Sports Media’s Bachelor Addiction
Why Do Sports Journalists Love the Bachelor?
“My clear-cut No. 1, Danielle L., and my No. 3, Whitney, were both sent home after a two-on-one date. Nick’s decision to send both home after that date is one we’ve rarely — if ever — seen over the years.” That’s Mel Kiper Jr., long-time ESPN talking head, breaking down Episode 6 of the Bachelor last month. “What was he thinking? Why not give it another week with Danielle L. to see if things evolve and his feelings grow? I liked Whitney all along, but there was zero chemistry between them. And why give so much air time to Jasmine?” Kiper continued during his weekly Bachelor Big Board, a spinoff of his annual, more orthodox, NFL Draft predictor.
Season 21 of The Bachelor concluded on Monday night with star Nick Viall proposing to Vanessa Grimaldi (good luck to the happy couple!). I watched the finale because (A) this show is phenomenally entertaining and (B) I have been trying for awhile to make sense of why Mel Kiper is talking about the Bachelor. And it’s not just Kiper; a large part of the sports media has an apparent Bachelor addiction. Coverage of The Bachelor and its host of spin-off shows (The Bachelorette, The Bachelor Pad, The Bachelor in Paradise, After Paradise, Purgatorio, Inferno…) has become a mainstay in sports media: Bill Barnwell dedicates entire episodes of his podcast to breaking down episodes with scrutiny similar to NFL games; SB Nation devotes a whole section of its website to the show; The Ringer, like Grantland before it, provides regular, in-depth Bachelor analysis. And this year, ABC capitalized on the apparent crossover viewers by partnering with sister network ESPN to create an official Bachelor Fantasy League. While the fantasification of The Bachelor has existed for years through unofficial sites like fantasy4reality.com, bachelor.realityfantasyleague.com, and bachbracket.com—mere iterations beyond the dorm room bracketology that began the craze—the ABC-ESPN partnership marks the corporate validation of a bizarre cultural trend.
But it makes some sense: The Bachelor is a competition, its format lends itself to bracket-building, the personalities promote fan interaction and choosing sides, and recent winners have included the brother of one very famous quarterback and one sorta(?) famous quarterback (I actually think the arrow points in the opposite direction — these guys were on the show because the producers knew they had a burgeoning male, sports-focused viewership). But the thread runs even deeper, according to many cross-over fans who argue that there is something fundamental and base that binds sports and The Bachelor together. Here’s Rodger Sherman, a Ringer writer that typically covers football and basketball, last month:
First of all, GQ Tony will vote for whichever Bachelor candidate he wants. Tony Bennett is the Bachelor. But the notion that “the Bachelor is sports” is perhaps a bit more radical. Drew Magary, in a Deadspin article with a similar mission to this one, talked to sports journalists who tweet about The Bachelor, and wrote that “most everyone I talked to who watches this show clearly enjoys treating it as a sport: pro wrestling with champagne flutes instead of folding chairs.” There certainly seems to be a pro wrestling mentality here — audiences revel in the complexity of a fiction paraded as reality, in the sordid pleasure of consuming low culture through an erudite filter. Last year Jeremy Gordon wrote in a New York Times Magazine essay titled “Is Everything Wrestling?” that “the rest of the world has caught up to wrestling’s ethos . . . a stage-managed ‘reality’ in which scripted stories bleed freely into real events, with the blurry line between truth and untruth seeming to heighten, not lessen, the audience’s addiction to the melodrama.” So sports and reality TV, the argument goes, may not be so different after all, and with the gamification of reality TV and the increasingly personality-driven model of pro sports on the other side, the lines of sports and reality entertainment may be on convergent paths.
The NBA, at least, appears to be approaching a similar median. Last year’s split between NBA superstars Russell Westbrook and Kevin Durant has elevated professional basketball drama to levels that rival the scripted realities of Pro Wrestling and Real Housewives. Their split drew analogs to the Brangelina divorce, soap operas, and reality entertainment. “We’re the reality TV of sports,” Durant himself acknowledged. Westbrook, more than anyone else, has embraced the drama of the spotlight, becoming renowned for a language of pointed symbolism, slight and petty digs at his ex-teammate. And his fans have latched on: in Kevin Durant’s first return trip to Oklahoma City since his departure/betrayal, Thunder fans greeted him with boos and an abundance of cupcake imagery, a reference to Westbrook’s 4th of July Instagram that bid adieu to Durant (#35) with a picture of 35 cupcakes. The not-so-subtle message: KD is soft. That Oklahoma City was never really in the game didn’t seem to matter; the whole arena was chanting “CUPCAAAKE” late into the 4th quarter. After the game, Durant returned to his favorite OKC steakhouse, even though the owner refused his $35,000 offer to rent it out. Westbrook was there as well, dining in another room.
ESPN writer J.A. Adande wrote of the Westbrook-Durant beef, “The all-important dramatic element of conflict is organically created. The NBA schedule doesn’t just match up teams jockeying for position in the standings, it forces people to occupy the same space.” In a league where personalities are often bigger than wingspans, it doesn’t take much coaxing to stoke drama. Professional sports have always provided entertainment in conjunction with competition, but the NBA of late has engineered its model and its marketing towards the larger-than-life personas of its athletes. The league manufactures personality as much basketball.
The Bachelor’s appeal is analogous. To gain the illustrious title of Reporter, I asked a Bachelor fan to explain her love for the show. Sydney Geyer, amateur Bachelor enthusiast, amateur podcaster, told me, “I love it because I love the psychology of a group of people who each have basically identical roles in society at large try in vain to fill that role in the microcosm . . . all of those women are used to being the prettiest woman in the room, and when everyone is, no one can be.” The Bachelor and the NBA both present an arena for the clashes of enormous personalities, that, in the case of the NBA, also happen to be some of the most talented and competitive athletes on the planet.
But, as Magary points out in that Deadspin article, treating The Bachelor as sport provides a convenient moral and intellectual counter to the gnawing sensation of a numbing brain and degrading morality: “Taking a show at anything other than face value allows you to coat yourself in bulletproof irony, making it clear that you watch but don’t necessarily approve of it.” When low culture is en vogue, there’s an easy disguise and validation for its consumption. The genius of The Bachelor, and maybe also of sports, is that it reels in both audiences: the fan drawn by charisma and emotional connection, and the fan buoyed above it by an intellectual detachment. But when networks hew to a capitalist line, the beauty and the horror of these things lies in the fantasy that here, if we squint, we might find the best of both worlds.
