“Sir, ‘demagogue’ is not a verb.”

Denigrate, if you like, the smirking approach to the daily news that Olbermann brought to his two nightly news shows; condemn him, if you will, for transplanting the flippancy of ESPN’s “SportsCenter,” where he made his name, to the haughty environs of the nightly news — but in the post-Edwin Newman era, what so-called traditional TV news anchor is willing to throw down the gauntlet over a part of speech?

It’s disappointing, then, that Olbermann has decided to leave for Fox News to host another sportscast, ending, after this week, the bizarre experiment that was “The Big Show with Keith Olbermann.” When MSNBC hired Olbermann away from ESPN last fall, it probably expected a diverting news program with an edge — a can’t-miss combo of hot-button politics and Olbermann’s patented highlight-reel shtick. (Right down to the pseudocollegiate opening graphics, in fact, “The Big Show” was designed more like a sportscast than a news show, even opening with its own version of a bloopers reel — three or four minutes of quick-cut soundbites from the day’s news interspersed with Olbermann’s wise-ass commentary.) What the network got instead was a nightly metacommentary on the very scandal-milking that had become MSNBC’s reason for being. The Monica Lewinsky story, which broke just a few months after Olbermann started with MSNBC, turned him into the Ted Koppel of presidential blow jobs (just as Ted Koppel was becoming precisely the same thing), doubling his workload as MSNBC soon tapped him to host a second show, the late-night “White House in Crisis.”

After four months Olbermann vented with a surprising commencement speech at Cornell University, beating his and his colleagues’ breasts for “covering this story 28 hours out of every 24.” As I wrote in August, it was a little hard to empathize with Olbermann trying to have his fame and loathe it too — Olbermann has cashed a half year’s worth of checks since declaring that “about three weeks ago I … told my employers that I simply could not continue doing this show.” But it undeniably made for interesting television. Over the past several months, Olbermann’s show has turned into a long-running one-man psychodrama, the main subject of which has been not Clinton’s troubles but the increasingly sardonic anchor’s cheerful contempt for his own job.

Given nothing but a parody of actual news to report on night after night, Olbermann turned his program into a parody of a news show — or rather, an imitation of a parody of a news show, often closer to fellow SportsCenter alum Craig Kilborn’s “The Daily Show” on Comedy Central than to its straight-news analogue, “Nightline.” (He ended some of his broadcasts, for instance, by wadding up his note cards and throwing them at the camera — the postmodern televisual shorthand for “Fuck it, you and I both know this is showbiz” à la David Letterman and Norm MacDonald.) He even deprecated his own program by incorporating a self-deflating “Nightline” riff into his opening voice-over: “Because it’s still your tax dollars in action, we bring you Day 296 of the Clinton-Lewinsky investigation!”

The very premise of “The Big Show” seemed as if MSNBC were subconsciously parodying itself and its hyperventilating approach to the news from Washington. We cover public affairs like a full-contact sport anyway, it seemed to be saying — except better, because the season never ends and nobody ever wins — so why not just cut the crap and turn our prime-time news show into a sportscast? And with a weird amalgam of career savvy and idealism, going through 10 varieties of bemusement an hour, Olbermann took the cynical premise and ran with it, in the process showing how much TV news has to learn from sports journalism.

The mistake MSNBC made with Olbermann was to hire someone from outside the world of news, who therefore was enough of a greenhorn to still take newscasting seriously. It would be easy to patronize “The Big Show” as mere news lite — most of the largely positive reviews Olbermann has received have emphasized his wry asides and rapid-fire pop-culture references (e.g., “The ‘Them’ Webster Hubbell was referring to was of course Bill and Hillary Clinton and not the giant ants of the 1950s sci-fi movie classic”). But in fact, Olbermann was far more dignified a host than most of his choleric peers at MSNBC and Fox, treating his interview subjects with an almost old-fashioned courtliness. That became painfully clear last week when he took the night off and was replaced by abrasive yapmeister John Gibson of MSNBC’s talk-krieg “InterNight.” Gibson tromped all over the show’s studied coolness like a doberman tearing up the azaleas, orchestrating an “InterNight”-style barkfest among James Warren, John Fund and Arianna Huffington. It was a clash of two cable-news cultures: Olbermann’s art of the raised eyebrow against Gibson’s jackhammering pleas for attention. It was InterminableNight.

