Sports marketing must be a fiendishly difficult job. It has to be, because so many people are so bad at it. You have to assume it’s unfathomably taxing, that you might reasonably interrupt a conversation between a rocket scientist and a brain surgeon by reminding them: “Yes, but it’s not exactly sports marketing, is it?” Orchestrating the stadium entertainment seems to be particularly challenging. It’s not as if people have come just to watch the sport, after all, they expect fireworks and flames, a 360-degree sportainment experience with lasers, lights, mascots, and music, always music, in every moment.
Last Saturday the umpires in the second Test between South Africa and Australia at St George’s Park in Port Elizabeth ordered the brass band in the stands to stop playing because they found the sound too distracting. The band walked out in protest, so the crowd started chanting “we want the band” and the musicians struck up playing again soon after tea.
The twist is Cricket South Africa recently started playing music over the PA between each delivery in their Twenty20 games, so every swing and miss and poke and prod was followed with a quick hit of Snap or Ini Kamoze.
Cricket has a habit of doing this. The ICC banned all musical instruments from its “Carnival of Cricket” World Cup in the West Indies in 2007. The papare bands at the P Sara Oval in Colombo are often told to pipe down. And Billy Cooper, the Barmy Army’s trumpeter, has been kicked out of a bunch of grounds because he wasn’t allowed to blow his horn. All the better to allow everyone to enjoy another tinny blast of 10cc’s Dreadlock Holiday. Seems the atmosphere at the ground is much too important to be left to the fans and is best served canned over the stadium PA.
It’s not just cricket. World Rugby banned Scottish fans from bringing bagpipes to the last World Cup. The England team’s travelling band have been shut out of this summer’s football World Cup, as they were for the 2012 European Championship.
Now, you may very well agree with those decisions. The St George’s Park brass band do make a hell of a racket and no one wants to spend 80 minutes stood right beside a guy playing bagpipes. But then you have to remember what the alternative is: the piped-in music provided by the marketing department.
It’s stiff to pin responsibility for all this on any one individual but the hard truth is that there’s a 21-year-old woman in New England with a lot to answer for. She’s called Caroline and when she was born, in 1997, a friend of her parents, Amy Tobey, who had a job picking the music they play when the Red Sox are at Fenway Park, decided to celebrate with Neil Diamond’s Sweet Caroline. The Red Sox won. Tobey was superstitious, so started to play it again every now and then, in the seventh and ninth innings when the team were winning. Until her new boss decided to make it the Fenway anthem.
Two decades later they play Sweet Caroline at every game. Not just every game in Boston, understand, but every game everywhere. It’s the track No 1 on Now That’s What I Call Stadium Filler 2018. It’s been a fixture at home games for Penn State, the Pittsburgh Panthers, Castleford Tigers, the Cleveland Cavaliers, Reading FC, Oxford United, the Sydney Swans, Saracens, and dozens of other clubs. It’s become the soundtrack of sportainment. You can hear it at the Australian Open tennis, England’s internationals at Twickenham and T20 finals day.
Diamond could never quite make up his mind what the song’s about. He used to say that it was inspired by a photograph of Caroline Kennedy he saw on a magazine cover. He has said since it was about his second wife, Marcia Murphey.
Anyway. These days, the song is a kind of order to be entertained, an injunction to act like you’re having a good time. Apparently Diamond never liked it anyway. Now millions of sports fans feel the same way.
The old salts at Fenway hate it. They say it’s an anthem for the “pink hat fans”, people who are happy to be at a show regardless of whether the team are winning or not. People, in short, who don’t really like sport. Or the target audience of the marketing department.
There is an alternative. Last year the commercial team at the New York Knicks NBL basketball team came up with a radical idea. They decided their game against the Golden State Warriors at Madison Square Gardens would be played in silence. No soundtrack, no video. It was such a bold idea they only felt brave enough to do it for the first half.
The big screens ran the message that “today’s game will be presented without music, video, or in-game entertainment, so you can experience the game in it’s purest form”.
And so the half played out to a soundtrack of shuffling, squeaking sneakers, the thump and swish of the ball, the buzz of conversation and the cries and shouts and cheers of the fans. All the noises you heard when you first fell in love with the game.