It’s hard to overstate how the lack of live sports is affecting America right now. Aside from the enormous financial impact that is being felt by the shuttering of sports competitions and leagues across the country, our sports drought is also creating an indelible mark on the our collective psyche. Living in an era when we feel more polarized than ever, sports create an opportunity for us to come together, transcending political parties and economic levels. Sports help us share victorious celebrations, heartbreaking losses, and the collective appreciation for athletic excellence. Without the magnetic force of athletic competitions, how can we find those common threads that help weave us together?
That is why ESPN’s broadcasting of The Ocho is such a welcome distraction and a breath of creative optimism.
Image Credit: ESPN
With the lack of regular season baseball and all the other live sports that usually fills its schedule, ESPN is revisiting one of its most creative experiments. For 11 hours on May 2, 2020, ESPN is rebranding its flagship channel as ESPN8: The Ocho and telecasting unusual sports content that ranges from live world-record deadlifting to pre-recorded cherry-pit spitting. Other ‘sports’ on the schedule include stupid robot fighting, lawn mower racing, putt putt championships and a rebroadcast of the 51st Annual Stone Skipping Championship.
This is the fifth time ESPN has rebranded as The Ocho since it started in 2017. The inspiration originally came from the 2004 movie Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story. In the movie, the professional dodgeball team plays on a fictional ESPN 8. At the time, ESPN had just started ESPN2 which it was referring to as ‘The Deuce’ – hence the fictional name The Ocho. So what has been a fun way for ESPN to creatively engage its audience and build some marketing buzz over the years (as well as a good number of laughs), has now become something way more important:
must-see-TV for a sports starved nation.
Although The Ocho was also televised late in March, that was still a time when the full weight of the pandemic was settling in. Most of us had no idea we would be here in May still wondering when sports would restart. The Ocho was good for some laughs, some great social media commentary, and a bit of curious exploration of underappreciated athletic skills (competitive sign spinning and death diving are not for the faint of heart). Suddenly The Ocho is filling the baseball, basketball and golf ball-sized wholes in our hearts, and even the thought of lawn mowers is getting our race car deprived spirits racing again.
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That’s the beauty and the optimism of The Ocho, that it can give us a bit of normalcy in this dramatically abnormal world. Sure, we might not know the athletes (and might even cringe at calling competitive Tetris players athletes) but we can all start rooting for something together again. We can have some taste of sports to discuss at our Zoom-based digital water coolers again. We can see sports again. And even that small notion is something that can make us a bit more optimistic and feel a bit more uplifted.
The other thing that The Ocho is doing is helping prepare us for what our ‘regular’ sports will look like when they return. No big crowds. No loud cheering in the background, not at first at least. Much like seeing people walk around our communities in face coverings, we are probably in for a shock for what sports looks like when it does return. It will be an ever-evolving new normal that we will need to navigate, finding ways to bridge the way we once watched sports with the new precautions this pandemic requires of us all. We might also even find the appeal of seldom seen micro-sports like the kind being shown on The Ocho – maybe not the crazier ones, but some unheralded sports that can be done in smaller, and safer ways.
Perhaps by watching all The Ocho however, we can find a bit of what we all miss – the sense of being part of something bigger than ourselves. That is the power of sports – to help us connect and appreciate what is possible when effort and discipline meets skill and teamwork. And those are traits that will help us not only reconnect with what we have been missing, but also help us create a collective future we are all so desperately seeking.
And in the meantime, let’s cheer on those arm wrestlers, seed spitters and stone skippers!
(You can find the entire times and listings for ESPN 8: The Ocho here)
