AFTER babies, puppies and packs of fresh Drake’s Yodels, there’s nothing more beautiful than live, we’re-paying-attention sports television.
Tuesday, YES’s Yankees team of producer Steve Danz and director John Moore made for us great, unspoken TV, because against great odds – this is the age of exploding graphics and wall-to-wall commercial clutter – they were able to pay attention to the game.
In the second, Mariners second baseman Bret Boone fielded a double-play ball, ran to get the force out, then kept running toward the dugout. Oops. Boone thought there had been two out.
Several minutes passed – the next Yankees batter walked – before the side was retired, and Boone’s fauxpas (pardon my French) might easily have been forgotten.
But as the Mariners headed off and YES prepared to go to commercials, a camera followed Boone, who headed toward pitcher Gil Meche. Boone spoke what appeared to be an apology, then, an instant before the commercials began, we saw Meche and Boone exchange a high-five.
No big deal? Au contraire (there I go again). These days, when the folks in the trucks are forced to pay less and less attention to the games, this was a big deal. Danz and Moore turned ordinary TV into great TV. These days, that’s a very big deal. Remember: TV’s called a medium because when it’s well-done, it’s rare.
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Don Imus towel-boy Sid Rosenberg remains eager to serve his master by providing the low-brow shock treatments that Imus, who, after all, interviews the nation’s leading politicians and news anchors, now pretends to abhor.
Wednesday, while presenting the sports report within Imus’ syndicated WFAN show, Rosenberg spoke of the previous night’s Mariners-Yankees game, referring to Ichiro Suzuki and Hideki Matsui as “the Japs.” Oh, how cutting edge, how clever.
Of course, Imus and crew recoiled in mock horror. But it was clear, once again, that Rosenberg was fulfilling his terms of engagement.
Afterward, Rosenberg stepped into his other role on WFAN: co-host of a sports show, during which he strives for at least a veneer of credibility. He’d never refer to Matsui as a “Jap” on that show. He’d only do that for Imus, somewhere between Imus’ interview with Tom Brokaw and presidential candidate Sen. Joseph Lieberman.
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While Fred Couples didn’t have to keep it together – and he didn’t – Jim Nantz had to. And he did.
“Right until we went off the air,” Nantz said yesterday by phone, “then I kind of lost it.”
Couples, whose fabulous career, unlike his popularity, had been in storage, Sunday won his first PGA event in five years, the Houston Open on CBS.
Gentlemen, start your coincidences. Nantz, CBS’s golf anchor, had been Couples’ golf teammate and roommate at the University of Houston, Class of ’81. Beyond that, they’d remained close, through good and bad. For Couples, professionally and personally, there had been plenty of the latter.
So, Sunday, even had Nantz abandoned his detached professionalism, he’d have been somewhat entitled.
Nantz, after all, is grandfathered.
Couples broke down and cried while being interviewed by CBS’s Peter Kostis.
“I knew that was going to happen,” Nantz said just before CBS signed off.
“Thankfully,” Nantz said yesterday, “I wasn’t on camera then, because I was losing it, fast. I was thinking about when we were kids in our dorm room, how we’d rehearse the green jacket Masters championship ceremony, just fantasizing, fooling around the way kids do.
“Then in ’92, he won the Masters and there I was in Butler Cabin, interviewing him. And now, when he’s supposed to be done, I’m there on the air for his first win since ’98. Too much.”
To the unknowing ear, Nantz, Sunday, didn’t seem that much more moved than had the winner been anyone else.
“Ya think so?” he said. “Well, that’s good, because I was having a very hard time.”
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The team dentist for the San Francisco Giants is Dr. Les Plack. For real. Les Plack. (And thanks to Mike Ganis of Houston for the tip.) . . . The Toronto Globe & Mail reported this week that the Blue Jays are preparing to change their name to the Jays, which would then provide the club the opportunity to become yet another team to change its uniform colors to stress (gang-favored and popularized) black.
Phil Mushnick’s “Prime Time” TV column debuts this Sunday in New York Post TV Week.