The Front Row
Sydney Morning Herald
Monday October 11, 1999
With the business end of the Rugby World Cup approaching, MALCOLM KNOX reflects
on the former players who drive the action from the commentators' box.
NEIL Edwards used to play football. In the Australian television industry, this seems to substitute for talent, experience and on-air presentation skills." We can thank Shaun Micallef for pouring the acid onto what is, for sports fans and TV programmers, an ongoing dilemma. How is the credibility
value of sportsmen-turned-commentators to be balanced against their variable quality as television talking heads?
Sports stars who retire to electronic media careers tend to evolve into three streams. One is the ex-player who turns out a conservative approximation of the journalist's trained delivery, under the guise of "colour commentary". This is the most common stream, and includes two of Seven's Rugby World Cup commentary team, Nick Farr-Jones and Simon Poidevin.
A second stream is the individual who will risk developing his own eccentric schtick, marking out his territory with a death-or-glory style, viz cricket's Bill Lawry, AFL's Robert Dipierdomenico and rugby's Chris Handy.
The third stream contains the rare talent who can broadcast with personality and articulateness, with candour and insight, as shown by rugby league's Paul Vautin and Peter Sterling, AFL's Jason Dunstall and the model for all sportsmen-turned-broadcasters, cricket's Richie Benaud.
(It may be unfair to place Benaud in such company because he is, after all, a career journalist who happened to play some good cricket.)
Observers of Seven's rugby coverage will have noted the inverse proportion between playing and broadcasting prowess. Match-caller Gordon Bray, a former grade-level player and referee, is a world-class commentator.
While he has toned down his trademark trivia snippets - "What a great touch-finder from the Taranaki pig farmer! His mother, Gretel, will lift her eyes from her Bayeux tapestry reproduction for that one!" - Bray calls the game with accuracy and inflection, and his journalistic work raises him above the pack, such as when he noted at the start of Australia's match against Romania that the Wallabies had agreed among themselves to share all of their payments for the Cup equally, regardless of who had played and who had not.
Former Australian basketballer and sometime commentator Damien Keogh, now Seven's general manager of sports marketing, sums up Bray's strengths:
"Rugby union is a hard sport to cover because of the technicalities of the rules. You've got to break down the barriers between the games and the viewers, but also the commentators have to be careful not to talk down to the viewers. The big advantage of having Gordon Bray is that he was a top-class referee and can explain rulings very clearly."
"Buddha" Handy has developed his own style, with Seven exploiting his "Go you good thing!" cry in its pre-RWC advertising. Notwithstanding the odd howler - introducing Ravenhill Park in Belfast last week as "one of the great stadiums of Australia" - Handy does provide an insight into the most arcane area of the game, the front row of the scrum, even if his panting delivery can sound as if he's still buried in one.
Former Australian captains Farr-Jones and Poidevin provide Seven with an important
credibility factor. Channel 9 accelerated the trend back in the late 1970s by stacking its cricket commentary box with former Test players. The standard of commentary might have fallen, as warring egos tried to one-up each other, but audiences value the words of those who have been there and done it.
There can be a dulling fear of expressing strong opinions. David Campese ran foul of his former team last week by criticising the Wallabies' style in a newspaper column. When a former great expresses adverse opinions, it hurts. Hence the tendency to cautious blandness. Farr-Jones and Poidevin often do little more than repeat the match call. It's rarely insight, rarer still expertise, and deadly earnest - though there can be some unintentional humour, such as when Poidevin described the Romanian team as "very hungry" shortly after reminding us of their material poverty.
Former players criticising current players on television is "dicey", Keogh says. "Poidevin and Farr-Jones were with the team not long ago, and several of the current players are their ex-teammates. If they're suddenly over-scathing of the players, then the team might stop talking to them. We'd lose some of their insights ..."
Yet his fearless opinions make John McEnroe the best player-turned-commentator in sport, thinks Keogh. "McEnroe has unquestionable respect and knowledge in tennis, a quirky sense of humour, and is unafraid to express an opinion. That's the full package."
In the home studio, meanwhile, Seven crosses to interludes with David Fordham and Marty Roebuck. Here the journalist-expert relationship functions tidily, with a skilled broadcaster bringing the best out of an erudite former player.
Sportspeople nearing the end of their careers are creating a very competitive market for media work. It is one of the few areas where a player can hope to sustain a high income after retirement. "It's hard to retire from a $300,000 to $500,000 salary and be all of a sudden looking at job ads in the paper and realising that all you have as a qualification is that you've been packing into a scrum for 10 years," Keogh says.
This buyers' market eases the job for the
networks of recruiting new commentators. "Networks look for players who have reputation, credibility, ability to articulate and, very importantly, a good personality," Keogh says.
"Commentary has a strong performance
element, of course, and players are used to
performing, be it on the field or in public speaking engagements. They get a lot of training before they move into the box, and that gives the networks the opportunity to assess them."
Once chosen, though, there is minimal on-the-job training - retired players are "more or less thrown into the deep end", Keogh says, unless they want to move from colour comments into match calling, as Gerard Healy, Matthew Campbell and others have done in AFL, in which case they need extra work with autocues and voice training.
Players usually arrive in the commentary box with well-nourished egos, so criticism can be a delicate issue. Farr-Jones walked out of the Wallabies' recent farewell lunch after failing to see the humour in a tirade from H. G. Nelson and Roy Slaven, who accused him of "going on and on and on and on, and not saying a thing".
Yet Keogh thinks the economy of the market will make stars more receptive to constructive criticism: "The next star will be retiring in a year or two, and your lifespan is short."
