February 2002 Archives

I don't care what anybody says; I like watching figure skating.

Sure, the competitions sometimes have foregone conclusions. And yes, with the constant bitching, weeping, and illegal beating of other competitors with blunt objects, sometimes skating seems more soap opera than sport. But the same could be said of professional wrestling, and nobody calls wrestling fans gay -- although that may be because many wrestling fans also list "gun enthusiast" as one of their hobbies. Hey, at least my guys wait until they're off of national television to start groping each other.

When they're not suggesting that watching figure skating is tantamount to relinquishing all your claims on manhood, those who don't understand the intricacies of the sport usually claim that it's just plain dull. These people aren't wrong per se, except insofar as their opinion differs from mine. They just don't appreciate the subtle joys that skating can bring.

For one thing, when a skater pulls off the rare, truly brilliant performance; when every motion is a fluid, graceful extension of the music; when the jumps seem to hang in the air for much longer than gravity normally allows; figure skating becomes something more than a performing art or a pseudo-sport. It can be profoundly stirring. On occasion, I have been moved to tears. Seriously.

But mainly figure skating is fun to watch because sometimes the skaters suck. And figure skating fans like myself enjoy that, because we are evil.

Not a lot evil, mind you. I mean, it's not like we're watching the Special Olympics and hoping that somebody crashes. It's just that there's just something strangely satisfying about seeing a highly trained athlete collapse onto the ice in a crumpled heap of assorted limbs, sequins, and failure.

Oh sure, when a skater falls, what you hear from the crowd is groans of dismay, but don't be fooled. They're only doing that because they're afraid you might otherwise hear the gleeful cackling inside their head. My girlfriend and I take particular enjoyment in loudly exclaiming, "Ass!" whenever it appears that a meeting with the surface of the rink is imminent. For those of you looking for some side activity to make skating more interesting, this also makes a fine drinking game.

Now before you pass judgment, consider for a moment why people watch the Winter Games at all. The athletes do display impressive feats of stamina and agility, but that will only take you so far with an American viewing audience. After all, is one good luge run really that distinct from another? Maybe your Norwegian roommate Nils can tell the difference, but I'm pretty sure Mavis Johnson of Wichita can't.

No, what actually keeps the people watching is the knowledge that, at any given moment, that speed skater might take a blade to the jugular. That biathlete might catch a stray bullet. That ski jumper might reach the bottom of the hill only to explode in a puff of powder, ski poles, blood, and mucus.

It's this possibility of severe, even fatal, injury that makes the victory of a successful competitor thrilling. And while some may be loath to admit it, the agony of defeat is often just as entertaining. Nobody wants to see anybody hurt badly or killed, but a tibia-shattering high-speed collision is still rip-roarin' good fun.

Which is why I think people who appreciate other winter sports so often malign figure skating. To many, seeing a bitchy teenage girl's butt connect with a sheet of ice is simply not as spectacular as seeing a bobsled shoot out of the track and plummet through the roof of a ski chalet.

That is, unless you realize that there are some things that are harder to run up against than snowpack, or ice, or tree trunks.

Things like a fragile self-image, perched precariously on the belief that you're a great skater.

Things like four long years spent watching your peers enjoy their childhoods, while your every waking hour is focused on training.

Things like knowing that son of a bitch from the Ukraine isn't half as good as you, but he's got a gold medal and all you've got is an ass crack full of shave ice.

You see, the key to appreciating skating is to understand that, to skaters, the seven minutes they're performing is life. When an Olympic figure skater skates a clean program, her life has a meaning. And when she goes down hard, legs akimbo, cheeks splayed across the surface of the rink, you can almost hear her little heart shatter. That's what makes it so dang fun to watch.

In fact, I dare say that the only part of NBC's Olympic Coverage I found more stimulating was the closing ceremony, and then only because I was straining to catch a glimpse of something peeking over the top of skank queen Christina Aguilera's leather hooker pants.

Yet, for all its primal joys, figure skating is a difficult thing to watch on television. That's because televised coverage of skating events carries with it something so unspeakably ghastly that after ten minutes you'll find yourself praying for Johnson and Johnson to break in and tell you how much they care about your kids.

I'm talking, of course, about that godawful commentary. Figure skating commentary is a singularly awful blend of jealous sniping and endlessly repeated clichés, made all the worse by the fact that you can't really mute it if you want to know whether the skaters are in synch with their music. It is my dream that some day the Separate Audio Program feature on my TV will allow me to listen to skating music without skating commentary, in addition to allowing Spanish speaking peoples to enjoy reruns of CHiPs.

