Ray Ratto, a gifted writer, can be an even better typist. Like Lawrence Welk, Ratto takes some of his best swings on "ah-one and ah-two" counts. A couple of weeks ago he explained why Jeff Thomason's rise from project manager for a New Jersey construction firm to backup tight end at the Super Bowl for the Philadelphia Eagles was such an irresistible yarn. "For one, he wanted to stay retired.... For two, he might actually catch a ball Sunday.... And for three, how many more Terrell Owens stories can a person absorb between now and game day?..."
Ratto is the San Francisco Chronicle's senior sports columnist, but the passage above was penned, or at least word-processed, for ESPN.com, website of the Disney sports-media colossus, which identifies him as a "regular contributor." Ratto serves up two to three helpings a week of instant ESPN analysis in addition to his impressive output for the Chronicle.
The cyber-appeal of the Ratto voice is easy to define: It offers just enough specific technical knowledge of the sport in question -- pro football in this case -- to ward off charges of bullslinging; just enough curmudgeonly detachment for intellectual credibility. Above all it features words. Words, lots of them, a torrent of them ... words at play, words at work, words winking and nodding, words grunting and sweating and heaving, words in step with and to feed the beast of the new 24/7 news cycle, a veritable vertiginous vortex of verbiage vying to vouchsafe the brand of Ray Ratto Inc.
Ratto is part of a troubling trend in contemporary sports journalism, one that mirrors larger issues in our culture of revolving-door accountability and rampant entrepremergerism. Dozens of major daily newspaper sports beat writers and columnists moonlight for ESPN -- from Jason Whitlock of the Kansas City Star to Dan Le Batard of the Miami Herald to Michael Wilbon of The Washington Post. The latter triples up as co-host of the acclaimed ESPN talk show Pardon the Interruption, which has spawned assorted copycat shout-fests, usually featuring fat and middle-aged ink-stained wretches desperately trying to appear hip, across the ESPN TV and radio family. Now and again the byline of one of these gents (and they're always gents) pops up in ESPN The Magazine, which like its namesake specializes in cross-promotion dressed up in hip-hop attitude and masquerading as high-minded social commentary.
Mind you, I'm not including in this list the many excellent former brick-and-mortar sportswriters -- Peter Gammons, Buster Olney, Chronicle alumnus Tim Keown -- who have surrendered to the siren call of ESPN and jumped across the divide full time. There, like contract players for the old Hollywood studios, they jockey for air time and space with a talent pool hip-deep in professional broadcasters, professional journalists, ex-jocks playing one or both on TV, and sundry all-purpose blowhards. The attraction was perfectly captured by an old college friend of mine, Skip Bayless, when he left the San Jose Mercury News to bloviate mornings on ESPN's Today show knockoff, Cold Pizza, as well as on ESPN.com whenever the spirit moves him. Bayless confessed in his farewell Merc column, "I have long wanted to enter the force field of Mark Shapiro, who runs ESPN." Move over, Jack Warner and Samuel Goldwyn!
But the focus here is on the sub-population of wordsmiths who are neither fish nor fowl, like Ratto. "Imagine the beating ESPN would be taking for doing dirt to sports if so many big-time newspaper columnists weren't on its payroll," says Phil Mushnick of the New York Post. I think Phil (who by the way is my friend, not my relative) is right. For sports insiders, ESPN has become more than just a bottomless pit of spin-off copy and ancillary income. It's a kind of Bad Housekeeping seal that makes everyone in its "force field" succumb to a superficial, crass, and calculatedly juvenile ethos. Like pro wrestling "sports entertainment," from which it takes its cues, ESPN-think has so infected the genre that it has become a branch of postmodernism unto itself -- sneering and leering, all the while letting the audience in on the joke so that we can be sure to feel smug and savvy even as our senses are being assaulted and our pockets are being picked.
There are many further observations that could be made about Ray Ratto's ESPN gig and how this overall phenomenon is emblematic of the decline of journalistic ethics, and indeed of western civilization. He was hired to bring a perspective on sports to his core Chronicle readers, and under the circumstances it's probably impossible for even him to know when he's pulling a punch. Not even the panelists on The McLaughlin Group receive direct payoffs from the Bush administration. At least not yet.
But let's stop. For one, because Ratto and the Chronicle are hardly hiding the ESPN relationship, so it's obvious that his employer doesn't give a damn; acutely aware that synergy is king, the Hearst Corporation has its own fish to fry, its own meta-news to corrupt. For two, because Ratto himself -- no doubt busy during Super Bowl week trying to decide which venue of his should be graced with which witticism -- didn't respond to a polite email inquiry. (News organizations love to hype the accessibility of their staffs by publishing email addresses, but they're not terribly interested in having a dialogue with information consumers.)
"And for three," because I don't want to waste any more bandwidth. I'm not getting paid by the word -- or, come to think of it, at all. And I believe a point can be made without either kneading it like pizza dough or beating it into pulp.