Olbermann’s decision to go back to sportscasting came just as, with the congressional elections and the ebbing of the impeachment drive, the political climate and world events conspired to bring onto his show something that he might have considered a long, long year ago to be actual news: for instance, last month’s near-war with Iraq. Ironically, with this interruption to the runaway hit sitcom of 1998, Olbermann seemed, if not uncomfortable, at least uncertain about what tone he should strike to deal with real issues of life and death. It’s as if months of repetition had made Olbermann more comfortable with the Lewinsky story, from which he could maintain a comfortable, smirking distance.

That might not have translated well to an actual international crisis. But it would have been interesting to find out: After all, what was the first Gulf War if not a highlight reel? What distinguished Olbermann from his colleagues was a sensitivity to semantic bullshit — that “‘demagogue’ is not a verb” instinct — which came straight out of his sportscasting background. He and his colleagues at ESPN took a stale, cliché-ridden field of journalism and subverted it, something that news broadcasting still sorely needs. Olbermann could barely bring himself to utter a cliché or parrot a piece of briefingese with a straight face: During the Iraq crisis, after the umpteenth repetition of the Pentagon’s claim that it “tapped directly into Saddam’s internal decision-making process,” he burst out to NBC’s Andrea Mitchell, “It sounds like they’ve put a bug in his brain.” Likewise, Olbermann’s pop-culture allusions weren’t just funny, they reminded us that there was actually a world beyond the White House lawn and the House judiciary committee, something that the wonky Washington corps of television journalists rarely acknowledges.

Ultimately, Olbermann’s broadcasts were proof of how archaic the typical anchored news show is: 50 years into the history of television, all these men and women in power suits are talking to us as if we’re wide-eyed innocents trustingly absorbing every word. Smarter broadcasters, like the ESPN sports desk and MTV’s programmers, know different. They know we’re sitting at home talking back to the TV; that if we don’t laugh with them we will assuredly laugh at them. ESPN’s sportscasters — like Beavis and Butt-head or their half-dozen successors on MTV — gain our empathy because they talk back to the TV on our behalf. The message they send, which Olbermann transplanted to MSNBC, is: “We know what you’re thinking.” Whereas the message of the outdated news-anchor setup is: “We know what you should think.”

Of course, Olbermann’s theater of bemusement also simply allowed us to wallow in the non-news of the past year while pretending we were above it all. But he must have known that, had he marched from his Cornell commencement speech into principled unemployment, a hundred John Gibsons would have been ready to take his place. Now that he’s jumping to Fox’s sports desk, he has diplomatically said that he’s not doing it out of disillusionment with the news business. Still, the decision recalls the ambivalence he betrayed when he first signed with MSNBC, telling reporters, “I am now, for better or worse, joining the ranks of newsmen.” The question is whether anyone at MSNBC, or anywhere else, will care that it took him only a year under its regime to decide that the experience was, if not worse, at the very least no better.

You might think, then, that the midst of SI’s annual journey to the bank would be precisely the wrong time to launch a competitor. But the publishers of the biweekly ESPN: The Magazine (that’s really the subtitle) have used the timing to offer the first criticism of the swimsuit issue that may actually hurt. Infantile? Sexist? These jibes roll right off SI’s SPF 15-coated back. (Anyway, the persons really degraded in the 1998 rendition — an equator-themed tour of the Third World — are not the high-paid Western professionals in their thongs but the Maasai tribesmen, Indonesian tambourine players and Ecuadorian guinea-pig chefs who serve as the Pier 1 background tchotchkes.)