The problem is that NBC chose skaters to comment on skating. This is a huge mistake because skaters are wholly incapable of distancing themselves from the competition. To the sympathetic commentator, all is beautiful and affecting, a successful routine being the equivalent of an extended orgasm. To the unsympathetic, any mistake is a personal affront, punishable by the severest form of browbeating.

In case you've been fortunate enough to be deaf during the skating coverage of the last two weeks, allow me to try to describe this dreadfulness to you.

First, you should know your enemy. During the Ladies' Free Skate last Thursday, this was NBC's crack commentating squad:

Sandra Bezic has nothing good to say, and yet, against all advice, says things pretty much constantly. NBC's Olympics web site describes her as "a 1972 Olympian and former Canadian pairs champion." Hardly the most auspicious pedigree, but to hear her talk you'd think gold medals came out of her ass. She currently works as a skating choreographer, additional evidence to bolster the supposition that those that can't do, teach.

Her commentary is solely defined by the fact that she cannot allow a skater to make the tiniest of errors without pointing it out in great detail. Sometimes her remarks take the form of abject shock, sometimes mock disappointment, but whatever the turn of phrase, the message is clear: "In my day, I could skate rings around this pathetic charlatan." Even though she couldn't.

Catch Phrase: "She must be so disappointed in herself."

Scott Hamilton, God bless him, is sincerely one of the best skaters of all time, and clearly an all around great guy. For a man with only one testicle, he has a surprisingly cheery outlook. So optimistic is he that he will sometimes declare a skater to be the clear gold medal winner, moments before the judges give him straight 4.6's and award the gold to the Russian.

Sadly, his overwhelmingly positive attitude does not translate into good announcing, and he spends most of his time countering the bitchy vitriol spewing from Sandra Bezic. When a skater lands a difficult jump, his effusive praise reaches such a fever pitch it sometimes sounds like he's just taken a massive crap in the announcing booth.

Catch Phrase: "Well, he/she/they gave a gold medal performance tonight, and nobody can ever take that away from him/her/them!"

Tom Hammond is, well, I'm not really sure who the hell Tom Hammond is, except that his head is very large and puffy, and he doesn't appear to know very much about skating. He's plainly afraid that if he says something wrong, Sandra Bezic will taunt him caustically. As a result, when he does open his mouth, it's only to unleash some patently obvious truism that couldn't possibly get him into trouble.

As near as I can tell, the reason Hammond is there is that some relatively sentient NBC producer has detected that the skating experience might be enhanced by not having to listen to constant inane commentary. As a result, Hammond periodically tries to get Sandra and Scott to just shut the hell up for a while. It never works.

Catch Phrase: "During this next program, we will keep our commentary to a minimum."

Let's listen in now as these seasoned broadcasting veterans enjoy the final moments of one competitor's long program:

HAMILTON: "What a wonderful display of technical prowess, a beautiful routine skated almost flawlessly!"

BEZIC: "Yes, a nearly flawless program, except for about fifteen minor slip-ups which I will now show you in slow motion several times so that I can point out how disappointing her performance actually was."

HAMMOND: "For you viewers new to skating, slow motion is a technique in which we replay the film at a lower speed, thereby 'slowing' the 'motion'."

BEZIC: "You can see right here, as she's going up for her jump, she slips a little bit off her edge. It's very sloppy, and should lose her some points. All in all, a disappointing program."

HAMMOND: "She'll probably lose some points with the judges if they perceive her as not being very good."

HAMILTON: "But she was still very strong artistically, and she really got the crowd behind her, which the judges love to see. I think she's got a good chance for gold here."

The skater sits waiting for her marks with the expression of someone who is passing a stone. After a few moments, the scores flash up on the screen. Most are mediocre to good, with the exception of the French judge, who has somehow managed to give an artistic mark of -0.4.

HAMILTON: "Wow! That will take her out of medal contention. I don't know what happened there with the judges. In my mind, and, I think, the minds of everyone in this audience, that performance was worthy of a gold medal."

BEZIC: "Actually, those marks are higher than I expected."

HAMMOND: "Next up are the three skaters placed highest after the short program.  We understand that you will want to enjoy their performances uninterrupted, so during their programs we will keep our commentary to a minimum."