The Channel 9 rugby league crew has turned on-air bickering into a comic art form, typified when Sterling hoed into Ray Warren for misnaming a NSW country town: "Ray, how can you call Wagga Wagga just Wagga?" Sterling asked. "Would you call Woy Woy, Woy?"
If this Rugby World Cup has done one thing, it has shown us that, in comparison with other countries, we are not badly served at all.
The New Zealand commentary tends to be as colourful as the All Black jersey, while former Springbok Joel Stransky's voice sounds as if he's taken one too many blows to the throat. Stransky and caller Hugh Bladen are an unashamed cheer squad for their team, calling every play as if a mouthpiece for the Springbok captain, Joost "the second referee" van der Westhuizen.
Bladen at least knows the Springboks intimately. During their opening game, against Scotland, he spoke of how he'd been playing golf with centre Brendan Venter only a week before. Venter scored South Africa's first try of the cup. Bladen's familiarity with the player did not, however, stop him awarding the try to Venter's brother, Andre.
Rucks and Bucks
Sports viewers might have had a flutter of panic last week to read, in Seven's annual report, that the executive chairman of the network, Kerry Stokes, attributed a last year's "poor financial
performance" to expensive sporting telecasts. Stokes said that unless events could justify their telecast through advertising sales, Seven would no longer buy the rights.
The 1999 Rugby World Cup is an expensive undertaking, and the matches take place at viewer-unfriendly hours between midnight and dawn, but Seven's network director of sport and Olympics, Harold Anderson, says Seven will show a "small profit" for the event.
Where once a network might have broadcast a World Cup as a loss leader for its prestige value, in the current environment "all of our decisions will be based on financial as well as marquee value", Anderson says. The World Cup must turn a profit on its own, rather than as a part of Seven's entire rugby commitment.
On the cost side, Seven has managed to defray the undisclosed but, says Anderson, "significant" price of the International Rugby Board's rights by sharing facilities and commentators with networks from Ireland, New Zealand and South Africa.
On the sales side, Seven sold its eight major sponsorship packages three months ago, according to the general sales manager,
network sport and Olympics, Rob Temple. This was backed up in the first week of the tournament with good ratings of 4 and 5 points during Australia's early-morning game against Romania, figures which will rise if the Wallabies advance into the later stages of the Cup. Accordingly, advertising rates have risen.
"People change their definition of prime-time when it comes to live sport," Temple says. "In the Atlanta Olympics, we had 48
ratings points for Kieren Perkins's 1500m race and it was on at 10.30 on a Saturday morning.
"Advertisers are aware of the fact that in a country such as Australia, people are used to
getting up at all sorts of hours to watch their sport live."
For pay TV operator Foxtel, the commercial imperatives are
different. Fox Sports is showing all 41 World Cup games, 39 of them live, with commentary from Greg Clark and former Wallabies Russell Fairfax and Greg Martin.
Its total commitment is 126 hours of action, including previews, wraps and specials.
The commercial test for Fox's coverage will not be the bottom line for this particular event, but its contribution to overall
subscriber levels. MK
A
South Africa
Scotalnd
Spain
Uruguay
B
New Zealand
England
Italy
Tonga
C
France
Fiji
Canada
Namibia
D
Wales
Argentina
W. Samoa
Japan
E
Australia
Ireland
USA
Romania
WORLD CUP ITENARY
DATE GAME
SEVEN FOX SPORTS 2
Live Replay
THUR 14- New Zealand v Italy 4am
delay 9.45pm 12.30pm
FRI 15 Wales v Western Samoa
Midnight live 11.45pm 3.30pm
Canada v Namibia
7.30am Highlights only 4.15am 11am
Australia v USA
2am live 1.45am 6.30pm
FRI 15- England v Tonga
Midnight delay 9.45pm 12.30pm
SAT 16 South Africa v Uruguay 2am
live 1.45am 2pm
Ireland v Romania
4am live 3.45am 4pm
SAT 16- France v Fiji
2am delay 9.45pm 1pm
SUN 17 Scotland v Spain
11.45pm live 11.45pm 2pm
Argentina v Japan
4am live 3.45am 3.30pm
WED 20- QF Play-off Runner-up B--------- v H 2.30am
delay 9.45pm 6pm
THUR 21 Runner-up C ---------
QF Play-off Runner-up A ----------- v G
12.15am live 12.15am 8pm
Runner-up D ------------
QF Play-off Runner-up E ------------- v F
4.30am live 4.15am 10pm
Best 3rd placed --------------
SAT 23- QF Winner D --------------------- v M
11.30pm live 11.45pm 12.30pm
SUN 24 Winner E
SUN 24- QF Winner A --------------------- v J
10.30pm delay 9.45pm 3pm
MON 25 Winner H
QF Winner C ---------------------- v L
12.30am live 12.15am 4.30pm
Winner F
QF Winner B --------------------- v K
3am live 2.45am 6pm
Winner G
SAT 30- SUN 31 SF Winner J ----------------------- v X 11.30pm
live 11.45pm 6am/
Winner M ----------------------
* * 2pm
SUN 31-MON 1 SF Winner J ------------------------ v Z 1.30am
live 1.45am 6am/
Winner M ---------------------------
* * 8.30pm*
THUR 4-FRI 5 3rd place Loser X ------------------------- v
6.30am live# 6.45am Midday/
Loser Z --------------------------
6.30pm
SAT 6 - SUN 7 Final Winner X ------------------------- v
2am live 1.45am 6am/
Winner Z -------------------------
* * 12.30pm
* * Delayed until 6am if Australia playing
* On Fox Sports
# Delayed until 11.15pm if Australia not playing
© 1999 Sydney Morning Herald