No, what SI’s annual breastfest is, ESPN snipes, is lame. Its promotions on ESPN: The Network joked about producing an all-nude issue — “but tastefully done” — and editor John Papanek opens his first column, “We are not all nude, or even close.” ESPN, aggressively seeking young sports fans, has turned SI’s cash cow into a liability, a stringy comb-over, a Vitalis-drenched symbol of retro decrepitude. Thus Papanek’s declaration — no doubt aimed more at quotation in industry assessments like this one than at readers who have already spent enough time with the magazine to get around to the editor’s column — that “this is not your father’s magazine.”

So what’s your magazine, junior? It’s frightfully close to its near-anagram Spin, for one thing, with a large trim size, wry photo spreads and modish design riffs and fonts that could have come off a Blur album cover. (It’s a great format for the gorgeous Nike and Nautica ads, by the way — and the National Fluid Milk Processor Promotion Board bought nine full pages.)

But more important, your magazine is a TV show. This long-promoted launch is just another step toward the multimedia Ragnarok impending between ESPN and Time Warner’s SI, manifest in the launch of the CNNSI network in 1996 and escalating through their well-publicized bidding wars for writers. And the magazine quite literally looks like the cable channel on glossy paper, not only cross-referencing ESPN’s programming but also picking up the channel’s visuals, from the orange-and-brown color scheme of its NCAA tournament graphics to its use of the ubiquitous wide sans-serif headline type that everyone will be using on their late-’90s-party invitations five years from now.

But the tie-ins run deeper. ESPN touts its “forward-looking” philosophy: It will look, Papanek says, “to the next two weeks and beyond — not behind to last week’s events, the results and highlights of which we expect you will have already got from SportsCenter.” And that’s fine and good, but there are more than editorial benefits to that. There’s a greater percentage in prompting reader-viewers to flip to ESPN next week than in asking them to reset the dials on the wayback machine.

The influence of broadcast journalism comes through too in ESPN’s promise that the magazine will not be so, well, magaziney. “No press-box pontificating, no wistful reminiscences,” Papanek hammers; in Newsweek (March 16), Richard Turner writes that its founders intend it to “‘celebrate’ sports and be a fan.”

Now the implication that SI takes more of a crusty sportswriter’s attitude than a fan’s is exaggerated to begin with — but why should that be a damaging attack at all? Pontification — or criticism, if you will — is the offshoot, not the opposite, of fandom. Sports journalism hardly lacks for see-no-evil boosters. The last thing it needs is another outlet that thinks its job is to prove to the fans it loves this game (any game) as much as they do and avoids rocking the boat with too much bad-mouthing, sarcasm or, God forbid, investigation.

Fortunately, ESPN, spin notwithstanding, does not seem to be that magazine. It is fresh, succinct and fun in all the right ways, particularly in the front-of-book “Jump” section. But it’s also thick with well-written — if occasionally purple — features and profiles. The strongest is Tom Friend’s “The Mismatch,” about boxer Tommy Morrison, who was diagnosed with HIV in 1996 and has refused all conventional treatments and medications. It’s a complicated portrait of a man from an abusive background, his jumble of stubborn and apocalyptic beliefs and his decision to gamble not only his life but his wife’s.

It’s also, though, a case study of the advantages and pitfalls of the TV-print marriage. By this past weekend the story was on ESPN network as a feature narrated by Friend himself. Condensed by necessity, the TV profile (with photo stills from the mag) was naturally sketchier, but its script was balanced; however, compared with the print piece, the production of the broadcast clip made Morrison’s self-treatment decision seem practically inspired. “He decided not to trust the doctors,” went the voice-over as inspirational music swelled. “He decided to trust himself.” The piece closed noting, as a fairly strong-looking Morrison walked away from the camera, that the year the doctors gave him to live was almost over. (No doubt concerned over implicitly endorsing self-doctoring for a killer virus, the network tacked on a disclaimer: “The Morrisons stress anyone … should educate themselves about HIV before making the same decisions that they did.”)