The next skater begins her program, and there are about fifteen seconds of silence from the panel. During that time, the skater makes two minor mistakes, and you can hear Sandra Bezic actually vibrating in her chair as she battles the urge to express her outrage. Finally...

BEZIC (explosively): "She stepped out a little bit there, that's going to cost her!"

HAMILTON: "Yes, that's a mandatory deduction, but next up is the triple Lutz, double toe combination. Nobody does these better than her. I've watched her do them all week in practice, and it's simply breathtaking. She's getting into position now and... OH YES!! JUST FANTASTIC HEIGHT THERE!!"

BEZIC: "She two-footed that landing."

HAMILTON: "But she got so much height and such big rotation!"

BEZIC: "She's got to be disappointed with her performance right now, as are, I think, the judges, the audience, and generations of her ancestry watching from on high. She'll be lucky to be in the top ten, and luckier still not to be deported when she returns to her home country."

HAMMOND: "This Russian skater's home country being, of course, Russia."

And so on. Perhaps you can see how some people might be turned off by two hours of this sort of thing.

Fortunately, there is a solution that could make figure skating the toast of the next Winter Olympics. I've hit upon a way to make televised skating coverage more accessible to the common viewer, more tolerable to watch with the sound on, and, at the same time, less gay-associative. My idea is this: fire Sandra Bezic and replace her with professional wrestling personality, "Macho Man" Randy Savage.

Oh, come on; just tell me you wouldn't tune in to hear this:

HAMILTON: "Her next jump is one that she does better than pretty much anybody in the universe, and perhaps beyond: the triple Salchow. She goes back for it, and... OH YES!!!!"

SAVAGE: "Awwwww yeeah, she snapped into that triple like a Slim Jim! She just crushed the Russian's medal hopes like a commie grape, brother!"

HAMILTON: "Now a death drop into a camel spin. This performance is shaping up to be one of the crowning moments of figure skating for all time, ever. It's truly something for her coach, her teammates, her toy poodle Floofy, Deney Terrio, really the whole world to cherish and be proud of!"

SAVAGE: "You bet your half-full nut sack, Scott, awwwww yeeah! And speakin' of death drops, my little bald friend, I'm layin' down a formal challenge right here, right now, for Brian Boitano to meet me in the rink this Saturday, if he thinks he's man enough! What you gonna do, Boitano, awwww yeeah?"

And why stop there? We could add some scantily clad cheerleaders to bounce around in the kiss-and-cry area. Instead of little girls picking up the thrown flowers after well-skated routines, how about midgets in face paint... with no skates! And wouldn't you think "Leaping" Lanny Poffo could do one hell of a triple toe loop?

No, no, I'm being ridiculous. Just fire Bezic. And hire midgets. That should be good enough for Torino.

Outside of the accounting department at 30 Rockefeller Plaza or Dick Ebersol's immediate family, the words "NBC Olympic coverage" do not conjure up many pleasant associations. Assemble a list of the most annoying trends in sports coverage over the last quarter-century, cue up the videotape from the last couple Olympics to carry the Peacock's imprimatur and get ready to tick off the offenses to both God and Roone Arledge, one-by-one.

Annoyed by excessive ad breaks that interrupt the flow of the broadcast and turn even the simplest of events into a montage of "Stay tuned for the results of the 100 meters" teasers? Then best to avoid NBC, where there's 19 minutes of commercials, promos and other throat clearing during every hour of coverage. Bored to tears by those sappy "Up Close and Personal" segments wherein we're told of the litany of illnesses, setbecks and Biblical plagues that the athletes have had to endure on the road to Olympic glory, including, but not limited to, rickets, consumption, irritable bowel syndrome, dead or missing pets, sickly second cousins and a dose of the clap apparently contracted en route to the stadium? Sorry, pal -- that's NBC's bread-and-butter. Not a big fan of relentless jingoism mixed with repeated self-promotion? Then avert your eyes from NBC, children, where the network so thoroughly wraps itself in the flag while trumpeting its own programming that, by the end of the fortnight, you'll be convinced that the 13 stripes each represent a Must-See program while the 50 stars stand for each time Ross nailed Rachel. Put off by tape-delayed broadcasts of hours-old events? Then you'd best not spend too much time chewing over NBC's modus operandi. Some of the network's coverage of the Sydney Games was so musty by the time it made it to air, I'm half-convinced that, to cut costs, NBC simply colorized footage from the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, slapped it on the air and hoped no one would notice.

