Voice of the Customer

TMCnet - The World's Largest Communications and Technology Community
 
| More
Voice of the Customer Featured Article Archive

[October 21, 2006]

The Baltimore Sun Rob Kasper column: Opera and NFL: Sound and fury that signifies fun

(Baltimore Sun, The (KRT) Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) Oct. 21--Whether I watch in person or I'm sitting on the sofa, I am a fan of professional football and opera. This weekend I plan to enjoy a good dose of both. The Ravens are off, but the Cincinnati-Carolina and Washington-Indianapolis football games on TV could be worth watching. Meanwhile at the Lyric, home of the Baltimore Opera Company, I will be on hand as the Greeks take on the Turks in a performance of The Siege of Corinth. The early line favors the Turks.

I have been following professional football since I was a boy. It is a leisure-time activity that was gleefully passed along to me by my father and merely tolerated by my mother. My mother's reaction to the "greatest game ever played," the Colts' televised 1958 overtime victory over the Giants, was that it delayed our Sunday supper.

I went to my first opera about 30 years ago, dragged there by my wife. She was getting her doctorate at the University of Chicago. As happens when graduate students are working on their dissertations, my wife got keenly interested in subjects other than her dissertation. She took a class on opera appreciation and decided going to the opera was something "we" would enjoy.

The Marriage of Figaro staged by the Lyric Opera in Chicago's magnificent Civic Opera House was a good start. The music was melodious, the sets were stunning -- it rained, real water, on stage--and I sat near a fat lady, with big hair, who jumped to her feet in rapturous applause as the curtain fell. I loved it. My second opera, Elektra by Richard Strauss, left me cold.

I was 1-for-2. That happens in opera and in football: You win some, you lose some.

There are other similarities, I have found, between being a fan of pro football and opera. Tickets for both are pricey, at least $100 for good seats. In both cases, you occasionally get lucky and latch on to a last-minute freebie.

Both venues have passion and drama. If you know the story of an opera, you pretty much know what is supposed to happen. Tosca will take that fatal leap. Don Giovanni will fry. But the particulars, how the singers pull the performance off and how they sound as they deal with fate, keep you interested. Football, on the other hand, should be unpredictable. This year that has not been the case, at least when the Ravens are on offense.

There are moments watching both that make my spine tingle. Todd Heap's touchdown catch to beat the Chargers and Diana Soviero's gripping solo last March in Dead Man Walking come to mind. And there are dead spots, long delays in the action on the football field to accommodate getting the commercials on television and draggy sections in operas to allow shifts in scenery. The mind wanders.

I am told that long ago in Italy when operagoers got bored with a performance, they closed the drapes around their boxes and partied until the action on stage got more interesting. This sounds a lot like the descriptions I have heard of what goes on in some football-stadium skyboxes.

Second-guessing plays a big role in both the football and opera experiences. By halftime of the game or intermission of the opera, almost everybody has become a critic. "The running game is still stagnant," someone cracking open a beer will mutter. "The tenor is great, but the soprano is mushy," an espresso sipper remarks. Still we go back for more.

The crowd is better behaved at the opera. You do get those annoying late arrivals that, thanks to the layout of the Lyric, climb over you to get to their seats. But never once at the opera has a well-lubricated fan fallen on me. That happened to me at the Ravens-Chiefs game a few years back.

Operagoers dress better than football fans. Every once in while I see a man in a tux, a woman in a glittering gown. And although those lurid cigarette factory girls in Carmen did quicken my heart, nothing at the Lyric has captured my attention quite the way the Ravens cheerleaders do.

There is, in my experience, no equivalent for opera fans of the local sports talk radio shows. But there are the Saturday afternoon broadcasts of the Live From the Met (heard in Baltimore on WBJC 91.5 FM) and my latest indulgence, the Metropolitan Opera channel on Sirus Satellite Radio.

My hope is to combine my two joys: to watch Ravens on television with the sound turned down while listening to a live opera broadcast on radio. I am looking forward to the first Saturday in January. That is when I Puritani is scheduled to be broadcast from the Met, and when the first round of the NFL playoffs are on TV.

rob.kasper@baltsun.com

Subscribe to Rob Kasper's podcast

Copyright (c) 2006, The Baltimore Sun
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News.
For reprints, email tmsreprints@permissionsgroup.com, call 800-374-7985 or 847-635-6550, send a fax to 847-635-6968, or write to The Permissions Group Inc., 1247 Milwaukee Ave., Suite 303, Glenview, IL 60025, USA.

[ Back To Voice of the Customer Community's Homepage ]


FOLLOW US

FREE Voice of the Customer eNewsletter

Subscribe Now

Featured White Papers

  • Seven Best Practices for Speech Analytics: Speech analytics is valuable for identifying issues in the contact center. However, limiting its use to the contact center only considers a portion of all customer interactions and subsequently only reveals a small part of the voice of the customer. This paper discusses how organizations can optimize their Speech Analytics implementation strategy to realize the promise of this exciting technology.
  • Understanding the Voice of the Customer: Today's contact centers involve a sea of information that must be captured, processed, and distributed on a daily basis. Effective use of this information enables companies to remain competitive in an increasingly aggressive and customer centric marketplace. An overwhelming percentage of the information that circulates in a contact center's audio recordings, documents, web pages, and emails is unstructured in that it resides outside of a normal structured database and cannot be managed efficiently. These unstructured items contain valuable information, yet this information historically has been difficult to organize, categorize, and access.

Case Studies

  • Aflac: Aflac, the leading provider of guaranteed-renewable insurance turned to Autonomy to help them automate the process of monitoring their contact center agent for quality and compliance. The company now has a system that can offer continued improvement in agent quality and productivity while enhancing the customer experience. ...
  • Avaya: Avaya, a global leader in business communications, inherited 880 websites as well as numerous intranets and extranets when it was spun off from Lucent Technologies. The sheer volume and diversity of the sites and the over 500 content creators resulted in inefficient content distribution rife with divergent branding, messaging, and product information. ...

Video Showcase

    Interview with Autonomy: Rich Tehrani interviews Simon Hayhurst, SVP of Autonomy

Featured Events

  • Multichannel Analytics with Autonomy Explore: In today's world of constant connectivity there are a variety of direct and indirect channels of communication between an enterprise (or a brand) and its customers. 80% of these valuable interactions are generated in a human-friendly, unstructured format across multiple touchpoints and channels. With this ever growing mountain of information how do you extract the emerging trends and topics of interest to the enterprise? ...
  • SES Chicago 2011: Marketers and SEO professionals attend SES Chicago each year to network and learn about topics such as PPC management, keyword research, SEO, social media, local, mobile, link building, duplicate content, multiple site issues, video optimization, site optimization, usability and more. The conference offers 70+ sessions, intensive training workshops, and an expo floor packed with companies that can help you grow your business. While you're at it, network with peers and leading industry vendors. Programmed by the SES advisory board, you can be assured - SES content really is king! ...
 
 
| More