For William Monahan

Aaron Barnhart
TELEVISION
The Stanley Cup Playoffs; "Seinfeld"'s Olympic Screw-Up


In the early 1980s, it seemed that the four major American sports -- baseball, football, basketball and hockey -- were on the verge of becoming the big two and the other two.  Professional basketball and hockey were dying slow deaths, it appeared, and from similar causes: franchises teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, scant interest from the TV networks, and an inability to curb violence on the field of play.  Then the NBA hired David Stern as its commissioner.  He instilled fiscal discipline on teams, banned players who fought or used drugs, and undertook a massive and hugely successful p.r. overhaul that made Michael Jordan a world superstar and the phrase "Dream Team" part of the global vernacular.

To really see why professional basketball has revived, however, you need only go to your set on any Sunday during the winter and spring and tune in the sport's dazzling showcase produced by NBC Sports.  NBC -- which acquired NBA rights from slow-moving CBS a decade ago -- has made hoops into a TV spectacular with few peers in the entertainment world.  With its camera wizardry, high-end graphics, statistical arcana, up-close-and-personal player profiles, sideline reporters, and so on, the NBA on NBC does for the sport precisely what "Monday Night Football" did for football a quarter-century earlier.

When a new commissioner, Gary Bettman, took over the National Hockey League in the early 1990s, he was trying to avoid having his sport left in the Big Three's dust.  NHL owners are financially a much healthier group than 15 years ago, though some franchises occasionally need to pull up tent stakes, including this year's Stanley Cup finalist Colorado Avalanche, known until last year as the Quebec Nordiques.  

But Bettman knows that for long-term security, hockey must become a successful TV franchise that U.S. audiences want to watch.  And he must surely know that this is a far more formidable challenge than the NBA's Stern ever faced.  After all, how do you make a sport whose game piece is smaller than a baseball, and which conducts its game at a pace only slightly slower than that of motocross, into a television product the uninitiated can easily watch?

The NHL's existing TV partners -- regional cable networks like MSG and SportsChannel -- lacked the resources to perform the makeover desperately needed.  So three years ago, Bettman signed a long-term deal with the cable powerhouse ESPN, which committed hefty resources and plenty of new ideas toward its NHL telecasts.  "National Hockey Night" borrows its name from the CBC's long-running "Hockey Night in Canada" telecast, but its production style is unmistakably taken from the same playbook that created "Monday Night Football" and "NBA on NBC."  ESPN has multiplied the number of cameras at rinkside, and miked seemingly every crease around the oval.  The technique paid immediate dividends two years ago, as the country tuned in for the Ranger's dramatic run for the Cup.

This year, most of the attention has been directed at the cable channel's new broadcast partner, Fox Television, and a gimmick it has introduced: a special puck that emits a phosphorescent (ck) halo as it bounces around the rink.  For extra thrills, the puck leaves a cartoony red streak in its wake after it is slapped -- as ESPN's Keith Olbermann would say -- real hard.  

But the real contribution of the two networks is capturing the ambience of the skaters, the checkers, and the goalies, both around and away from the puck.  During power-play action last week between Colorado and the Detroit Red Wings, ESPN cut to a camera positioned just above the plexiglass behind the Detroit goal.  Two players contending for the puck skated headlong into the picture frame, then vanished from the bottom of the screen.  An instant later the camera shook as if hit by a tsunami.  

As for the longstanding knock against hockey -- that it is too tolerant of fighting and dirty play -- TV can fix that, too.  Violence, as Eldridge Cleaver once said, is as American as apple pie; hockey simply needs to make its own brand of violence, which one might say is as Canadian as a Molson, palatable to U.S. tastes.  During this year's playoffs, we have seen some breathtaking puck action: precision passing and scoring as well as pesky defense and outstanding goaltending.  In its open-field play, hockey has no peer among the Big Four, and this surely makes the brutal trench warfare much less unlovely.

But that is during the playoffs, the so-called "second season" of the NHL.  The 82-game (ck) regular season is a different story: penalties tend to bog down the action, and the more "chippy" players -- that wonderful Canadian euphemism for skaters cruising for a fight -- assert themselves more often.  [closing thought goes here]

SPEAKING OF SPORTS: to promote its coverage of the Olympics this summer, NBC asked the stars of its hit show "Seinfeld"  to appear in some Apparently someone forgot to run the promos by public relations.  In one of them, Kramer tells George they should just gather all the athletes together in the middle of the Olympic Village and have them shoot it out, "like at the O.K. Corral."  Last one standing wins.  Apparently someone at "Seinfeld" forgot about the time they really did shoot it out in the Olympic Village.  Here's a hint: the year was 1972, and nobody died laughing.

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