Kicking out and knocking them down

If I hadn’t known better, I’d have thought that the basketball game I was listening to on the car radio recently was a soccer game, so often did the participants “kick it out” or “knock it down.” Turns out that “kicks it out” in sportscaster-speak means to pass the ball, while “knocks it down” is apparently a new-age way of saying that a player has scored.

The players in this particular game knocked it down all night, but scored nary once (which, come to think of it, is just about like any soccer game I’ve ever had the misfortune to watch.) They continually kicked it out without penalty, playing, I suppose, on a basketball court in which nothing was out of bounds except maybe the play-by-play guy’s description of the action.

I bring this up only because the current spate of high school basketball playoffs serves as a reminder to sports fans who cannot always make it to the game that a good radio play-by-play announcer is a thing to be cherished. The more so if the sidekick in the booth responsible for providing color commentary is informed, witty and knows when to speak and when to keep quiet.

It’s probably a safe bet that the undertaking is much more difficult than it may appear to the casual observer. Trying to fill two or more hours of airtime while keeping things interesting and avoiding tiresome cliches is my idea of a thankless task, and one you’d be well advised to forgo if your feelings are easily hurt by nitpickers and Monday morning quarterbacks the likes of me.

My extensive research shows that the truly serious crimes of aggravation committed by basketball play-by-play people often involve sins of omission, as compared to sins of commission.

Oh, sure, when they say a ballplayer has fallen to the “ground” – when, unless the game has been inexplicably relocated to the auditorium parking lot, what they mean to say is that he or she has fallen to the floor – it is mildly off-putting. And when they continually report that the ball is “off glass” as yet another way of avoiding having to say that the player has scored, the effect is akin to hearing someone scratch their fingernails across a slate chalkboard. “Off glass,” after all, could just as well mean that, rather than banking off the backboard and through the net, the ball has clanged off the board and into the broom closet.

But for my money, the greater felony is that it seems never to occur to some play-by-play guys that dial-hopping listeners who might have inadvertently stumbled across their broadcast seek immediate answers to two questions: Who is playing? And, what’s the score? The better announcers, aware of their transient audience, give you this information early and often, and I say hats off to them. The less aware not only are hard-pressed to remember to let you in on the deal, they often compound their error by prattling on about some irrelevancy while players in the background are scoring points – usually at the free-throw line – that are never acknowledged.

Granted, on a good day you can sometimes get half a loaf. “East Grand up by 14,” Mr. Play-by-Play might let slip at some point, leaving the late arrivers the impossible task of trying to come up with the remaining critical parts of the equation. The more astute listeners might make some small breakthrough once they get wind of the names toiling for East Grand’s mystery opponent. A preponderance of Beals and Alleys, with an occasional Carver or Fagonde thrown in, for example, would mean that the other team is most definitely Jonesport-Beals. Still, despite the commendable Sherlock Holmes-esque detective work, the score remains pretty much a military secret, known only to those actually attending the ballgame.

If the masochist driving down the Interstate hasn’t elected to abandon the game in favor of an old Willie Nelson tape, he might tough it out until the half-time break on the supposition that surely this guy will say who’s playing and what the score is at that point. At last, the break comes: “And that’s the end of the first half, with East Grand’s lead down to seven points,” the man declares. “We’ll be right back after these messages…”

Which is probably more than can be said for most of his former audience.By then, the smarter listeners will have gone in search of the nearest bar to knock down a few of their own.

NEWS columnist Kent Ward lives in Winterport. His e-mail address is olddawg@bangordailynews.