Average Frank Views: Magic and Bird vs. Spike TV

It’s not baseball season yet.

An item in the current issue of Sports Illustrated begs for a second-look at the subject of college basketball.

In an essay about his book When March Went Mad: The Game That Transformed Basketball, Seth Davis, also a featured commentator on CBS’ college basketball coverage during the season and the tournament, writes that, “in today’s cable culture, the 24.1 monster Nielsen rating” of the 1979 title game between Michigan State and Indiana State “will never be equaled.”

Since this is Sports Illustrated, the statement comes off as almost an endorsement by what still is the standard-bearer of sports journalism.

So it carries some weight.

But what if the assertion is wrong?

Is it really impossible to get a 24.1 rating on an NCAA Final again? Davis mentions the 12.1 rating of last year’s Kansas-Memphis game in comparison.

So, it’s not possible anymore to have an NCAA title game twice as interesting as that? More to the point, in Davis’s reasoning, is the fact that the big ratings of the past were aided overwhelmingly by the lack of so many cable channels with which to compete, an assumption about television as a whole which has become accepted as conventional wisdom.

But isn’t this way of thinking unfair to the past and to the present?

For a moment, forget about cable channels and what year it is, and consider the differences between the 1979 title game and last year’s.

1979 featured Magic Johnson and Larry Bird. 2008 featured Derrick Rose and who… Mario Chalmers? Would you know his name if it wasn’t for that shot? 1979 featured undefeated Indiana State from the Missouri Valley Conference vs. Big-10 force Michigan State. 2008 had Kansas from the Big 12 and Memphis from Conference USA. 1979 featured two of the most interesting athletes in the history of American sports. They’re identities were so finely wrought they might as well have been cartoon characters. Magic, with that million-dollar genial smile and the show that he put on; Bird, the small-town Indiana kid with a nose that looked like a beak. If it were fiction, you wouldn’t have believed it. All of this would have been true had neither of them played a game in the NBA.

Kansas and Memphis represented… what? Why are our sights so low?

If Sports Illustrated believes that we could never have an NCAA title game twice as interesting as 2008, they are short-changing the sportsworld, not to mention American culture itself.

After all, this is the same mentality that stated at the end of the ’90s that it would be impossible to get ’70s and ’80s ratings level for network prime time ever again. But then “Who Wants to Be A Millionaire?” and “Survivor” showed up in 1999-2000 to defy that prognostication. “American Idol” did the same a few years later.

Those shows weren’t great; they were merely good.

But Magic and Bird in the 1979 Final was great.

Are we supposed to believe that if these two players were born 30 years later, they wouldn’t rivet the sportsworld and make their way into American culture just as they did in 1979?

Are we supposed to believe that if there were such a thing as Spike TV back then, many of us would’ve been watching that instead of Magic and Bird on plain old NBC?

It just doesn’t hold up.

That 1979 game was a fascinating matchup, no matter who you are or what year it is, whether you’re a casual sports fan or a die-hard.

If there hasn’t been that many memorable teams in recent years, couldn’t that be one of the reasons why ratings today are relatively low?

The 2008 game was noteworthy, no question, but it didn’t mean that much. Whoever won, it didn’t really matter to casual fans. There wasn’t all that much to root for, or against.

By contrast, great personalities and identifiable/memorable players provide meaning to who wins or loses, which in turn equals ratings.

The fact is, even if Derrick Rose has an exceptional NBA career, he’ll never be nearly as interesting as Magic Johnson or Larry Bird. It’s just a fact; he doesn’t have the presence or personality.

Why are the UNLV teams of ‘90 and ‘91 so well-remembered, the same for the Duke teams of that era? Is it because they didn’t have as many cable channels to compete with, or is it because they were just very memorable? A lot of sports fans can still name three or four starters on those teams all these years later.

Who can name three or four starters on either Kansas or Memphis’s team last year?

Don’t some things just always stand out, even in a flooded market?

If suddenly dozens of authors wrote spare prose about old men and fishing in the waters off Key West in 1950, Ernest Hemingway would still stand out. If suddenly an extra thousand novels were published and promoted in the early ’90s, The Firm would still carve its place in American culture.

It’s important for Sports Illustrated, and the sports world to remember this. To accept that sports will never be as interesting as they were previously is defeatist, plain and simple.

What such an attitude leads to is this idea that whittled ratings and diluted enthusiasm are inevitable. That just is not the case, because, after all, in this new world of 800+ cable channels, what if the game on the musty network still happens to be the best thing on TV… by a longshot?

• April 7, 2009 -- Average Frank Views: Notes from a Championship (5)
• March 30, 2009 -- Average Frank Views: Gonzaga Makes Them Suffer, Again (1)
• March 27, 2009 -- Wildcats Humiliate Blue Devils (0)
• March 23, 2009 -- One And Done (0)
• March 17, 2009 -- Breaking The Brackets (6)