Photo by Juan O’Campo/NBAE via Getty Images
2024 was a year that made it hard not to feel like we are losing some specific types of sports media forever.
As time hurdles forward and society has progressed according to what technological innovations allow, our lives have picked up pace, to unprecedented, breakneck speeds. We have all these conveniences we didn’t have 25 years ago, and counterintuitively, less time than we’ve ever had to enjoy them. There are many sad and insidious ways these resource deficit crushes of money and attention affect us, but as a part time writer focused on largely frivolous pastimes like movies, rap music and sports, the main way this phenomena affects me is how a general readership prefers its content — or at least how readership is seen to prefer its content — a demand that is interpreted by media corporations to determine what they are willing to let me write about for money, and the form that writing must adhere to.
The mandate is people want their entertainment and information in the most clear, concise, digestible forms possible. Make shorter movies, shorter podcasts, lower word counts for less pay. “They” want the most direct and efficient possible delivery systems for information and entertainment. This meeting could be an email, this thinkpiece could be a Tweet. We are all condensed and compressed in a semi-delirious rush to meet our deadlines, to wrap things up, to figure things out. The end we’re all racing towards has never been made clear to me, but they’ve done studies and crunched numbers, there are stats for everything, and the suits may have a point. People don’t go to the movies as much, they two-screen streaming content, they skim albums and watch some schmuck’s Cliff Notes recap on Tiktok, they listen to podcasts at 1.5 speed, they click on the piece you spent a month researching and writing, they read the headline, they drop a shitty QT and keep scrolling. There’s not much money left, seemingly in anything, but more specifically, in this. In this type of long, slow, considered reflection that is also, theoretically, entertainment.
In semi-related news, the past year I’ve lost, or am facing the impending loss, of three wells of content that represent a time in media we appear to be saying goodbye to. They are reflective of a style, of a philosophy that is losing its purchase on what it means to be a sports fan, and perhaps even what it means to be alive in the 21st century.
In California, there was the death of the basketball legend turned legendary color commentator, Bill Walton. In Atlanta, following a shortsighted, supremely stupid and very streaming-era-media-bungled negotiation over another NBA broadcast rights deal, it was announced Inside the NBA would likely be ending its run. And in New York, perhaps least consequentially for everyone but me, there was the sudden and unceremonious announcement that the Yankees longtime play-by-play radio commentator John Sterling was retiring. With these departures, on the brink of another breathless NBA season, I thought it was time to do the unthinkable and pause, for a brief look back at what these media members did, how they did it, what it meant, and why it’s going away forever.
Bill Walton’s lasting image as a player was painted by David Halberstam’s masterpiece literary journalism novel Breaks of the Game, another very endangered form of high-commitment media there’s little appetite or access left for. The writer embedded with Walton’s then-champion 1977-78 Portland Trail Blazers in a league, and a society that was shifting beneath their feet by the game. In the book, Bill “Spider” Walton is described as “a tall spindly boy with a terrible stutter, almost pathologically shy with strangers”, a character that bears little resemblance to the middle-aged, koan-spouting, basketball yogi/anthropomorphic Grateful Dead Dancing Bear he presented as on television as a staple of Sunday NBA on NBC triple-headers throughout the 90s.
The transformation Walton underwent in the ensuing years, as his body betrayed him, he retired, and began having to consider what the rest of his life might look like, was a familiar arc. The equation of sports media has long been an unholy — and at times uncomfortable — alliance between uncoordinated J School students with poetry in their hearts, and former competitors with actual expertise who either want to stay close to the sport they dedicated the first halves of their lives to — or simply need the steady paycheck and have to figure out how to transition from playing a game to explaining it.
There have been many hacks and geniuses on both sides of that admittedly overly neat dichotomy, but Walton was a special breed once more common on the media landscape: The former athlete who goes from remote, stoic figure to a gregarious weirdo in his newfound role, moving from jock to nerd. Removed from the sport that consumed them, these faded stars either quietly always had or began developing their interests, feeding their curiosities, maturing into the people they would’ve become sooner had that development not been arrested by two-a-days. The audience got to go with them on this unfolding, shaggy, odd, usually fascinating and always entertaining journey of the soul these commentators brought to the mic.
Walton beat his insecurities of speech with a litany of two-dollar words sketched freehand into an Alex Grey drug rug mural of bug fucked hoops mysticism. He was dedicated to the impossible pursuit of basketball nirvana, and discussing it on an aesthetic and theoretical plane draped in electric Kool-Aid flavored acid blotter. He lived for the transcendent glimpses of grace people can achieve on rare occasions, almost always found in the perfect and beautiful pass, what Walton saw as the pinnacle expression of physical invention and human generosity.
Extemporaneously riffed subjects ranged from Shaquille O’Neal’s footwork, to blue whale spermatozoa, to Oregon’s national park system, to half-remembered pointless, whole-quarter-long stories about something John Wooden once taught him that probably never happened. He was rough and un-media trained, somewhat divisive, an acquired taste. I loved him. In Walton’s hands a game was a catchphrase-laden, hammy and corny poetry reading, a graduate-level philosophy class, a diary. In the course of one of his broadcasts you could learn something about the universe, the Grateful Dead show at American Music Hall on Aug. 13 in 1975, and your own life. But what I imagine his detractors would say, at times, is you’d learn little to nothing about the specific game you were watching. He challenged any sports media executive’s lucid definition of what the point of in-game color analysis is meant to provide for its audience.