You can understand, then, why the prospect of NBC handing over its programming schedule to Winter Olympics coverage for the past two weeks didn't necessarily make the heart leap with joy. This, after all, is the network that turned the 2000 Summer Olympics into such a tedious, tape-delayed bore that it drove us to watch "Dharma & Greg" reruns, lest we spend one more second listening to Bob Costas prattling on about the historical significance of the beach volleyball competition. Just how good can we expect the coverage to be when that same network is about to work its drama-killing voodoo on the men's luge and women's 1,500-meter speedskating?

Well... pretty good, actually. Surprisingly good. Shockingly good.

It alarms me to write this probably as much as it floors you to read it, but I've really enjoyed NBC's Winter Olympics telecast. I've found the selection of the events covered to be extensive, the announcing to be largely top-drawer and the more bothersome aspects of modern-day televised sports to be astonishingly less bothersome than I anticipated. Considering it's regarded as a good day when I can walk away from an NBC sports broadcast without wanting to hurl a brick through my television set, that's nothing short of a minor miracle.

Not that NBC hasn't done its level best to try and goad me into altering the look of the ol' Magnavox with the help of a well-placed cinder block. Like CBS before it, NBC decided to hitch its Winter Olympics wagon to America's fascination with figure skating -- a fascination I do not share, understand or tolerate. I can think of dozens of things I'd rather watch -- test patterns, Dellaventura reruns, anything starring Tony Danza -- instead of a horde of rosy-cheeked, sequined pixies jumping around an ice rink and, after the Slovakian judge scores them a 5.6 instead of a 5.7, blubbering uncontrollably on camera.

I don't care that much for the women skaters, either.

But, on this issue at least, my tastes and those of the rest of the country diverge wildly. So 16 consecutive nights of figure skating it is! Double axles and triple toe loops for everybody! Regnant populus! Sic semper banality!

With NBC already exceeding the FDA's recommended daily allowance for skating, this naturally had to be the year everyone discovered that -- try to contain your surprise now -- a competition based on subjective scoring turned out to be more rigged than a hand of five-card draw at Ken Lay's house. And that gave the network all the impetus it needed to give us blanket coverage of the one thing worse than watching figure skating -- talking about figure skating. So, in between footage of the non-fixed events, we were treated to shot after shot of America's newest sweethearts (by way of Canada), Jamie Sale and David Pelletier. Here's Sale crying and Pelletier staring grimly as the scores are announced. Here's Sale and Pelletier talking about what they were thinking when she was crying and he was staring grimly as the scores were announced. Here's Sale and Pelletier getting their gold medals. Here's Sale and Pelletier getting a new medal ceremony. Here's Sale and Pelletier joining Barenaked Ladies on stage. Here's Sale and Pelletier sharing a hoagie.

(Maybe Sale and Pelletier were, indeed, swindled. Scott Hamilton certainly seemed to think so, and I'm in no position to dispute him, since I wouldn't even bother to turn my head if Sale and Pelletier magically appeared in my kitchen and started performing lutzes. All the same, I have a hard time believing there would been quite the hue and cry had it been the stern-faced Eastern Europeans rooked out of the gold instead of the doe-eyed North Americans. But on the bright side, if the IOC is now in the business of righting judging wrongs, I guess that the 1972 U.S. men's basketball team will be able to stop by the office to pick up their replacement gold medals any day now, right? No? Oh.)

NBC committed other offenses, though nothing really rising to the human rights violation level of excessive figure skating coverage. There were NBC's promos for the Olympic coverage itself, blending rock music and quick edits and -- in a radio ad airing here in San Francisco, at least -- a Jeff Spicoli-esque voice-over announcer, all to attract a younger, hipper crowd to the Olympics while making me feel approximately 104 years old. And then you had Bob Costas talking. A lot. There were the commercial breaks long enough for you to thaw, marinate and cook a steak. And the almost human-like vocal inflections of unblinking NBC sports cyborg Hannah Storm. You had Jay Leno's insipid Tonight Show, now offering warmed-over jokes on a global scale. And Bob Costas still talking. There were musical groups performing pop tunes as out of place in Salt Lake City as they were during the halftime of the football playoffs. And will you just put a sock in it, Shorty? I'm trying to watch footage of Jamie Sale and David Pelletier making snow angels.

