I don’t understand who he’s trying to protect? Those athletes know what they’re getting into when they go out there. They’re getting paid big money for it. If they catch a hard one, well, that’s breaks. Who am I to worry about them? Do they worry about me?

—Alberta Prouliere, Clerk/Transcriber

(On July 24, 2010, the preceding column, syndicated by the American Feature Service, a subsidiary of IBC, appeared in the Saturday supplements of 412 newspapers.)

Saturday, July 24, and Sunday, July 25, 2010

The television control room for the Prospectors-Minutemen game is located inside a mobile trailer parked at the intersection of Lombard and Stockton. The trailer itself is a stark, drab, lifeless gray vehicle, completely devoid of ornamentation or color. That’s outside. The inside of the trailer is an entirely different matter.

Inside burn a seemingly infinite collection of lights indicating the functioning state of the limbs, tendrils and organs that compose the giant named Entertainment. Is the giant moving too fast? A light flashes. Is it healthy? A light shines clear. Is a part of it diseased? A light flickers and dies. The lights are everywhere. Camera lights, sound intensity lights, voltage lights, elapsed playing time indication lights, time zone monitor lights, down status lights, scoring lights, lights of all hues, blinking on and off like a Christmas tree gone berserk.

In the midst of all these lights sits their omnipotent master, the program coordinator. At his discretion, a flicker will become a glow; a glow, a ring of blackness.

He sits before a master console filled with forty nine tiny viewscreens, one for each cameraman covering the game both on the street and in the studio.

The flavor of the game and the clarity of its progress as it appears on home viewing screens is a result, solely, of the program coordinator’s skill at the console—how cunningly he anticipates evasive actions, how quickly he sizes up the flow of power, how well he positions his cameramen relative to the players, from what angles he covers the letting of blood.

When the two teams, the Prospectors and the Minutemen, and their attendant cameramen come out onto the street, a series of blips will appear on a large screen in the center of the console. The blips indicate the location by number of every player on both teams, as well as the location of every cameraman. The player’s jerseys and the cameramen’s coveralls are woven from special radio frequency sensitive material, each man being assigned his own discrete frequency. A sensor in the control room locks to each signal and feeds its position to a central computer which translates it into a cogent visual display of location.