It wasn’t long after the death of Walton was announced that the omens of a spiritual demise we’d been hearing for weeks and months began to get louder, transitioned from speculative Tweets to speculative headlines, and a rumor no one wanted to believe gained an air of inevitability. By late June, shortly after the Finals, the NBA made public the end of their long-term, league-remaking partnership with Turner Network Television, all but ensuring that regardless of what iteration it may survive in, on the channel or elsewhere, the best desk show in both basketball and sports media history would be forever changed.
I can’t remember when Inside the NBA first became appointment viewing for me. What I remember was how difficult it could be to actually watch the show. This is partially because basketball games don’t adhere to neat schedules like soccer matches, and possibly because of what at least felt like the free-flowing shapelessness of the program. In my 20s, when I worked nights and stayed out later, I’d attempt to digitally record episodes off cable television, which is a word salad I can’t imagine most readers now in their 20s will be able to decipher. But at the scheduled moment the TNT broadcast was meant to end, around, say, 1 a.m. EST, the show would be mid-run and gaining steam, with no end in sight, so I had to start recording the 1 a.m. block — re-run episodes of Bones, or Franklin & Bash, or Rizzoli & Isles, or whatever — to ensure I’d catch the late night sprawl.
To me it speaks to the exhilarating, spontaneous nature of the program. Maybe the show ran a tight 60 from the moment the late game ended, but I like to think if you clocked it, some nights could be two hours, some forty minutes and change, with the runtime simply depending on how much material they had to discuss that night, and how long the guys felt like hanging out in that studio I could draw from memory in Atlanta. Before Ernie, Kenny, Chuck, and later Shaq became household names, fodder for SNL sketches and “gotcha” aggregation headlines, its magic was the atmosphere of an unscripted, low-stakes hang it established. Inside the NBA felt like shooting the shit with a game playing in the background at a neighborhood dive bar. Like Dave or Conan’s late-night programs, the show was canny enough early on to fold the personalities of its host and even the production team into the broadcasts with incredibly loose segments and skits. They were wise enough to clear out and let the charismatic hosts, and their seductive dynamics, cook. To let Charles be Charles.
It was the antithesis of the airless, truncated nature of other network desk shows across sports. People with no chemistry, prior relationship or spark, with little talent, attempting to manufacture the magic TNT had twice a week for the last quarter century. In tightly stage-managed bites they spout the stats the research team pulled up for them, offering slivers of strategy and half-baked analysis, completely misunderstanding their role in this ritual or what we as an audience actually want from them.
The guests would show up randomly, sporadically. Like the show, its makeup was fluid. The cast would augment for a season or two. Magic could sit in, or Chris Webber, or *shudder* Reggie Miller (every program needs villains). They would fire off politically incorrect “hot takes” before the idea of that term corresponding to the broken-out, provocative, viral, 10-second clip existed. But in their hands it always felt organic and deeply felt, rather than the manufactured munitions industry the hot take has calcified into. The hosts would spit in the face of conventional wisdom, and they were right as much as they were wrong, but their takes were genuinely important to NBA culture and community. As Ernie tried desperately to keep some semblance of an organized show going, their conversations would run into the commercial breaks. When the show returned from break they’d still be talking. It all added to the uncanny sense you were a fly on the wall, soaking in intimate scotch and cigars bull sessions the viewing NBA curious public never had gotten access to before, and never would again.
Photo by New York Yankees/Getty Images
John Sterling Sloss was born on the 4th of July 86 years ago, several subway stops from Yankee Stadium on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. He was blessed with vocal cords coated in the honey and brown sugar caramel they use to season the fragrant roasted nuts sold in wax paper bags on corners all over Manhattan and outside The Stadium, so announcing was a natural career path. He jobbed his way up the East Coast through the 70s and 80s, paying his dues and graduating from talk radio gig to announcing gig, sport to sport, market to slightly larger market as career broadcasters used to, but his final destination was always clear.
Beginning in 1989 as the Yankees radio announcer, Sterling was an innings eater, a master kibitzer, an expert filler of dead air that typified a particular style of local 20th-century sports radio broadcasting. He never made the leap to television, possibly because he refused to be upstaged by a visual medium that would’ve cut into his beloved time on the mic. He was a fossil trapped in amber, an antiquated throwback Cosell/pitchman/slightly daft grandpa figure, mixing the anecdotal brushes with mid-century celebrities you’ve never heard of and pitch counts in with ad copy for factory outlet men’s wear and polish sausages. He was cliche-riddled and Vaudeville schlocky. Each player had a dad pun nickname no one but Sterling called them and their own gimmicky home run call. You’d make fun of the home run calls, screaming them among friends sarcastically, which would somehow quickly lose that satirical framing and become parroted genuine expressions of joy. He did the job for 36 years, at one point broadcasting 5,060 consecutive games, nearly doubling Gehrig’s streak. By any measure, his was the voice of the Yankees, and the narrator of many years of New Yorkers’ lives.
