Imponderables: Fun and Games (11 page)

W
ho knows how long the Academy Awards will last? Or the Super Bowl? Certainly, the networks don’t. With thirty-second commercial spots fetching hundreds of thousands of dollars, you can be assured that big money is at stake. Obviously, networks would like to sell commercials during overruns, but how can they sell time when they don’t know if they are going to have it? And what about the local affiliate, which usually airs its own ads at 11:00
PM
, when the Academy Awards is just getting to the important nominations?

When they air an event that they know has the potential to run past its allotted time, the networks try to sell advertising spots on a contingency basis. ABC might approach Kraft and say: “Do you want to buy a spot on the Oscars after the third hour?” Kraft would argue that ABC can’t guarantee placement of the ad (sometimes the Oscar broadcast almost comes in on time). ABC would counter with a reduced price—something on the order of a 30 percent discount—to compensate Kraft for the possibility that the commercial will not air. ABC is happy that it has eked out some gravy for commercial time it would have otherwise not sold. Kraft is happy because it gets a bargain rate and reaches an audience likely to hang in to find out who won for best picture. Likewise, overrun time on sports programming is likely to be a bargain: Viewers will stay tuned to see who wins the contest, and afternoon events that run long tend to bleed into prime time (in some parts of the country, at least), when the number of sets in use is higher.

Why don’t sponsors jockey to buy overrun time? For the most part, commercials are bought by advertising agencies representing sponsors. Commercials are usually designed to influence specific demographic groups, and advertising time is bought in order to reach a designated number of that group within a certain amount of time. Sponsors tend not to be as concerned about “bargains” (they know approximately how much it will cost them to reach each thousand of their targeted audience) as they are about reaching that audience efficiently (they don’t want to sell life insurance on
The O.C.
, whose audience is predominantly young and female when most of their customers are older and male) and quickly.

Many companies use live programs (sports, awards shows) that might overrun to introduce new products, announce improvements and changes in image of products, since specials and sports are exciting and glamorous environments in which to showcase their “exciting news.” When a company is making such an important announcement, it is imperative that commercials run as scheduled, to coincide with its products’ hitting the stores.

Networks aren’t always successful at selling overrun time, however. If not, their best strategy is to use the vacant advertising time to promote their own shows. Ever since ABC used the 1976 Olympics to successfully hype its prime-time line-up for the fall, networks have become acutely aware of the power of promotion within important television events to increase the initial tune-in of regular series.

The last option of the network, and by far the least desirable, is to use up the extra commercial time by running free ads. When networks haven’t sold time and haven’t planned extra promo time, they will often run ads at no cost to the sponsor rather than run public-service spots. Public-service spots denote to the viewer that no commercial time
could
be sold, a failing the networks do not want conveyed, even subliminally, to the viewer.

When network overruns impinge on their affiliates’ time (11:00
PM
E.S.T., 10:00 C.S.T.), the local station usually loses the revenue from commercials already sold for that period. In most cases, local stations sell time in “strips,” meaning that sponsors buy, say, five 30-second spots during the 11:00–11:30
PM
period, Monday through Friday. The station may place the sponsor’s five spots on whatever day or days it wishes to. If the network preempts its time, the local station will simply place the ad on another day. If the station were totally sold out of commercial time for the quarter and the network preempted it, the station may have to refund the sponsor’s money unless some kind of trade of time slots can be negotiated. It thus isn’t hard to understand why local affiliates don’t appreciate even planned overruns, such as theatrical movies that are longer than two hours. Although local stations profit from the limited number of commercials they can sell per hour during the network lineup, they can make more during local programming, when the network doesn’t have its finger in their pie.

L
arry Josefowicz, of Wilson Sporting Goods Co., told
Imponderables that the dark blue color is
the most easily discernible. Light colors fade into the wooden floors and white or cream walls of a racquetball court. Considering how fast a racquetball moves during a game, the choice of colors becomes a safety, as well as a playability, issue.

Wilson and its competitors tested other colors, but none combined visibility with customer preference like the present color. Brad Patterson, executive director of the Racquetball Manufacturers Association, adds that at one time, black and dark green racquetballs were tested, but they marked the walls. Patterson doesn’t see any other color stealing blue’s thunder in the near future:

Submitted by Gary Fradkin of Carmel, New York.

J
eff Atkinson, a former National Football League kicker, told
Imponderables that most kickers detest
the drag of a shoe, for the faster a kicker can get his foot through the ball, the farther he can kick it. Although most football kickers favor sleek, tight-fitting soccer shoes, a minority favor kicking in the buff. The thought is enough to make you cringe.

But barefoot kickers don’t break their feet. Why not? In the now omnipresent soccer-style field goal kick, the foot meets the ball not on the toes but well above them, where the laces of the shoe would be if they were wearing shoes, and a little to the left of center (for right-footed kickers). Sports physician John R. McCarroll adds that if the kick is properly executed, the ball is struck by a flat surface of the most stable parts of the foot.

Why are there fewer barefoot punters than place-kickers? Because punts are executed on the outside rather than the inside of the foot. If you kick a punt on the same spot as a place-kick, the ball won’t spiral properly. The outside of the foot is a little more susceptible to pain and injury than the inside of the foot, so there are fewer barefoot punters.

Atkinson says that the one time barefoot kickers often regret their choice is when kicking off. The most pain a kicker is likely to sustain is not from the football but from the hard plastic that holds the ball, which players sometimes hit accidentally.

