Slow Motion & TV

Written long-long ago but Facebook readers have never seen this.

I see a man mid-air, desperately trying to catch a pass just out of his reach; he is stretching and straining every muscle. He is unsupported – enormously vulnerable to attack– and before he hits the ground two 250 pound flying spears hit him, one high and one low.

Will that man get up soon? Will that man get up ever?

Time after time I have said to myself: well, they've done it this time. Two guys just killed another guy in full view of 40 million people. At the very least, they have crippled him for life. Often we are given a commercial break to ponder the question, and often, the shot before the commercial shows a man not moving at all– in some cases we would swear he wasn't even breathing.

As you well know, 98% of the time the player walks off the field "under his own power." These are superb athletes, and we, watching, realize what the human body can take, and still come out alive, kicking, ticking.

We pay to see this; in some strange way we need to see this. We never want the bone to be broken, the player to be paralyzed for life. It has happened: Gerald Stingley. We pay to see the players get up and walk away.

And in slow motion, on television, we savor the vicious hit. We do watch to see this. Every time it happens it is unbelievable. Before your very eyes, you will see whiplash, you will see blindside hits, you will see six trucks run into one human being, and that human being will get up and walk away.

What we realize is that all of us inhabit just such a body – albeit not quite as well tuned a body. We are not so ready to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune – especially when outrageous fortune comes in 250 pound packages nowadays.

Sports are"live" on TV, and let me explain what that means by turning to the one other sport that benefits almost as much from slow motion as football does: basketball.

The Chiefs, Robert Parish of Boston: dark, huge, frowning. He turns and whacks Bill Laimbeer up side the head. He hits him once, he hit him twice, he hits him thrice. See it in slow motion; see it again and again. If I count the number of times I saw the slow motion replay, I think Parrish hit Laimbeer something like 45 times.

We viewers love it. We don't want them to edit it. In fact we want them to play and replay the dirty deed. Where else can we see real crime carried out in slow-motion?

In the case of Parish and Laimbeer, the referees claimed not to have seen what 60 or so million home viewers saw. Laimbeer was not even awarded a free throw in a game that Detroit eventually lost by one point.

Basketball is perhaps more beautiful than ballet because basketball is more dangerous and spontaneous. Basketball is ballet in a battlefield. Ten seven foot Giants do battle in a dollhouse space – the area immediately under the basket – and in that space they soar and leap and gyrate in ways not imaginable, in fact absolutely unimaginable until slow-motion came along.

As they say of Dominique Wilkins (Mr. instant replay): you would not believe it if you did not see it -- and you would not ever see it if it were not for slow-motion. Or, you can hardly believe it when you actually do see it: how can the human body do so much before it returns to the ground?

It is hang time, defying gravity, that fascinates us in ballet and mesmerizes us in basketball. And again, thanks to slow motion, our visual hang time is exploded.

Basketball and football both of which involve spurts of action by bunches of people, have benefited most from slow motion and TV. In basketball and football, real motion was too fast and furious for any of us to follow, until slow-motion came along.

Now that's slow motion is here, Tis Bliss to be in heaven where bodies collide and glide.