Just One Truth For Me
June 10, 1968
Danny Blanchflower attained international fame as a peerless soccer player in Great Britain, where the world's most universal game is revered. But when he was hired as a television commentator to explain the sport to Americans he did not perform as his employers wanted. Here he tells why he was considered a failure, suggests why professional soccer is in trouble in this country and passes on a deeper message that all sport should heed
Danny Blanchflower
It never really worked. I probably should have known that from the beginning, had I given it more thought, but I doubt if that would have changed my feelings. I'm not the sort to go into anything with a pessimistic attitude. Even now I want to believe that enough people in America want an honest outlook in their sporting affairs, enough, that is, to get it. At least I hope they will give my opinions fair consideration.
Maybe I should have been more concerned that night in February 1967 when I met Jack Dolph, the director of sports for CBS TV, in the foyer of London's Savoy Hotel. His words do seem more significant now. I remember his brief apology for having little time to spare before he rushed me through a mixed bag of questions concerning American soccer and my possible role as a television commentator, and how something in my answers perturbed him. "You're a spellbinder with words, I'll admit," he finally said. "But, to be honest, you frighten me."
His fears were spellbound, apparently, because a month later a press conference was held by CBS in New York to announce my appointment as "color" man for the network's latest venture into sport, the televising of National Professional Soccer League games.
None of the press corps seemed upset by my answers on that occasion, but they did have some doubt about my fate with CBS. "You'll ruin him," one lady reporter said to Bill MacPhail, the CBS vice-president for sports, over a drink at Toots Shor's after the conference. "Look," MacPhail said to me across the table, "if we say a word to you, you have my permission to phone her."
I wondered if he had forgotten that when I was summoned to his corner office on the 26th floor of the CBS Building just a few weeks later. A couple of his aides were sitting around, and there was a slight air of embarrassment.
"We didn't like part of your commentary on Sunday," one of them said.
"What was that?" I asked.
"You criticized the St. Louis goalkeeper. Couldn't you have been more positive?"
"No," I replied. "He made a mistake."
"That's not what we mean.... You could have said it was a good shot."
"It wasn't a bad shot," I admitted, "but the quality of the shot is relative to the goalkeeper's reaction. It happens quickly, and one's best judgment is instinctive. This shot was from nearly 35 yards out. Only a rare one from that distance should beat the goalkeeper, and then one would say, 'Great shot. The keeper had no chance.' Here the goalkeeper was a yard or more off his goal line into the field of play, a bad position that allowed the ball to glide over his upstretched hand and dip into the empty goal behind. Had he been on his goal line that would not have happened."
"We think you could have said it was a good shot," they insisted.
"It would not be the truth," I said.
"We don't want you to tell lies," they argued. "We think there are two truths: a positive truth and a negative truth. We want you to be positive—to say it was a good play rather than bad."
I had never met men before who worshiped two truths. Why had such inventive souls stopped at only two, I wondered? Why not four truths? Or 10? The philosophical winds of it swept through my mind. If they had two truths they must have two gods. Honor thy father and thy mother and thy two gods.... Positive and Negative. If their life was a conflict between two gods, had Satan, that fallen angel, been banished from CBS as well as heaven? Or did it imply that CBSwas heaven? (It was easy money, and it sure felt like heaven there at times on the 26th floor.) But if there was no bad, how could there be good? What would their reactions have been if I had said of the goalkeeper at St. Louis: "Well, folks...that sure was good negative play on his part, making it easy for them to score that great goal."
Dolph's words, "You frighten me," and the lament of the press lady, "You'll ruin him," made sense now. There was a conflict in the land, and I was in the middle of it.
Someone told me later that the team owners did not like my comments and that CBS thought I was knocking the product. I wondered how they ignored the large amount of complimentary mail I received and their own evidence in an audience response survey at the start of the soccer telecasts. "Several themes recur again and again in this flood of correspondence," the survey stated. "Perhaps the most constant of these is unstinted praise for the lucid commentary, gentle humor and perceptive insight of the 'color' man." Or had they considered the comments of The New York Timestelevision critic, Jack Gould, who had reviewed the first soccer telecast and said the game was "chiefly noteworthy for the distinctive commentary of Danny Blanchflower, a London sports journalist whose blend of running criticism, boundless compassion and sterling clich� eased the visual ennui."
"I know only one truth," I eventually said to MacPhail, "to which a man takes either a positive or negative attitude." And I suggested that we tear up our contract, that there need be no compensation, no name-calling and no malice.
