This isn’t about bowling, per se, it’s about everything else, including bowling. But before it’s too late, do your best – go out of your way – to get to a high school bowling match.
Seriously. Watch how, after a kid rolls five or six strikes in a row, the kids on both teams give the kid a congratulatory, respectful and traditional touch – just like the pro bowlers do on TV. Or at least used to do on TV.
You’d better catch it now because if the “new” Pro Bowlers Association succeeds in its desperate, made-for-TV marketing plan, police soon will be needed at kids’ matches.
HBO’s “Real Sports,” tomorrow at 10 p.m., focuses on something we’ve touched on here: A Pro Bowlers Tour, now seen mostly on ESPN, that now encourages – begs – pros to replace their gentlemanly habits with crude, vulgar, taunting demonstrations.
HBO correspondent Bernard Goldberg interviews Pete Weber, whose pro wrestling-borrowed “Right here!” crotch-pointing – aimed as much at a TV camera as his opponent – last year generated more pub for the Tour than any bowling accomplishment.
Also interviewed is new PBA CEO Steve Miller, who says that he wants to create as many villains as heroes.
“I want to have someone to love and someone to hate. And that’s part of what sport is about,” Miller says. It is, huh?
Goldberg asks if Miller would encourage a bowler to throw his opponent down the lane. “I wouldn’t encourage him to do that,” Miller responds.
“But you wouldn’t mind if he did?” asks Goldberg.
“I guess I wouldn’t mind if they did that,” Miller says with a laugh.
And so, the lewd act that two years ago would’ve surely led to Weber’s immediate suspension, is now exactly what Vince McMahon, er, the PBA wants. Miller is a marketing specialist whose last stop, it’s worth noting, was with Nike.
“I think what we really have done is taken the handcuffs off the players,” says Miller. Good. If the PBA succeeds, handcuffs will be needed by cops responding to brawls between high school bowling teams.
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Like the XFL on NBC, the Arena Football League on NBC will cause once credible sportscasters to take dives. Yesterday, in the open to Tampa Bay-Orlando, Tom Hammond stated that the game’s a “tough ticket.” But he couldn’t hide the hundreds of empty seats in full view.
But everything’s a bad-faith sell. Saturday, we saw a lot of Ray Romano playing bad golf in the PGA’s Pebble Beach Pro-Am. But if either Romano’s TV show or the event wasn’t a CBS property, how much of Romano do you suppose we’d have seen?
And while NBC’s “Meet the Press,” yesterday, didn’t, for the first time in years, have an NBA theme to coincide with (cross-promote) the NBA All-Star Game – NBC no longer owns NBA rights – yesterday’s “Late Edition” on CNN did. Wolf Blitzer chatted with Kobe Bryant, Dirk Nowitzki and the relentlessly smug David Stern. CNN is a partner station of TNT, new home of the NBA All-Star Game.
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The Don Criqui-Jim Spanarkel team that called B.C.-Rutgers for ESPN, Saturday, was good on the senses. Neither man starves for attention, Criqui gave Spanarkel all the room he needed and Spanarkel remains understated and under-rated for his nuts-and-bolts clarity.
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After a U.S. NBA All-Star team flopped at last summer’s World Basketball Championships in Indiana, the humiliation inspired experts to recognize that while the rest of the world plays a five-man, team game, the U.S., of all countries, has lost its copy of the plan.
The lament was loud, widespread and lasted about a week: The NBA had become what it bargained to become: A one-on-one, or two-on-two game of “Clear-Out,” identifiable and reflexively celebrated for only two-things: The three-point bomb and the rim-rocking slam-dunk.
Those are the only two things that excite most courtside TV commentators, the only things that make most highlights reels, the only things seen in most NBA TV promos.
And this year’s NBA All-Star Game weekend was predicated, once again, on two things: The three-point shot and the slam-dunk.