But you know what? I don't really mind all that. Because NBC also did something really clever, something that allowed me to escape from the rock concerts and HannahBot 2.5 and the ongoing soliloquies of Bob Costas.

It put the Olympics on cable. And in doing so, it became the first network to take full advantage of the flexibility and exhaustiveness that cable can add to Olympic coverage.

This isn't the first time someone thought of farming out the Olympics to cable. NBC tried something similar in 1992 with its misbegotten Olympic Triplecast pay-per-view scheme. Four years ago in Nagano, CBS and TNT split the Olympics coverage, with the cable channel handling the onerous daytime chores with the Eye Network hogged the prime-time glory. And as recently as the Sydney Games, NBC shuffled off less popular events and preliminary-round coverage to its two cable outlets. But in each of those cases, cable played the warm-up act to network TV's headliner. Yeah, if you wanted to see the first luge run or some of the Nordic Combined or maybe highlights of the Sweden-China women's hockey tilt, then cable had you covered. But if you wanted the marquee events, the finals, the big story, then it was prime time or no time, baby.

Not in Salt Lake City. This time around, NBC treated MSNBC and CNBC as complements rather than competitors. The result? You were just as likely to see an eminently watchable event on one of the cable outposts as you were on the mother ship.

You also got to see a wider variety of events. I've tuned into substantial portions of each Winter Olympics dating back to 1980; this is the first time I can recall a network devoting any appreciable amount of time to covering winter biathlon, as CNBC did last weekend. And it's a pity that it hadn't made it to the airwaves sooner since, really, there's not a sport in the world that wouldn't be improved by introducing the element of gunplay into the rules -- even figure skating. Especially figure skating.

So I got to see the biathlon and some pretty exciting cross-country races and team events not involving squads from the U.S., such as a thoroughly entertaining Czech Republic-Sweden hockey match... all without ever having to watch NBC if I didn't feel like it.

Oh, sweet cable. First, you give me shows featuring cursing and partial nudity. Then, you introduce me to the simple pleasures of curling. Is there anything you can't do?

Cable provided me with something other than compelling hockey games and coverage of otherwise obscure winter sports -- something good for me, not so good for our friends at the Peacock Network. It gave me some place to run to whenever the broadcast on NBC began to drag.

NBC's going to commercial break for the next 10 minutes? Then Phil's going to CNBC -- possibly for the rest of the evening. An uplifting portrait of some skier battling the twin nightmares of beriberi and psoriasis? Um... think I'll check in on the Belarus-Finland game. Bob Costas is still blabbing on about some bit of minutiae or another? Click. HannahBot trying to understand why it is we humans cry? Click. More figure skating coverage? Click, click, click.

(And as my colleague, Jason Snell, points out, throw TiVo into the mix, and you've got the best of all possible worlds. Weepy figure skaters, Bob Costas and other instances of dead air disappear in a fast-forwarded blur as you skip ahead to something actually interesting.)

The twin balms of cable and an itchy finger on the fast-forward button wash away a lot of grievances. NBC's policy of America-First, America-always coverage? Doesn't make no never-mind to me, not even the pairs figure skating promo that informed us Canada's Sale and Pelletier were trying to "bring home a medal for North America" (Guess that under NAFTA, we're all gold medalists -- even you, Mexico!). The decision to tape delay coverage on the West Coast? While I prefer my televised sports to be live, this particular boneheaded decision came at the behest of NBC's West Coast affiliates, who didn't want the spotlight events to be taking place at 5 p.m. local time -- Ebersol, to his credit, opposed the decision (Still doesn't make up for the XFL, Dick.). Besides, between TiVo and replay coverage on cable, if I really want to see a particular event, I'm going to find a way to see it -- live, plausibly live, or live on tape.

So yeah, maybe NBC's done a couple of things wrong with the Salt Lake City Games. But the network has also done enough right that I don't really mind the other stuff. Either that, or I'm suffering from Stockholm Syndrome and I've begun to sympathize with my captors. No matter. After some noticeable stumbles in Atlanta and Sydney, NBC got the formula for Olympic coverage largely right this time around -- offer up a full menu of events on as many channels as the FCC will allow. If the network sticks with this basic approach for its coverage of the Summer Olympics, I'll be tuning with an open mind and high expectations when the Athens Games start two years from now.

Perhaps Bob Costas will have wrapped up his thoughts on Jamie Sale and David Pelletier by then.

