I've been an avid sports fan for my entire life (mostly MLB, NFL, NHL and auto racing). Over the past 10 yrs or so I have found myself almost unable to watch any TV coverage due to all incessant commercials (especially those sneaky side-by-side 30 sec inserts), the constant broadcast booth babble, and overuse of graphics that cover up the action on the screen.
It's partly the aging process, but also the need to (greed) monetize every second of screen time; "This kickoff is sponsored by"... , "This power play is brought to you by..." etc. There's no flow to any game anymore.
Tennis fan here. Tennis Channel during things like Wimbledon is the worst. They relegate the actual match going on to a corner (albeit a big corner) of the screen while they repeat future matches and the results of past matches on a column on the right side of the screen (along with promotional stuff) and something else on the bottom side of the screen that has taken me years of expensive therapy to forget.
I watch a bit of college football, NFL, and NBA (but by no means a lot), and cannot recall ever seeing this for equivalent games — e.g., wild card NFL games. I now understand why people get a 85” TV even if a 65” is completely more than fine, thank-you-very-much, otherwise.
The announcers for big things at least tend to be good. But the Cincinnati Open — only does tennis have their finals of a major event on a hot and humid midwestern Monday in the middle of August — you’d think that they just scrounged up some people who never have called a match before, and who’d rather talk about anything other than what’s being shown on the screen (albeit in the aforementioned box in the corner).
The Cincinnati Open isn’t the French Open, but it’s still a “minor major,” well above, say, being the equivalent of bowl games in college football that really exist now only for ESPN. Because it’s not like there’s a lot of people watching it, unlike college football, which a not nil proportion of fans think is still an amateur sport and go “la La La” when they hear the acronym “NIL.”
I do find it weird that Cincinnati still has the Open. It may have historically been a larger city and otherwise relevant in the world of tennis. But it’s a cruel joke to expect some of the top players in the world to play in awful summer weather at what are these days decidedly somewhat B+ and the equivalent of AAA-level minor league facilities (or Oakland when the A’s still played there, which they may still do if I cared enough to check). Particularly so soon after Wimbledon if memory serves.
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