E! SPN

Once upon a time, ESPN Sportscenter was the original "Must See TV". In a detailed, yet fast-paced one hour program, ESPN covered the highlights of all the day's sporting events with style and a good dose of humor. Somewhere along the line, however, the network lost its way.

When ESPN was launched in 1979, it filled a tremendous void. It was a network dedicated to presenting live athletic events and to delivering complete sports news to the whole country each day. Fans who once settled for catching very limited highlights at the end of local news broadcasts could now get all the information they wanted in one comprehensive show. Sportscenter was the perfect entertainment fix.

At some point during the 1990s, ESPN began to tinker with the format of Sportscenter. In came the derivative empty suits presenting the highlights while armed with overly-rehearsed catchphrases. Additional ESPN Channels were launched to offset new competition presented by the multi-channel Fox Sports Network. Apparently, the simple highlights package was no longer ambitious enough. Sports had to become "transcendent", crossing paths with music, entertainment and even politics. With more airtime to fill, ESPN had to cover more than sports. It had to cover sports plus subjects only tangentially related to sports: investigations, arrests, shoe contracts, "best of" lists and the WNBA. 24-Hour Sports Talk Radio added another dimension...now fans could call in to shows and discuss sports-related stories at length and ad nauseum.

Soon, the personality profiles you'd once only see during the Olympics started to creep into the daily programming on Sportscenter. You'd have a story on a basketball player overcoming drug addiction, a baseball player facing down illiteracy, a hockey coach coping with a death in the family. I even remembered a "Breaking News" story about how Tiger Woods fired his caddy. Even the bag carriers were becoming celebrities! From Magic Johnson "attaining" HIV, to Nancy Kerrigan getting clubbed in the knee and OJ Simpson killing two people and evading the cops, sports news was turning up in the front page news. Football players began cutting rap albums and rappers began trying out for pro basketball teams. Meanwhile, ESPN stopped delivering the news in order to become the news. Political correctness reared its ugly head. From Al Campanis and Jimmy "The Greek" to Charles Barkley and Tim Hardaway, sports personalities were being held accountable more for their public statements than for their job performances.

Whether or not this troubling evolution has Disney's fingerprints on it is debatable. However, it's hardly coincidental that much of the frivolous extracurricular programming on ESPN came about after Disney added ESPN and ABC to its roster. The non-stop promotional tie-ins, the incessant hyping of overrated sports rivalries like Yankees-Red Sox and North Carolina-Duke all came about on Disney's watch. How often does a network need to deconstruct Bobby Knight in order to question "what makes this enigma tick"? How often does a network need to play golf with Hootie and the Blowfish to show that a popular rock band can be just a collection of down-to-earth regular guys? Why does a network need to make a list of the top 100 athletes of the 20th Century just to reinforce the myth that Michael Jordan was the greatest of the 1900s?

As if the unnecessary addition of the self-congratulatory ESPY Awards Show wasn't a pointless enough marketing gimmick, I think ESPN hit rock bottom this week. They have created a segment called "Who's More Now?". Apparently the purpose of this segment is to determine what current athlete is the most socially relevant. Set up like a seeded NCAA Tournament Bracket, this contivance matches up two athletes in a subjective head-to-head battle over who is the better on and off-field performer. Apparently, the player with the best combination of game statistics, endorsement contracts and celebrity gossip will ultimately be crowned the "Most Now"...whatever that's supposed to prove. Personally, I'd prefer to subject myself to what passes for "torture" in Gitmo than to sit on one of these Dance Fever-inspired panels and embarrass myself discussing whether or not Kobe Bryant is "More Now" than Tom Brady. The fact that respected former professional athletes have reduced themselves to engaging in these verbal contortions saddens me. ESPN has now fully evolved into self-parody with Sportscenter being totally unwatchable. The makeover from respectable sports highlight program to utterly trivial entertainment news farce is now complete. Bring on Ryan Seacrest and Melissa Rivers, for ESPN has become another E!