A friend was adamant that the runaway television sports highlight of the past year was Goran Ivanisevic serving for the Wimbledon tennis championship. After a little thought, I was inclined to agree. The crowning hour of Ivanisevic's life arrived not on the traditional Sunday afternoon but on a weekday due to a particularly severe round of the torrential rain that south London effortlessly manufactures for its big tennis fortnight.
Because of that, television audiences were down and many missed the live broadcast of the Croat's hallucinogenic anguish as he served and missed title chance upon title chance before literally stumbling to victory in the end against an exhausted Pat Rafter. In some ways it was poor tennis - here, after all, was the quintessential big hitter, a man who carved a successful sports life out of whacking a tennis ball across a net with regular millimetre accuracy - failing, choking in the crucial seconds of his athletic life against an opponent who was out on his feet.
And it should be remembered that whatever class was on court belonged to Rafter. The Australian brought sporting graciousness to new heights during the Goran-frenzied presentations while his conqueror, a wildcard entry to Wimbledon, blasted a number of tournament officials with a series of charmless verbal volleys relating to their looks, sexual orientation and competence.
But everyone who saw that final rooted for Ivanisevic and the common reaction afterwards was not so much delight that he had won but sheer relief that he hadn't blown it. Because during those portentous closing games, Ivanisevic appeared to be engaged less in a battle with Rafter than in a private struggle with his own soul. This was a journeyman pro in his declining years, way down the world rankings, who somehow put himself within one shot - a serve - of his first Wimbledon only to be struck with stage fright. It wasn't life-or-death stuff, as sports is so often presented' but Ivanisevic did convey the impression that if he failed on this vaunted stage then quite serious mental repercussions would be visited upon him.
Personally, I thought Goran was a bit of a jerk, a boring ace merchant (he hit 200 plus at Wimbledon) who managed to reinvent himself as a 'character' in a sport notoriously devoid of human interest and then hit a hot streak at the right time. I wanted Rafter to win, to hell with the consequences for Ivanisevic's state of being in his retirement days. (This sentiment faded a bit after I saw Ivanisevic's homecoming in Zagreb, where he dropped his trousers in front of 200,000 fans, a gesture that for some reason was funny, fitting and eloquent, not to mention preferable to most sports homecoming speeches).
But the memorable circumstances of Ivanisevic's happily-resolved sporting dilemma illustrated what people want out of sports on television in this age of saturation coverage. Technical excellence and even flair, captured from a million different ways, is no longer enough to make it memorable. SKY Sports has been slow to learn this. The human eye is beyond surprise when it comes to television images, sporting or otherwise.
There is so much sport on television now, even on the terrestrial channels, that it is becoming almost impossible to assimilate which moments are blessed with "genuine" greatness and which should be consigned to the purgatory of recorded sports events never to be aired again.
For instance, a few weeks ago against Juventus, Dennis Bergkamp of Arsenal delivered a goal-scoring pass of such perfect timing, inventiveness and simplicity that it looked, to this untutored eye, to be of the same vintage magic as we see in old George Best footage that is still fawned over. But the conferring of an honorary degree on Bestie got much more coverage than Bergkamp's beautiful and inimitable flick. The Dutchman, though, lacks colour, especially in comparison to Best who is the ultimate embodiment of what the mass audience demands from sports: athletic brilliance allied to human drama.
The two biggest names on the most successful television sports phenomenon of modern times, Manchester United, both combine sports and personality, albeit in utterly different ways. Roy Keane is one of the best soccer players in the world but the unsolicited fascination with him stems from his naturally fierce privacy and his singularly obsessive attitude. David Beckham is rated as one of the best soccer players in the world but generates as much attention through photo shoots and his Royalty-Lite way of living. They provoke opinion and debate in a way the mega-talented but moderately spoken Michael Owen does not.
What were the Irish sporting highlights of 2001? Fantastic Light/Galileo? McAteer versus Holland? Kevin Broderick's point against Kilkenny? O'Driscoll's try in the first Lions test? Or that point from Maurice Fitzgerald. In this country, those moments will be long remembered.
But globally it is hard to identify sporting moments from the past 12 months that will resonate as clearly as, say, the old Ali fights and interviews that BBC 2 shows now and again or the 1970 Brazil World Cup footage.
The lesson from earlier decades, when television sports was still sane, is clear: less is more. In the past decade and a half, with output spiralling and bidding rights for every two-bit cockfight in town, the demands have grown more extreme, perspective has been lost. Ben Johnson's yellow eyes, the Ayrton Senna crash, Evander Holyfield's ear, Hillsborough: these are among the most readily identifiable and "biggest" sporting television phenomena of that period. The concept of "best" has become diluted.
Watching a sports event on television, for all the attendant comfort, is, of course, secondary to being there. But ticket availability and location means that television is the medium most of the population rely on for the defining events. But now, they are all presented as "big" and "unmissable". If the bombardment continues, sports on television will become like elevator music; constant, unheeded and joyless. Here's hoping there is an end to the bingeing.