Sterling was emblematic of what baseball meant when it was America’s pastime. It was the texture of your summer. It scored the season like a rhythmic cicada chirp. It was a languid, ever-present fixture that not that long ago was a feature of the sport, not a bug, in a largely bored country. If you’ve ever really been locked into a baseball season, not for fantasy purposes, not as “news” to keep up with, or as a leg in your parlay, but if you’ve really lived through a season with a team you’ll understand my meaning perfectly. Every day at an appointed time, on a portable radio on a porch or in a park, on a muted TV, the game would be friendly wallpaper, one in a 162-game succession. It wouldn’t command every moment of your waking attention, at times it would barely command any. But the game would just kind of be there, you’d pop in and pop out as your job, or chores, or family members, or dinner prep allowed. The idea of a pitch clock, of a pace problem needing to be solved didn’t exist because you never wanted the game to end, rooting for the extra innings or the second leg of a doubleheader when applicable, and when it did eventually end you were kind of let down, the rest of the day or evening had the faint tint of aftermath, and you looked forward to first pitch the next day.
In April of this year, after making a go of the preseason and the first long road trip, Sterling realized he was cooked, and immediately retired. On short notice, there was a ceremony celebrating his run at Yankee Stadium on April 20. Across 36 seasons he worked with five broadcast partners (but his longest, best and most indelible partnership was with his work wife, the great Suzyn Waldman), he broadcast a total of 5,420 games. Over that period he watched the franchise transform from Don Mattingly and a crew of loveable scrubs to a dynasty that returned the luster to the most famous, if not greatest franchise in American professional sports history. The Yankees moved from their baseball museum to a new stadium, from a payroll of $18 million to $306 million. He wasn’t an announcer, he was an astronaut.
The tenuous thread connecting these men across sports is that they practiced a form of media that defied impersonal infotainment and injected humor, and humanity into increasingly regimented, formulaic standards and practices. They were idiosyncratic autodidacts, free of the professional patina, the new finishing school polish contaminating everything. It’s not just plaguing sports. All criticism, reporting, writing, and entertainment is facing down the barrel of the same Wikipediazation of its medium, on a death march towards readers incapable of deciphering man-made content from A.I. by an industry increasingly obsessed with efficiency in an attention-deprived hellscape. You may see these changes as improvements, as an old flabby and excessive style giving way to innovation and progress in media. You are entitled to your opinion.
But for me and those who think like me, these are some last bastions of civilization. Walt Clyde Frazier is still on MSG weaving beat poetry into every Knicks season, for now. I’m sure there are sleeper cells across the country, in small market pockets where a few broadcasters remain unafraid to run long, and meander, and be weird, and be themselves. Zach Lowe (formerly) of ESPN is a vision of what the next generation of the type of media I’ve lionized here could look like, an analytical genius basketball addict who pushed back on the industrial media narrative complex in his on-air appearances, brilliant written dispatches, and appointment listening podcasts littered with dad jokes and dumb English language usage inquiries. He was recently very publicly fired by the network that made him a star just weeks before this new season. He will inevitably have a new home, potentially by the time this reaches you, but his value being assessed as excessive, and disposable, is troubling to say the least.
Because most importantly, all these men were great at their jobs. In the way a well-timed acid trip in your youth can show you God in the angle of light cast through the trees outside a bedroom window, Walton would pull strange, fascinating, brilliant connections out of random and arbitrary basketball that would sail directly over the heads of any other commentator. Because Charles gave zero fucks, he would often be the first to tell us an appointed emperor of the league was naked, at times whole seasons before the vaunted X’s & O’s analysts caught on. Because he spent 162 days a year (plus spring training) with them, Sterling knew the American League, particularly the East better than any national baseball pundit pretends to. He had seen the utility infielder on the Rays from their first steps as September call-ups to just ok rotation guys and spoke of their early foibles and slow maturation intimately and accurately, as you might a beloved nephew who took some time figuring their shit out. Today the media is overrun with great and well-versed analysts. What’s changed is the extratextual relationship we had with these translators. They were given space and time in our lives. They have been replaced by consultants and groupthink acolytes.
At the outset of this piece I stated that no one would miss John Sterling but me, but that apparently isn’t true. At the end of September, Sterling returned, almost as suddenly as he left us, to broadcast the end of the season, and one last Yankees playoff run. The other night, with the Yankees up 1-0, I decided to eschew the TV broadcast and listen to the game on the radio.
I did the thing you’re not supposed to do with baseball on the radio, centering my night around the broadcast, both for this piece, and to hang out with John and Suzyn again. They hadn’t missed a beat. As the Yankees went down in an uninspired, sadly familiar flavor of too-tight playoff game, the pair had a blast remembering guys, straining to recall the names of trade prospects that never made it. Al Kaline and Mickey Staley were on the field next to Gleyber and Jazz. The game sucked, but I’ve decided to listen to the rest of the playoffs rather than watch it, while I still can.
