Fun fact: In the infancy of the now giant sports broadcasting conglomerate ESPN, the network was searching for sporting programming to help fill its 24 hour model – at the time it had numerous doubters as to the viability of a channel dedicated solely to broadcasting sport 24 hours a day. In 1979, the very first international contract the network signed was to acquire the rights to broadcast the Victorian Football League in North America. Games were broadcast either live or on tape delay every Friday and Saturday from the beginning of the 1980 season through till 1986, at which point the network had grown into a serious player in the US broadcasting market.
So the VFL, and Australian Rules Football, represented a key cog in the growth of ESPN as they evolved into being “the worldwide leader in sports.”
Currently, ESPN does show the occasional AFL game live on their subsidiary channels ESPN2, 3, and etc.
But all that coverage still doesn’t mean that Americans have a blue’s clue about how the game works.
Case in point, on flagship show SportsCenter late yesterday, where anchors Robert Flores and Kevin Connors took a quick little look at a few of the top plays from last weekend’s Round 14 match-ups.
Key takeaways:
- COLLINGWORTH. You can’t un-hear it.
- The ubiquitous appearance of an American pulling out the “that’s not a knife” line. We’ve all played knifey-spoony before, m8s. Let it die.
- Digging deep into the reference pile for that Travis Cloke comparison – that’d be Marshawn Lynch, current running back for the Seattle Seahawks, and Jan Stenerud, a Norwegian-born legend who played for the Kansas City Chiefs, Green Bay Packers, and Minnesota Vikings between 1967 and 1985; the only placekicker to be inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
- That stiff-arm from Cloke is universal.
- Unfortunately, so too is looking like a flog on the sporting field. Sorry, Levi Casboult.
