For the past few weeks, I've been telling anyone who'll listen about how stupid I think the "Sounds of the Game" feature is. For every halfway passably interesting bit of bench banter the TV crews capture, they subject us to a hundred non-illuminating clips of players grunting, or breathing hard, or hollering some crafty strategem like "GO! GO! GO!"
Oh, and then there are the hits. How much more real they seem when you can hear — um... the microphone maxing out.
These little segments are king-sized stupid, of interest to no one save maybe mic designers looking for a stress test.
For some reason, though, it never occurred to me why these clips are so inane until I watched this
vintage video footage of Kevin Stevens and Brian Trottier taunting Minnesota Northstar Brian Bellows. (I found it linked from
this story on Playoffbeard.com, a site I intend to revisit.)
It makes perfect sense, of course. The televised "Sounds of the Game" are uninteresting because the interesting sounds of the game are unfit for television!