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Sportscasters, Television

Sportscasters are among television's larger-than-life personalities. The very best have endured on the air across decades of ever-changing players, revolving coaches, and up-and-down seasons, reaching generation after generation of fans. But the era of great sportscasters is fast disappearing. For newcomers, becoming a giant among colleagues is unlikely because the conditions of viewing sports and thus of experiencing sportscasters have changed drastically since the 1990s.

At the network level, teams of play-by-play and color commentators accomplish the game announcing, often covering different leagues within a sport, and as the seasons change, they typically cover several different sports. Their specialties are breadth rather than focused depth, and unlike local announcers, network sportscasters generally hide personal preferences for specific teams. They can show themselves as fans of a sport, such as baseball, golf, or hockey, but cannot favor a particular team except on talk shows where they normally draw on their expertise rather than personal fan preferences. Although cable network sportscasters more often concentrate on a single sport, rather than jump from sport to sport as broadcast network sports-casters do, cable uses the same team approach, matching a high level of game-calling experience in a play-by-play announcer with player, team, and league knowledge in a color announcer. A network's inherent need to balance its game coverage creates distance from the teams and keeps fans equally at a distance from the announcing personalities.

At the local or regional level, announcers are often hired by a team or league and are expected to promote the home team. Personality counts nearly as much as expertise because sportscasters have become part of the entertainment. At the same time, shortened contracts for many local sportscasters have dissipated much of the consistency and predictability that long characterized local sports coverage, reducing fans' dependence on home announcers and thus undercutting identification with individual sportscasters.

Development of Sportscasters

Sporting events were among the very first programs carried on television, and borrowed radio sports-casters used their voices to interpret what viewers could barely see on the first black-and-white television screens. With their small, lighted arenas, boxing, roller derby, and wrestling were ideally suited to the bulky, light-demanding cameras of the 1950s, and the early television sportscasters invented highly original ways to announce, explain, and add color to the events. By the mid-1960s, color and better equipment enhanced the coverage of baseball and football, and a new group of sportscasters emerged with faces as well as voices. ESPN was formed in 1979, showcasing television's preeminent sports program SportsCenter, and sports began providing all-day/everyday content for cable television. Soon, HBO delivered premium (subscription) boxing and other sports events and regional channels sprouted, and the number of sports channels has only grown. Today, sportscast-ers announce on Fox's more than 20 regional networks, plus its national cable sports network that carries the National Football League (NFL), Major League Baseball (MLB), and the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing (NASCAR), along with tennis and golf. ESPN also occupies half a dozen channels of television, radio, and the Internet, with hosts and guests providing a continuous stream of sports talk and news along with live or taped games, highlights, and scores. In addition, cable networks MSNBC, TNT, TBS, and WBN carry live games, as well as the Spanish-language Univision and Telemundo. The U.S. satellite services, DirecTV and Dish Network, each provide a dozen or more premium sports packages of football, baseball, soccer, hockey, basketball, boxing, and wrestling. All these television sports services transmit the words of hundreds of sportscasters daily—all competing for the fan's eye and ear.

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