Submitted by Dr. Roger Alexander of San Diego, California.

T
here are few things quite so disconcerting in sports as watching a pair of graceful and athletic skaters putting their hearts, souls, and bodies into interpreting music that sounds like common garden sludge. But, honest: Skaters and their coaches don’t deliberately go out and select the worst arrangements of songs to showcase their prowess. There are logical explanations for why the music in free skating and ice dancing is often so unsatisfactory.

1.
The skaters must choose music that will please judges. Competitive skaters are mostly in their teens
and twenties, but judges are mostly middle-aged and older. Skating to “Stairway to Heaven” or John Cage’s last avant-garde symphony is no more likely to score high with international skating judges than singing a Prince medley would with Miss America judges. In some cases, coaches select the music for skaters; some skaters select their own. Usually, it is a collaborative process between the two. But music must always be selected that will impress judges, even if the arrangement is unlikely to bowl over audiences.

Theoretically, the selection of music should have no bearing on the marks that skaters are given. Judges are only supposed to judge how well skaters
interpret the music. But not one of the skating
authorities
Imponderables spoke to doubted that
music selection was a crucial element in building a successful program. One judge we spoke to admitted that an emotional, easy-to-follow piece of music, for example, was much more likely to engage judges than a difficult, abstract, cacophonous one. At the very least, pleasing music can keep the judges’ attention during indifferent stretches of a skating program.

Skating judges need not have any musical training and are often musically parochial and unsophisticated. In international competition, it might be necessary to please (or at least not offend) judges from Japan, East Germany, and Canada. As a result, the television principle of “least objectionable program” is in force—if you don’t want any of the judges to “tune out,” you had better not offend any of them.

There have been several examples of prominent skaters being punished for their selection of music. One notable example was the United States’ ice dancing pair of Judy Blumberg and Michael Seibert, whose lovely performance of “Scheherazade” was not awarded a medal in the 1984 Winter Olympics because a judge felt that the music was inappropriate for ice dancing. According to Blumberg, this particular judge loved their skating, but didn’t feel that any music inappropriate for a dance floor should be used in the ice rink.

2.
Vocals cannot be used in ice dancing and, in practice, aren’t used in free skating.
Although there is no actual prohibition of vocal recordings in free skating, no one dares defy the common law. The vast majority of popular music contains vocals. The restrictions on vocal selection hinders skaters in two ways. The most obvious is that they are deprived of using what are often the best orchestrated and produced versions of any given song and the versions with which both audiences and judges are most familiar. Even worse, skaters and coaches are forced to become musical archivists, desperately scrambling to find
any all-instrumental rendition of a song they
select. Judy Blumberg told
Imponderables that when
she and Michael Seibert were hunting for selections for their Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers routine, there were some songs that they wanted to use for which they could find no all-instrumental versions.

The skaters and coaches we spoke to were evenly divided about the merits of the vocal restriction. Coach Ron Levington, who has guided the careers of Peter and Kitty Carruthers, feels that the rule isn’t necessary and is rather arbitrary. In his opinion, the rule remains in force largely to distance competitive amateur skating events from the professional ice shows. Levington echoed the feeling of others that there is no reason that vocals have to be distracting to the judges.

Seibert and Blumberg’s coach, Claire Dillie, strongly dissents. The purpose of ice dancing, to her, is to interpret rhythms. Dillie feels that there is a strong danger that if vocals were allowed in competitions, skaters would start interpreting lyrics rather than music and that skating doesn’t need vocals and lyrics any more than ballet does. Still, Dillie recognizes the problems in finding suitable instrumental orchestrations of popular music, and she encouraged Blumberg and Seibert to use a piece that was specifically written and arranged for them.

3.
There is pressure to have several tempo changes in the long program. The answer to this
unstated law, which is meant to assure the athletic and interpretive versatility of champions, is for skaters to splice together up to four different pieces of music. Often, the surgical procedures help to showcase the performers but are musical abominations. There is a maximum of four-tempo changes per long program, but using four selections in as many minutes usually defies any attempt to make the routine an artistic whole. This is why “theme routines” like Blumberg and Seibert’s Astaire-Rogers medley makes sense—they combine different songs and tempos but provide a sensible context for lumping together the different songs.

4.
It is important that musical selections provide opportunities for skaters to demonstrate difficult technical moves.
One reason ice-dancing music is usually superior to free-skating music is that the latter competitions include more acrobatic leaps and spins. Music must be found to accommodate these movements, making the selection of appropriate material that much more difficult.

5.
Many arenas that house ice skating competitions have horrendous sound systems.
And when you are hearing the lousy sound secondhand via television (which itself has lousy sound), often with Dick Button wailing away, no music is likely to sound celestial.

6.
Too many skaters and coaches just don’t care enough about musical selection. Many skaters, with
excellent technical skills, are just kids. They don’t have the emotional depth to genuinely interpret music. Without a sensitive coach who understands their limitations and strengths, the students can become automatons, oblivious to the music. And if the coach doesn’t care about music, the selections can be as banal and the arrangements as overbearing as many of them are today.

When we first asked experts about this question, we almost expected them to say that there was a special recording studio in West Germany that recorded muddy, ponderous, Euro-pop versions of songs specifically for skaters. Their strategy would be to drain the original song of all vestiges of life to ensure that the music would never distract judges from the skaters.

But it turns out not to be true. The skaters and their coaches really are trying to find the best music possible for their performances. But fate has conspired to make this a difficult task indeed.