ESPN 25: 25 Mind-Bending, Eye-Popping, Culture-Morphing Years of Highlights

This engaging history of the cable show SportsCenter makes the case that the sports highlight tape is the central artistic-discursive genre of our time. Sportswriter Hirshberg traces the development of the sports highlights tape from its origins in Classical Greek vase painting. In the hothouse climate of a fledgling sports cable network desperate to fill airtime, the highlights tape branched out from the staid, chronological ""Who Won?"" format and flourished into art. Hirshberg narrates the human drama and pathos surrounding the compiling and editing of the tapes, analyzes their 17 archetypal themes, including ""Blowout"" and ""Turning Point,"" and ponders their social impact as they reconfigure sporting events into flurries of disconnected, telegenic bursts. Highlights tapes can have an edifying effect, he acknowledges, by, say, admonishing lackadaisical players and revealing the unexpected importance of cleats, but they also distort and debase sports by encouraging players to embrace highlights-worthy individual showmanship instead of selfless teamwork. And what of the pain of athletes who see their most embarrassing mistakes immortalized in flub and goat highlight tapes? Hirshberg's treatment of the subject, sprinkled with trivia sidebars on such topics as great team mascots and historic national anthem renditions, is erudite and thoughtful, but always light-handed. If the goal of sports commentary is to raise the relatively inconsequential to the level of entertaining pseudo-significance, this book qualifies as a small gem. Photos.