The new era dawned Sunday as Fox Sports began its coverage of the National Football League. A new era, courtesy of MTV, CBS and Rupert Murdoch’s pocketbook, where nearly every tidbit of information has a sponsor.
Welcome to Brave New World, Madison Avenue-style via Hollywood.
“Fox NFL Sunday” opened with Terry Bradshaw’s show-bizzy introduction but then settled into a more sedate mix of news and features reminiscent of CBS’ “The NFL Today,” down to Lonnie Lardner playing the Lesley Visser role.
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All in all, a comfortable, if not familiar, package, with newcomers Howie Long and Jimmy Johnson fitting in well with ex-CBS vets Bradshaw and James Brown. At the same time, the commercials and graphics seemed aimed at the MTV generation. A split personality for now.
The only major network glitch was a satellite-switching problem out of Los Angeles that caused Chicago viewers to miss the first few minutes of the Bucs-Bears telecast. A Fox spokesman said it wouldn’t happen again. Uh-huh. At least the “Fox Box” worked this week.
Room for improvement: The local pregame shows on WFLD-Ch. 32 (“Bears Sunday Live”) and WBBM-Ch. 2 (“Chicago Bears Today”) were embarrassments. “Bears Sunday Live” was filled with all kinds of technical glitches, from wrong graphics to dead microphones to bad camera cues. Even analysts Gary Fencik and Mike Singletary, while appearing more relaxed than host Derrin Horton, looked like they were sitting in a hole on the set. “Chicago Bears Today” was filled with sports anchor Jim Berry mugging his way through 30 minutes of Bears promotions wearing a Bears shirt. What ever happened to objectivity? These two local productions were so bad, in fact, they have to improve. . . . don’t they?
Happy birthday: The statistics ESPN can muster to celebrate its 15th anniversary are impressive. Since the cable network first went on the air Sept. 7, 1979, the number of original hours of sports television has grown from 1,288 to more than 8,600; regional sports networks, from 3 to 22; retail sales of licensed sports merchandise, from $5.5 billion to $13.1 billion; Super Bowl press credentials, from less than 700 to more than 2,300; and NCAA Division I basketball teams, from 261 to 301.
The last one you can blame on Dick Vitale, another ESPN creation.
“We are incredibly proud of what we have accomplished in the past 15 years,” says ESPN President Steve Bornstein. He looks at one event-the 1987 America’s Cup yacht races-as the network’s turning point.
“We fulfilled the challenge of televising sports that the three-lettered networks wouldn’t bring to America,” says Bornstein. “We were able to take a sporting event that had been compared to watching grass grow and make it compelling drama for the American viewer.”
That year also marked ESPN’s first deal with the National Football League. “There were tears in my eyes” the night of the first NFL exhibition telecast, says anchor Chris Berman, who joined the network in its infancy. “There were 50 engineers hanging around just in case something got unplugged.”
Three years later, and ESPN completed its drive into mainstream America with a four-year contract with Major League Baseball. “Baseball made us a 12-months-a-year network,” says Bornstein. As more viewers discovered ESPN-there are more than 60 million subscribers now-sophistication replaced amateurism.
“We’ve devoted more resources than all the other networks combined addressing the serious issues of sports and society,” says Bornstein.
As if by coincidence, “Outside the Lines,” one of those ESPN “serious” programs, takes a look at physically and mentally challenged athletes in “Triumph of the Will” at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday.
“We treat sports with respect and we treat the viewer with respect,” says Berman. “We never treated it like religion. We’re not trying to make sports anything more than they are.”
As part of the 15th anniversary celebration, Berman will reunite with two other original anchors, Bob Ley and Tom Mees, for a commemorative edition of “SportsCenter” at 10 p.m. Wednesday.
Personnel moves: Former WLS-Ch. 7 sports reporter/anchor Mike Adamle, now host of the syndicated “American Gladiators,” has joined ESPN as a sideline reporter for its Saturday night college football telecasts. Adrian Karsten, like Adamle a Northwestern alum, moves to sideline reporter for the network’s Big 10 games. And Dan Jiggetts, of WSCR-AM and WFLD-Ch. 32, will work as an analyst on selected ESPN college games. . . . Four play-by-play men and three analysts will cover Notre Dame football on NBC this year: Tom Hammond-Cris Collinsworth, Saturday and Sept. 24; ND alum Don Criqui-Todd Christensen, Oct. 1; Jim Lampley-Christensen, Oct. 15; and Charlie Jones-Randy Cross, Oct. 29 and Nov. 19. John Dockery will be the sideline reporter on all six telecasts.
Down, Rover: Brent Musburger shamelessly turned ABC’s telecast of the Saturday night’s Notre Dame-Northwestern game into an unceasing love-in for Fighting Irish QB Ron Powlus and coach Lou Holtz, making NBC’s coverage of Notre Dame football seem more impartial than it is.
Programming note: Wednesday’s exhibition soccer match between the U.S. and England will be televised live on ESPN2 at 2 p.m. and on tape delay on ESPN at 6:30 p.m. Like the recent World Cup telecasts, there will be no commercial interruptions.