Beer and Circus by Murray Sperber

“Gee Whiz” approach and the skeptical “Aw Nuts” attitude, but ESPN’s innovation, borrowed from such sportswriters as Dan Jenkins, placed the sentimental and the skeptical side by side. When longtime SportsCenter anchorman Chris Berman showed a clip of a home run, he often intoned, “Back-back-back … ,” consciously paying homage to old-time broadcaster Red Barber’s call of a famous drive by Joe DiMaggio in the 1947 World Series. Then Berman would mock a player by giving him a comic nickname, e.g, outfielder Mel “Kids in the” Hall; and Berman’s partner, Keith Olberman, would show a clip of Hall dropping an easy fly ball, and groan a nasty, “Guh!” For long football runs resulting in touchdowns, announcer Larry Beil would yell, “Run, Forrest, run!,” evoking scenes from one of the most sentimental movies of the 1990s, Forrest Gump. But when showing an injured player on the sidelines during practice, announcer Dan Patrick sometimes commented, “He’s listed as day-to-day, but then again, aren’t we all.”
    For TV viewers, the perfect mind-set for watching SportsCenter, particularly when seeing clips from college sports events and knowing all about the corruption in intercollegiate athletics, was (and is) the equivalent of what George Orwell defined in 1984 as “doublethink”: the ability to believe contradictory ideas simultaneously, for example, acknowledging the dysfunction of college sports while fervently following its teams and games. College students were (and are) especially prone to doublethink: encountering intercollegiate athletics firsthand, they often relate inside stories about the jocks on their campus receiving special financial and academic deals, but when those jocks take the court or field, they cheer madly for them, particularly if the team is winning.
    A nationally published guide, How to College in the 1990s , perfectly caught the student doublethink attitude toward college sports, as well as its connections to beer-and-circus, and the importance of winning:

    Come game time, all this [college sports corruption] seems trivial. When you’re chugging your eighth beer and passing your buddy’s girlfriend up the stadium rows while your football team clobbers its archrival, or [you’re] vacationing in New Orleans while your team plays in the NCAA basketball championships, you couldn’t care less if the star player got an F in Remedial English 1. You’re happy, you’re partying, and he helped you get to that state of mind.

    When ESPN started a print magazine in the 1990s, it focused on college-age readers, and it filled each edition with doublethink (as well as numerous ads for beer and liquor products). In an issue with a syrupy article on a University of Tulsa basketball recruit who had been home-schooled before entering college, ESPN The Magazine also published a feature comparing “Halloween vs. Midnight Madness,” asking, “Two rituals that ease fall into winter, but which best fulfills its promise? Tykes hopped up on sugar. Undergrads polluted on grain alcohol. Let’s see how they stack up.” The magazine formatted the piece as a gambling chart (many college students bet on sports events, and ESPN caters to their habit, see Chapter 17). Among the entries were:

    The negativity and cynicism about intercollegiate athletics in this feature would have startled earlier generations of college sports rooters, yet current fans cheer as loudly for their teams as their predecessors did, mainly illustrating the power of doublethink.
    In the final decades of the twentieth century, however, not all college sports fans moved to doublethink: indeed, this attitude marked a generational divide among college sports enthusiasts, younger fans adopting it much more readily than their elders. College students and young alumni accepted corruption as the norm while embracing their favorite