A trip to the Rolling Rock brewery. A couple of roller-coaster rides at Kennywood. An Oakland adventure to the old Forbes Field wall and The O.

	Tammie Arroyo, Associated Press Fox News Sports Correspondant Leeann Tweeden poses next to an AOL Nascar at the March 2004 premiere of "Nascar 3D: The IMAX Experience" in Universal City, Calif. Click photo for larger image.

These television stories weren't exactly hard-hitting "60 Minutes" stuff.

So what was I thinking last week when I tried to sit down with Leeann Tweeden, amid her busy Pittsburgh shooting schedule, for a serious discussion about women sportscasters?

After all, former Frederick's of Hollywood models who serve as co-hosts with a dwarf on extreme-sports shows aren't women sportscasters, journalistically speaking.

Women who wear midriff shirts and tight jeans to TV work, when not modeling on the side, aren't bent on becoming the Edwina R. Murrows of the electronic media.

Interviewers who date interviewees -- Tweeden, 31, is currently an item with Florida pitcher Josh Beckett, 24 -- aren't concerned with reportorial objectivity and integrity.

Although love can have something to do with it: Lisa Guerrero, formerly of Fox Sports Net and ABC, five months ago married ex-Baltimore pitcher Scott Erickson.

Tweeden was in Pittsburgh last week as part of a one-woman summer tour for "The Best Damn Sports Show, Period," that bastion of probing, investigative journalism. (Yeah, yeah, what was I thinking?)

Hires like her put the Fox in Fox Sports Net, the cable network blatantly playing the Babe card in contrast to ESPN's perceived Hip-and-Sports-Smart female set.

Fox Sports Net employs Lisa Dergan, a former Playboy Playmate (Tweeden, by contrast, continues to model clothed, though barely in some lingerie).

It employs Inga Hammond, a highly credible ex-CNN sportscaster on loan to NBC for the Olympics, though her cable bosses dressed her in a seductive way that Ted Turner never did.

It employs Lauren Sanchez and Brooke Burns and any other anti-Linda Cohn it can find.

In short, or at least in short miniskirts, these Fox Sports Net sirens overtly sell what is subliminally peddled elsewhere: sex.

It's not a dirty word on TV anymore.

Heck, they put it in show titles. They even put it on the History Channel -- sex and the Civil War soldiers.

If it isn't that common denominator, it's plebian interests, such as poker and dodgeball across sports cable or at the multiplex.

Coming soon to a theater or cable-channel near you: The World Series of Go Fish, Extreme Four Square and Bachelorette Capture the Flag.

In hopes of finding a modicum of perspective in this morass, I tried last week to sit down and talk about the price women sports journalists had to pay over the past quarter-century, how Tweeden followed in the female footsteps of such trail blazers as the PG's own Pohla Smith, Sports Illustrated's Melissa Ludtke and CBS's Lesley Visser, who dared to enter both the male-athletic sanctum and male-dominated sports media, how women such as Guerrero continue to become objects rather than objective reporters.

Dumb idea. Dumb.

Not that Tweeden is.

Au contraire, she maintains that she graduated her Manassas, Va., high school a year early, at 16, and could've attended Harvard.

She should've proven her wit by once turning down an overture from a certain diminutive artist: Believe me, I was not attracted to that 4-foot nothing Prince, who wore boots higher than mine.

"I get it every day," she snapped about people doubting her intelligence, though a midriff-and-jeans outfit isn't exactly a convincing Mensa uniform.

Instead of college, she went into modeling. And then ESPN fitness shows. And then soft-hitting stories on Fox Sports Net's zeroed "54321," extinguished "Blue Torch," and now nightly "Best Damn."

The thing is, it isn't serious journalism, and she enjoys selling every minute of it.

This is a new strain of woman sportscaster: Not related to the Cohn, Visser, Michele Tafoya or Bonnie Bernstein old-school Importance of Being Earnest, but rather from the Sheryl Crow beauty academy of All I Want To Do Is Have Some Fun.

"I'm the one laughing all the way to the bank," Tweeden said. "I love what I do. I could do it for the rest of my life.

"People like you bring it up -- 'women as sports journalists'. It's all good. The more [women in sports TV, period,] the better for all of us. It's not like someday I want to be a sideline reporter. That's not my inspiration. Or aspiration."

Apparently, there are enough hormonally imbalanced male viewers out there who like a nice aspiration.

Yet look at it this way: Imagine instead if you were watching midriff-exposing men.

Click.

Levity and entertainment are grand in sports TV, but it's the athletes who should be baring themselves, not the interviewers.