon in 1972 who was not at the game actually watched this play live on television since it was not broadcast in the area. Yet stories abound of “I remember where I was when I saw…”.
These two events are meant to unravel the narrative establishing the liveness and presentism of television, replacing it with its importance in constructing a historical discourse through iterative viewing. Despite television’s importance in constructing the narrative around which a certain group of people define themselves (in this case, the city of Pittsburgh), liveness still maintains a very strong power within this historically narrative. While not causing a negation of history through an ever-changing, overpowering present, the belief in the liveness of the television transmission and the viewers averring their dutiful watching at the landmark moments of this history lends the viewer credibility within the social group: liveness is, as anyone who has sat through a scoreless hockey game, tedious and banal — often, nothing really happens. Yet, by “being there” in the moment of the true event (a possibility, with its caveats, afforded by television to millions who cannot actually be there), whether it be a catch or goal, gives the speaker social currency amongst those in the group, regardless of the assertion’s veracity.
The religious overtones of the Immaculate Reception align it with a transformative event: a miracle through which the subject is changed forever thanks to a divine act. While the moment to which it alludes heralds the arrival of a Messiah that would change a people and their beliefs forever, what some may see as a trivial play also changed Pittsburgh forever: a football laggard, this moment is cited as their turnaround, a springboard from which they would win multiple championships in the following years. The fact that the football team’s ascension occurred concomitantly with the city’s decline, caused by the changes wrought by a free market liberalism taking shape in the 70s that destroyed the steel industry and plunged the city into a massive recession, endows this event with a mythological quality whose authenticity is in part established for future generations by those (false) viewing stories.
A final anecdote from Pittsburgh sports history some thirty years after the former football example: as the team approached the goal line, ready to score the points that would all but assure victory, a trusted running back in his twilight season fumbles the ball. As the city recounts the day after the salvation of a desperation tackle that prevented what was almost the ensuing catastrophe, a story comes out that one man, watching diligently as all of us were, literally suffers a heart attack in the moment of the fumble. This man is celebrated as a hero of sports fandom and his place in the lore of Pittsburgh history is assured. This is the liveness and history of television uniting in one moment of pure feeling, to which all viewers can only aspire.