"Oh, there's no need for that," they said, showing no conviction in their own argument.
Nor was I the only trouble CBS was having with its soccer game. There was difficulty with commercials. Soccer's two 45-minute periods of continuous play, with a 10-minute interval at halftime, was contrary to American television's pattern of fitting in commercials at regular intervals. CBS officials worried about this, but gave the impression that it was the possible reaction to their solution that concerned them rather than the problem itself. They decided to use goal kicks and delays for injury as starting points for the commercials.
This would have been fine had they let play continue and picked it up again in motion after the minute's break. They could have recorded the missing piece and, had it been of any significance, have come straight back to where they left off, because if a goal had been scored or a riot caused it usually takes about a minute after this for play to restart.
But they wanted their viewers to see it all, to pay the piper and call the tune, which in this case was contrary to their own interests as well as to the spirit of the game. So the CBS people convinced themselves that a goal kick uses up 40 seconds (on a rare occasion it might, but usually it takes about 20 seconds, sometimes less). Now all they thought they had to do was delay the game another 20 seconds. When they asked me I told them this was a wrong approach. It was something like listening to a jazz group improvise on a tune and, when it came to a natural pause in the music, to stop it for a minute and then ask it to pick up again where it had left off. It was murder, man!
But CBS strapped an instrument to the referee to signal him that the next injury or goal kick would be convenient for a commercial. The device did not work too well. Perhaps the referee was not picking up the signal in the heat of the game, or maybe it was contrary to his instincts to stop play when all his life he had been keeping it moving.
The system turned sour publicly in Toronto. Peter Rhodes, an English referee, wanted to show CBS officials that he could make it work. Early in the match the leftwinger of the Toronto team tripped and fell. Rhodes whistled a "foul" and waved his arm to show the CBSproducer that he intended a delay for a commercial. But the winger had not been hurt as badly as Rhodes had anticipated, and started to get to his feet. Rhodes pushed him back to the ground, and the Toronto crowd was immediately aware of skulduggery.
Rather than help CBS, which was his intention, Rhodes had embarrassed the network. There was talk of Congress investigating, and that is when a red handkerchief made its first appearance on a soccer field. The National Professional Soccer League said it did not want to deceive the public, so the referee was to wave a red handkerchief to show that he was delaying the game for a commercial. Rather than insist that CBS stop the delays, the league would take the money from CBS and, at the same time, wave a red flag to suggest it had not quite surrendered to the deceit.
By now I could see that the U.S. did not need professional soccer. It has its own popular sports, like baseball, basketball and American football. Yet soccer has something to offer, if America would take an interest in it. Basketball and football demand giants. You don't have to be a big man to be good at soccer. If you're good enough, you're big enough. Soccer could give the U.S. world competition in a major team sport. The World Cup is the greatest of sporting tournaments. It is professional, unashamedly so. It happens every four years, like the Olympics. But at the Olympics the gold is scattered and somehow the feelings of victory are diluted. The World Cup has only one winner and it is a team triumph. It builds up to a singular conclusion and a grand climax.
Green Bay fans know the joys of being called world champions of American football. But who really plays that game outside America? Think of the national pride across the land if a U.S. team—a boy from California, one from St. Louis and Dallas and New York and so on—won the World Cup in a truly worldwide competition.
What the U.S. could do for soccer is just as exciting—a big country with big horizons, big challenges, big ideas, many peoples and climates and conditions, a great competitive urge and great wealth. Mix all that into soccer and the possibilities are limitless.
But first the public has to be interested and educated, and that is what I was trying to do on the air. It was not a calculated act on my part, more an instinctive reaction to the circumstances. It was not easy to define. It had to be done on the move, hit-and-run, because soccer offers a commentator little time for real explanation. The U.S.teams were overnight productions, a human product, a sell-out-and-come-right-away product. There were many faces from many lands. It was all for one and one for all, or nearly so. I had much compassion for their circumstances—playing in hot weather on bad soccer surfaces in front of small crowds.
Nor was I comparing their efforts with other, better standards that I know. There would have been no point in that. I called it as I saw it, gave them credit by their own standards, and when they made a bad pass or move I said so. It must have sounded critical to American sponsors and owners who had seldom heard a bad shot called a bad shot before, but it had to be honest. How else would the American public understand and appreciate soccer if it was not told what was good and what was bad?
