Time Essay: Time to Reflect on Blah-Blah-Blah

Late in his career, Announcer Bill Stern made an endearing confession about his vocal ways as the Christopher Columbus of television sportscasting. Said he: "I had no idea when to keep my big, fat, flapping mouth shut." The insight dawned too late to be of much use to Stern, but it might have been of value as a guide for his heirs. Unfortunately, nobody in the broadcast booth was listening. The result is the TV sports event as it is today: an entertainment genre in which an athletic game must compete for attention with the convulsive concatenations of blah-blah-blah that passes for commentary.

Television sportscasters, in short, are still a long way from mastering the art of the zipped lip. It is this familiar fact that has legions of sports fans eagerly looking forward to a special telecast of a football game that NBC has promised for Saturday, Dec. 20. The teams and site (Jets vs. Dolphins at Miami) are of little importance compared with the radical innovation that will be the main attraction: the absence of the usual game commentary. Thus the telecast will offer—and here Sports Columnist Red Smith leads the cheers—"no banalities, no pseudo-expert profundities phrased in coachly patois, no giggles, no inside jokes, no second-guessing, no numbing prattle." Just one announcer will be on hand, says NBC, to offer only the sort of essential information (injuries, rulings) that a stadium announcer traditionally provides. The prospect is engaging, even if it may be shocking to see a game presented merely for the sake of the drama on the field.

This blabber-proof telecast looms as far too rare an occasion to waste only in joy over a trial separation from the stream of half-consciousness that usually accompanies athletic endeavors on the tube. While sports fans will surely relish the moment, it should also be seized for grander purposes, for awareness may just be dawning in the Age of Communication that silence is indeed often golden. President-elect Ronald Reagan has so far, often to the chagrin of the press, shown an admirable reluctance to grab all of the many chances he gets to sound off on just about anything. Given the possible alternatives, Yoko Ono's fiat that John Lennon's passing be marked with ten minutes of silence around the world was inspired. In truth, the day of the telecast experiment would be a perfect time for the nation to reflect generally—and silently—on the whole disgruntling phenomenon of superfluous talk.

The American tendency to unchecked garrulity is most conspicuous in the realm of TV sports, but it does not begin or end there by a long shout. The late-evening TV news, for example, is aclutter with immaterial chatter. "Happy talk, keep talkin' happy talk . . ." Rodgers and Hammerstein offered that lyrical advice to young lovers, but a great many TV news staffers have adopted it as an inviolable rule of tongue. Happy talk is not reprehensible, but should it be force-fed to an audience looking for the news? Surely not, no more than a sports fancier tuning in football should be obliged to endure Tom Brookshier and Pat Summerall happily going over their personal travel schedules.