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Monday, July 28, 2003

So some nobody winning the Greater Hartford Open is of considerably greater broadcast consequence than Lance Armstrong winning a record-tying fifth consecutive Tour de France.

That's the message CBS sent yesterday.

Three hours live of Todd Fischer, Peter Jacobsen and ... who, 90210's Luke Perry ... vying for the coveted Hartford hardware, which, if memory serves, is shaped like one of the insurance state's famed policies.

Versus one hour taped of this historic, centennial-edition Tour closing in picturesque Paris.

Not to be critical.

Once again, the tale on tape isn't anywhere near the same as live drama. In the end of one of the world's trademark athletic competitions, the Eye Network spent 45 minutes recapitulating all 23 days and 2,125 miles. Then, in the final few moments, it captured none of the spirit of the finish. Most sports newscasts last night aired as much of the final stage as CBS did.

Didn't Armen Keteyian on tape say something about this month-long bicycle race being the most grueling event in sports? Didn't he label Armstrong's comeback from a crash one of the greatest moments in sports history? And didn't he mention something about Armstrong pedaling into "the air of immortality?" Yep, yep and yep. And to CBS, it was all worth about 50 minutes of prepackaged music, beauty shots and narration for, globally speaking, what amounts to a fifth consecutive World Series triumph or Masters golf championship.

And next, live, from world-renowned Cromwell, Conn. ...

Sometimes, you have to pare an hour off the final round of a ho-hum golf tournament and add an hour to a landmark race. Viewers need to learn the importance, the history, the achievement of a sports tradition outside their ken, if not outside their mainstream. Air it, and sponsors will come, even if Armstrong's U.S. Postal Service had to buy up the entire second hour. By the way -- Olympics-rich NBC -- can we cut out so much of that taped stuff now?

This event live is worth it to Outdoor Life Network, which increasingly gets some of its highest ratings one month of every year, the July tour. Don't guffaw over that last statistic. Sales of racing bikes have surpassed mountain bikes, too. So viewership isn't the only rising tide; the Tour's effect trickles down to product movement.

Outdoor Life, closing out its nearly 200 hours of Tour coverage, broadcasts at 8 p.m. Thursday its version of the race's "Defining Moments." After that, it will be another year until the best television act in sports returns to our screens. I'll miss such little informational nuggets as Ullrich pedaling 110 revolutions each minute in the time trials or that Armstrong went from the sour lemon jersey years ago to the orange jersey as the most media-accessible rider this tour.

At least CBS had the good sense to bring in Outdoor Life's acclaimed commentators, Phil Liggett and Paul Sherwen. Man, I'm going to miss those chaps, and this from a fellow who has trouble on a stationary bike. They talked nonstop for two-plus hours every tour broadcast, yet they never intruded on the pictures, never dominated the backdrop. In fact, these blokes were so literary and poetic, their commentary was music to the ears.

Sherwen, in a taped segment about the rain-slickened time trials Saturday, spoke of it being "a race against Mother Nature herself. She's woken up angry today." He later invoked such lovely phrases as "egality in the race" and "brilliant ascension" and "the moment [Jan] Ullrich had dreaded is here," referring to his time-trial crash.

Even if somebody else wrote these words for Sherwen, why doesn't this person pen scripts for "NFL Today"?

A better question: Could we get Liggett and Sherwen for a Steelers-Bengals telecast?

It can't be merely the British accents. Because John Madden in a Cockney just wouldn't work.

"In the course of human events, this one is the most moving," Keteyian said.

In a transportational sense, that's true -- moving an average 90 miles a day clockwise around France, up and down mountains, hoping to avoid yellow handbags like the one that felled Armstrong last Monday.

"Fittingly," Keteyian said, "we've had the race of the ages."

Then the hour-long tape didn't end a moment too soon before the gripping, three-hour conclusion of the Lesser Connecticut Invitational.

Vanity press

ESPN focuses its cameras on itself tomorrow night with a two-hour, behind-the-scenes, "This is SportsCenter" special. Talk about a slow news day. More than that, talk about immodest. The special is twice as long as "SportsCenter" itself.

The four-letter network centers the special around Kenny Mayne, Dan Patrick, Kevin Frazier and Stuart Scott, for whom we all should leave the boo but drop theyah. (That awful phrase has seeped into my children's lexicon, for crying out loud.) There is a look at a day in the life of Linda Cohn, so maybe we'll finally discover if this six-toes rumor is true. And then comes a Top 10 list from Chris Berman, on whom Vegas no longer places odds about the utterances of nicknames or song lyrics, it's such a given.