There’s no point declaring a winner between ESPN and SI on the basis of one thick, long-planned, well-funded launch issue — nor is it clear there needs to be one, ever — but SI has justification to worry: The first ESPN is a far better read than the same week’s rather slight March Madness SI (March 16). Still, for all ESPN’s done to accentuate its difference, it’s a nuanced one. Just like SI, it focuses heavily on the major team sports; and after the year of Venus Williams, women’s sports magazines, Tara and Michelle and the WNBA, there are no features on women athletes except an overview of the women’s NCAA Tournament and yet another column on UConn scoring champ Nykesha Sales. Cheap shot? Maybe, if every page of the issue weren’t obviously calculated to scream, “You are holding the future of sports, boyyyy!”

ESPN’s back page is titled “0:01″ — “a last-second shot at the buzzer” — as compared with SI’s “Point After,” and that about captures the shading of hipness ESPN seeks: to be basketball to SI’s football, not ahead of the moment, just close enough behind to use the moment as a wind break. This is not your father’s magazine, but it’s not your kid brother’s — or sister’s — either.

Repurpose This Graphic! It’s a fine line between Nostradamus and Nostradumbass, as several of our more excitable media outlets discovered over Asteroid 1997 XF11′s not quite 24 hours of infamy. Thursday morning CNN Interactive was blaring the headline: “Collision Course: Bracing for an Asteroid Impact.” By Friday we were reading, “Kiss Your Asteroid Goodbye” on the cover of the New York Post. But the memento mori moment wasn’t too brief for the CNN site to immediately cook up a nifty graphic, no doubt intended as the heraldry for a score-and-a-half years of exercised call-in shows and nightly countdowns. We can never mend the broken dreams of the network-news-theme composers whose “Symphonies for Vertebrate Species Die-Off” lie half-scribbled beside their synthesizers — we will never read that Roger Rosenblatt essay on how our nemesis in the sky reminds us that we are all brothers at heart — but we don’t have to let this computer-enhanced rock go to waste! A few possible uses:

• Cover art for a comeback concept album by Rush
• Emblem for a really, really dystopic 2028 Summer Olympiad
• Campaign poster for the first presidential candidate of the Heaven’s Gate Party

Send your suggestions to Save the Rock ’98.

Information Wants to Score a Book Deal: “In this heady age of rapid technological change, we all struggle to maintain our bearings.” No, you’re not reading a display ad for the New York Times’ new Thursday Circuits section — this bit of Brave New Worldery sprung from the keyboards of a dozen of the heppest commentators in new media. It kicks off the founding document of Technorealism, a statement of principles on the social meaning of technology that seeks “to expand the fertile middle ground between techno-utopianism and neo-Luddism.” Said fertilizer is being earnestly spread at Feed, where several TechnorealistsTM — who include editors and contributors to Feed, Wired and the late Word — are debating the role of government in cyberspace and whether “information wants to be free” or “information wants to be protected.” Long-overdue, level-headed, intellectual effort to wrest tech dialogue from hyperventilating extremists? Bald-faced attempt by professional phrase-coiners to form a cyberpundit cartel for the new millennium? Who says it can’t be both? Judge for yourself — but for the love of God, hang on to those bearings.

Laun insists there’s a new breed of mini-golfer out there, beyond the adorable tots and irony-seeking Gen-Xers. The windmills and wigwams are still around, but modern mini courses are more likely to look like scaled-down models of Pebble Beach than Kmart versions of Disneyland. “The courses that have started coming up since the mid-’80s are really very challenging,” enthuses Laun, “with undulations and contours that lend themselves to more skilled putting rather than luck.”

Nobody needs to tell the pros that if you’re going to play a serious game, you can’t be teeing off into a doll house. So does this mean our mini golf innocence is soon to be so much water under the itty bitty drawbridge? While there are not as yet any Nike ads featuring sweaty mini-golfers grunting and puking as they swing across their teeny holes, that day may soon be upon us. “Our association has over 40,000 players all over the world,” boasts Laun, “and some of them are making upward of $1,500 playing in a single weekend.” That’s a considerable step up from the free game tokens and troll dolls normally accepted as the primo booty for beating par at the local family fun center.

