By Treating TV As A Joke, The Joke’s Now On Poker

When you think of legendary football announcers, you think of Howard Cosell, Al Michaels, Dick Enberg and John Madden.

When you think of great basketball announcers, you think of Chick Hearn and Johnny Most.

When you think of baseball, you think of Jack Buck and Vin Scully.

When you think of golf, you think Jim Nance and Johnny Miller.

And when you think poker, you think … Norm MacDonald? Norman Chad?

Sometimes I feel like poker is our daughter going out the door in heavy makeup, a tube-top and miniskirt. I want to stop her and ask, “If you don’t respect yourself, how do you expect anyone else to respect you?”

The one lesson poker should take from other sports is that people watch aspirantly. That’s the case in all media. It’s why 14-year-old girls read Seventeen magazine, but 17-year-olds read Vogue. With the glaring exception of tabloids, people generally read and watch up, not down.

That’s why people love that series Jon Gruden does with quarterbacks on ESPN — because the viewer feels like he’s being taken inside the real process. It’s real and it’s raw, and they forget the presence of the cameras.

It’s also why comedian Dennis Miller got run out of the Monday Night Football booth after two years. People don’t like it when you clown with the game they love.

I would put the IQ of the Top 10 poker players in the world up against the Top 10 in any other occupation. Yet we are represented as almost the opposite when you turn on the television.

I’m sure that I would love to have a beer and a steak with either of the Norms. But we are at a crossroads for our sport and public perception is important. If the NBA was in a do-or-die situation, they wouldn’t have Curly from the Harlem Globtrotters call Game 7 of the Finals.

The most recent Poker After Dark had maybe its best lineup ever, including Phil Ivey, Phil Galfond, Brandon Adams, Brian Hastings, Tom Dwan and Patrik Antonius. Yet as I’m watching Ivey and Galfond — two of the best minds in the history of poker — play a pot, I’m simultaneously screaming at the announcers to stop ruining the show with their ill-timed, misinformed analysis. I had to turn it off.

When I recently flew to London for Big Game V, I got sick just as the event was beginning and rather than play, I ended up announcing for 24 of the 48 hours the show was streaming live. I was unprepared, had vertigo, and was totally sleep deprived. I simply provided what information I could, trying not just to call the action, but predict what the players were thinking. Yet despite my injecting what most of you would consider basic poker acumen, the chatrooms lit up with positive comments about my analysis. Most said that it was nice to have their game treated with respect for once.

This is not to praise my own abilities. I’m a far cry from what I would consider the ideal announcer. But it does say something about the way the game is projected today.

After “Black Friday,” there stands to be far less poker on television, as those events were primarily sponsored by the Big 3 poker rooms. This means that the poker that is broadcasted is liable to get worse in quality, as ESPN flies in the basketball crew to jerry rig a poker show.

This all comes back to the fact that we need some sort of governing body or commissioner’s office to leverage our assets, negotiate a broadcasting deal and control the way we are to be perceived.

I feel the mission statement for this generation of poker players needs to be: Let’s clean up poker and change the perception of who we are, not to mention how we’re marketed and branded as individuals. TV is presently exploiting the perception that we’re degenerates, when in fact it would be better if they showed us as we really are — smart people.

We have an opportunity to one day look back and know that this was the time we didn’t play to common perception and changed the face of the game.