Flak Magazine: Kick Out the Sports! 11.17.03

These are the saddest of possible words:
"And now here's my partner, Beasley Reece."
Duos of who-dats, mangling their verbs,
"With Tim Ryan, I'm Ron Pitts."
Ruthlessly pricking our soon-to-bleed ears,
Making 60 minutes feel like years—
Words that bring out the worst of our fears:
"Hello, everybody, I'm Craig Bolerjack."
— with apologies to Franklin Pierce Adams

Abandon hope all ye who turn on your TV set on Sunday, if ye are a fan of an NFL franchise whose games are called by the networks' F team announcers. With few exceptions, if your team is assigned the lower tier of announcers, especially after the season's halfway mark, it is confirmation your team's season may as well be over.

The NFL is the only league that has network coverage for every game, so no matter if the matchup is stellar or the cellar, somebody has to call it. Sunday nights on ESPN and Monday nights on ABC aren't an issue, because those networks only have to assign one set of announcers. But on Fox and CBS, there's a clear pecking order as to which games get which announcers. The best matchups — or at least the ones expected to have the most national interest — get the A team — a high-profile network guy (Greg Gumbel on CBS, Joe Buck on Fox) partnered with a high-profile ex-jock (Phil Simms on CBS, Cris Collinsworth and Troy Aikman on Fox). The next-best matchups get the B team, with a familiar broadcast voice (think Dick Enberg or Kevin Harlan on CBS, or Dick Stockton on Fox) paired with a familiar ex-jock voice, like Dan Dierdorf on CBS, or an up-and-coming analyst like Fox's Daryl Johnston.

The rest of the games — well, not all the announcers are awful, though many are, but the whole vibe associated with them says, "Go outside and clean your gutters."

Recently, I turned on a game in which my local team, the Chicago Bears, was hoping to beat the Detroit Lions for the second time in three weeks. A victory would put the Bears in playoff contention at 4-5. But I knew the Bears were done when the announcers introduced themselves as Curt Menefee and Tim Green. Menefee is a common species among F teamers, a local TV sports guy hired as a weekend warrior. Green is another common species, the exile sent to broadcasting Elba for past sins. In the case of Green, who once appeared to be a rising star at Fox, that would be writing nonfiction and fiction books detailing the seamiest sides of the NFL playing experience, the kind of stuff that has the NFL pressuring ESPN to cancel its series "Playmakers."

The most famous exile may be Pat Summerall, who started to show the effects of aging and "retired" under pressure following the 2002 Super Bowl after 21 years as half of the No. 1 announcing duo at CBS, then Fox, with John Madden. Summerall stayed for one more year to do, at his request, only Dallas Cowboys games in 2002, a request the network may have granted only because the Cowboys were terrible that year. Fox demanded Summerall be a full-time, traveling F teamer if he wanted to stick around, and this time, Summerall retired.

Anyway, Menefee and Green may not be terrible announcers, but it's tough to tell because watching so much bad football, week after stinking week, plays tricks with your head. Menefee started the game repeating ceaselessly that Lions receiver Bill Schroeder would not play because of injury, and then when the Lions completed a pass (to tight end Matt Murphy), he blurted, "Caught by Bill Schroeder!" And the action on the field was no better. The game's first 12 seconds featured a Lions incompletion, an offsides penalty and a time out to avoid a delay-of-game penalty. At that point, even some of the players probably started thinking about going out to clean the gutters. Cursed by its F-team association, the 3-5 Bears lost to the 2-6 Lions by the even-more-dull-than-it-looks score of 12-10.

The Catholic Church, it seems, has a patron saint for almost everything, so I'm going to nominate Beasley Reece as the patron saint of F-team announcers.

In order to get you canonized, your advocates have to prove at least two miracles. Reece is halfway there due to his continued employment. Since 1991, first at NBC and now at CBS, Reece, a former New York Giants and Tampa Bay Buccaneers defensive back, has been pushing the limits of syntax while stating the obvious as a booth analyst and, for a few years, as a sideline reporter. Almost none of it came during games that mattered. As an Indianapolis Colts fan living in the city during the team's awful years of the early 1990s, I prayed for games not to sell out so the game would be blacked out on local TV, and I would be spared hearing Reece. The New Jersey Association of Health Underwriters hired Reece as a convention speaker, and he told the group that success came from doing something you do well, every day of your life. The man who told us a naked bootleg can't be run "completely naked" says announcing is what he does well? To get an idea of Reece's unique, to say the least, style, check out his web site, featuring such gems as:

When I call a game for the networks, I am given access to the players and coaches in the form of interviews. That meterial [sic] is the basis of my conversation when the contest slows down. Don't believe the broadcasters who constantly put these guys down as basic thinkers (dumb) and focused only on personal goals and money. The meetings remind me of who I used to be and struggle to remain. The great majority of coaches and players are intensely motivated. They recharge my battary [sic] each year. I remember talking to Quarterback Elvis Grbac. He was new with Kansas City and having a great season. Elvis had spent years behind Joe Montana and Steve Young, and now he had his own team and things were going great. I asked, "Elvis, here you are after waiting many years to get your own team and things are going great! How does it feel." He said, "Beasley, nothing has happened that I did not anticipate." May not sound like much at first blush, but I heard him loud and clear. Elvis expected to win.

No one who sees Reece in the booth on game day should expect to win. Or at least, expect to win enough to amount to anything. When the F team arrives, it is sent as your guide to NFL Hell.

E-mail Bob Cook at bobc@flakmag.com.