I haven't had much of a chance to watch the Winter Olympics, though in my defense, it's not as if NBC is tape-delaying coverage to coincide with my active, on-the-go lifestyle. I tuned in for a few minutes Saturday night to catch the Dave Matthews Band performing in front of a throng of flag-waving spectators, who seemed more excited to be on camera than listening to the guy who wrote "The Space Between." Then NBC cut away to pairs figure skating, and since that meant I would have to wait even longer to see actual athletic competition, I turned off the TV.

Instead, I watched something I had TiVoed off ESPN Classic a couple nights ago -- the U.S.-versus-Soviet Union hockey game from the 1980 Olympics. I've lost count of how many times I've seen that game in the past 22 years -- certainly enough to commit major portions of the contest to memory. When color commentator Ken Dryden starts talking about how the U.S. team is relying too much on goalie Jim Craig at the 10-minute mark of the third period, for instance, it's the safest bet you'll ever make that Mike Eruzione is going to wrist a shot past Vladimir Myshkin for a 4-3 lead as the building erupts.

Not to spoil the ending or anything, but the U.S. squad winds up holding on for the victory.

Yet, even though I know how it ends, even though I can recount every goal, I always watch that hockey game whenever it's on. I always shake my head at the end of the first period, when Viktor Tikhonov yanks Vladislav Tretiak -- certainly the greatest goalie of his time, and arguably, the best ever -- in favor of the untested Myshkin, since I know the bullheaded Soviet coach has just cost his team the game. I always chortle when U.S. coach Herb Brooks exults in the Eruzione goal, only to stop and stare pointedly at the game clock as he realizes he's about to endure the 10 longest minutes of his life. And I still get the same goosebumps, the ones that start at the 28-second mark when announcer Al Michaels informs viewers that "The crowd is going insane!" and end as soon as Michaels asks us whether or not we believe in miracles.

But this time when I watched that 22-year-old telecast, I noticed something else about the game -- something that was missing. Whenever there was a stoppage in play, Michaels and Dryden would talk about the game, the strategies in play, which players to keep an eye on and so forth. What they didn't talk about was ABC's prime-time lineup or the great shows you could expect to see on the network once the Winter Olympics concluded. When the cameras panned the stands at the Olympic Events center, we weren't treated to random shots of Fonzie, or Captain Steubing or the cast of Charlie's Angels sitting amongst the crowd. And when Alesander Maltsev scored early in the second period to give the Soviets a 3-2 lead, Al Michaels did not say, "The Maltsev score puts the U.S. in a tight spot... but not as tight as the spot Jack Tripper finds himself in with the Ropers on an all-new Three's Company, this Tuesday on ABC."

No network would ever allow that to happen nowadays. Sporting events have become extended promos, three-hour commercials for your prime-time schedule with the occasional home run, slam dunk or groin pull to give the announcers a break from relentlessly shilling Just Shoot Me. You can't go five minutes in the Super Bowl without Pat Summerall exhorting you to stay tuned for a special hour-long Malcolm in the Middle immediately following the game. Networks regularly squeeze promos for upcoming shows in between plays; it won't be long before they've figured out a way to trumpet the latest episode of That '70s Show in the time it takes the pitch to leave the pitcher's hand and arrive at home plate. And any time there's a shot of the crowd, you've got a fifty-fifty shot of seeing David Schwimmer or Tom Arnold or the skeletal remains of Calista Flockhart who -- can you imagine? -- have a show coming up on this very network.

In many ways, televised sports coverage has made a quantum leap since 1980. The graphics have gotten more sophisticated and telling. The camera work has become more extensive and revealing, with everything from skycams to goalcams giving us another look at the action. For every failed, ill-conceived attempt at innovation -- hello, glowing hockey puck -- you can name two or three improvements in sports broadcasting made during the past two decades.

Well... except for one area. Despite the crude graphics and two-decade-old conventions, that ABC broadcast of the U.S.-Soviet hockey game does an unparalleled job of depicting and describing the action -- telling you who won, who lost and why -- with an absolute minimum of distractions. There were no logos cluttering up the screen, no over-the-top halftime show to promote, no comedian-turned-analyst in the booth cracking up at his own one-liners -- in short, none of the relentless self-promotion that marks the sports telecasts of today.

Yes, TV networks have dramatically improved the methods they use to cover sports in the past 22 years -- I'm just not sure they've done much to improve the coverage itself.