One problem was that few of the team owners had any real love for soccer. Some owned stadiums, and soccer was just another circus to fill up empty seats. Some had been inspired by talk of soccer abroad and the World Cup. All of them envied the prestige and profits of the American football teams, particularly since TV enabled pro football to become such a big success. Soccer gave them a sniff of buried treasure and they were after it, with a hint of desperation in their mood because the portents were discouraging. I doubt if they had considered that it took American football many decades to become a financial bonanza, or how much grief and love was put into it by the early pioneers or that millions of boys had been grounded in its fundamentals at high schools and colleges. The owners, like the masses, knew little about soccer, but they had vested reasons to be wary of anything that sounded critical of it. They were in no mood to appreciate my intentions.
Nor was CBS. Sports TV does not have the same critical faculty as sports journalism. The TV companies are co-promoters. They have to sell their product to the sponsors and to the viewers. I have been told by producers on both sides of the Atlantic not to say that a game was bad when it had been obvious to everyone that it was bad (I always tried to explain why, believing the reasons were more interesting than lies about it). But the TV producer fears an announcer with a mind of his own. He prefers a mechanical idiot who will get him in and out on cue, a sweet-talking tape recorder with the tones of an old fairgrounds barker: "Come along folks.... See the greatest show on earth." They will buy the announcer's soul and preach to him of two truths, and if he can eliminate the negative in his voice he will be a joy in producer-land forever—or until some political storm comes along and demands a new recorder.
The public takes this because it loves its sport, no matter what. But given the choice, I doubt that this kind of thing is what it really wants. Some of the letters in that CBS audience-response survey that I mentioned earlier were revealing enough. "It is refreshing to hear a sports announcer give his own personal and forthright opinions on individual plays and players instead of trying to make a show of impartiality," wrote one viewer. "It was thoroughly refreshing to hear his comments on what were apparently his true feelings without all the ridiculous self-censorship usually employed by announcers," wrote another. These remarks show that the public knows most sports television has a deliberate phoniness about it.
In time television's attitude can do sport great harm. It can undermine its values and lead to the worship of false idols. As the newspapers once carried news of the sporting dream across the land, TV now carries the vision of it to every small boy, young and old. A young player can see a colorful, moving image of his sporting idol. He has a clear picture of what style to mimic. All the coaching in the world could not replace that advantage. But the boy must be informed of the difference between aimless movement and good action. The picture should be given an honest definition by the commentary. Sport is a wonderfully democratic thing, one of the few honorable battlefields left. It is a conflict between good and bad, winning and losing, praise and criticism. Its true values should be cherished and protected. They do not belong to owners of athletics franchises or to TV companies. They belong to the people. Any small boy, anywhere, who kicks a ball owns a piece of the action. Everybody enjoys exaggeration and romance in a sporting story, but deliberate lying and cheating for profit is something else.
I hope nobody will misunderstand my comments concerning the personalities in the CBS sports department. They were far ahead of any TV company I've worked for before. What control any of them had over policy or to what extent they were slaves to the system, I don't really know. I do not go along with the saying, "If you are not for us you are against us." Many people I am for do some things I am against. The only reason I have referred to them, or written this story, is to point out a dubious quality in the marriage between TV and sport.
TV is an intruder at a sports event and should always be kept in its place. It should not be allowed to change important details of the event to suit its own ends. It should stand back at times and be critical about what is going on. But because it is a very presumptuous being, television thinks the world belongs to it.
TV can help sports crowds grow—build interest—though there were big sporting crowds long before TV. Television can also do much harm. It brings quick money into sport and thus can bring a worthy prosperity to the owners, the players and the game. But, unless handled properly, this money can also destroy the values of a sport, its very roots. The hero should get his rewards, like Arnold Palmer. That adds to the romance of a sport. But what about the million-dollar bonus babies who get the rewards before doing any real battle and steal away with it all, and not a noble blow struck by them?
How quickly can a sport devalue itself? The National Football Leaguedivided its 16 teams into four divisions last year. Perhaps that was a smart move for geographic and other reasons. But it had a touch of the old sales talk to me. Four champions, all winners, make more hay. It devalues the meaning of the word "champion."
Perhaps it is time for a full investigation of the whole area of sport and television. Both sport and television are reaping big financial harvests now, but unless some care is taken these harvests could become the grapes of wrath for the future of sport. Those are some of the feelings I inherited after a season as an American TV commentator.