That kind of lucre still doesn’t approach what Tiger Woods gets for putting on his hat in the morning, or what the less-talented pros get for failing to make the cut in this week’s PGA Championship. It doesn’t matter. As with all true artists, the great ones aren’t in it for abundant riches. Before miniature golf entered his life, says mini golf iron man Elmer Lawson, “Most of the time I was busy working or sleeping. This way I get out to see the world.”

Lawson had played regular-style golf for years, but it was at his local Redding, Pa., miniature golf course that he first heard the siren song of the putter. He was drawn by the glamour. He was drawn by the excitement. He was drawn by the chance to win a gift certificate to the local mall. “I saw they were offering prizes, and it cost only 10 bucks to enter the tournament,” he explains. “Basically, you had nothing to lose.” From then on, the plastic windmills of his mind were set inexorably in motion. In his first competition, Lawson finished fourth. It was a heady brush with the leader board.

Before he knew it, Lawson had entered a milieu in which he could play an entire game in less time than it takes to do a load of laundry, where he was rapidly racking up vouchers for his local shopping megaplex. More important, he was no longer just Elmer Lawson, coating technician for the local lock manufacturer, he was Elmer Lawson, internationally ranked miniature golf player. He went on to bigger tournaments in his home state, then on to the nationals in Florida and, eventually, all the way to a global level championship in Denmark last year. This season, Elmer’s lined up a rigorous schedule of traveling the circuit that will take him to such exotic outposts of mini golf action as Portugal and Switzerland.

Tom Dixon too can testify to the excitement of the mini golf circuit — and this is a man who knows from thrills. “I used to be a rodeo rider,” says the 44-year-old Kansas City cowboy. “I rode bareback for 10 years. I kept getting hurt so many times I had to retire.” It was during those halcyon days that Dixon discovered the joy of mini golf. He had survived wild horses, but could he conquer the rough and tumble world of diminutive driving? The answer, unequivocally, was yes. Now Dixon divides his time between trucking and working the lucrative pro mini-golf circuit. He’s a bona fide star of the miniature golf hierarchy, a man whose picture has been on the cover of European magazines and who has ranked No. 1 in the U.S. two years in a row.

But the Astroturfed road to mini glory is laden with sand traps. The PGA teems with superstars, deep-pocketed sponsors and die-hard fans. Miniature golf does not. While the charms of this genteel recreation might float with the Swiss, any athletic endeavor in the U.S. with the word “mini” remains a mighty tough sell. Overseas, the game is played with white knuckle concentration on impeccable, bonsai sized lawns. In our land, the sport is still often played within putting distance of the change machines.

But if people want to laugh at what Lawson does with his free time, “I just tell them they can play me whenever they want to and I’ll beat them. People think you just go up there and hit the ball, but you’ve got to know how to line it up. It’s a science.” That understanding is starting to take root. “More Americans played miniature golf last year than went camping,” chirps Deborah Paulk, editor of the brand new Golf & Family Fun magazine.

The image boost has been helped along in no small part by ESPN, the network that has broadened the definition of what constitutes “sports” to include cheerleading championships, tree cutting competitions and something known officially as swamp buggy races. Miniature golf tournaments have been airing regularly on the network for five years now, and while they probably don’t generate the same excitement as Fitness Beach, they do garner consistently high ratings among families. This season, viewers can expect more high voltage action, culminating in September with the newly inaugurated American Masters Miniature Golf Championship. Though the very word “Masters” suggests a final nail in the funhouse coffin of old-school miniature golf, the game still retains a few of its arcade trappings. The Florida course where part of the tournament will be held features a smoking, steaming, belching artificial volcano that erupts every 15 minutes. If you’re going, plan your shots accordingly.

Though it now has its own Masters Tournament and international celebrity circuit, the legends of mini golf know they haven’t quite broken the big time yet. But they’re ready. “They’ve made movies of the characters from NASCAR racing,” says Tom Dixon. “Why can’t they do that with miniature golf?” Still, even if Tom Cruise does for miniature golfers what Billy Bob Thornton did for simple-minded homicidal maniacs, the real players will remain humble. Lawson probably still won’t need a caddy. After all, he says, “I only got three clubs.”