Barbaro won’t be forgotten

Going into Kentucky Derby Week, an inescapable story is Barbaro, last year’s Derby winner who broke a leg in the Preakness and then battled for his life before being euthanized Jan. 29.

Last fall, Ross Greenburg, president of HBO Sports, decided to tell the story in a documentary. He also realized he might face competition.

So Greenburg made a deal with the horse’s owners, Roy and Gretchen Jackson. They signed an exclusive agreement that prohibited them from doing interviews for any other full-length documentaries. In exchange, HBO made a donation to the laminitis research fund.

Later, when NBC, which will televise the May 5 Derby, started work on a Barbaro documentary, producer Rob Hyland found out about the Jacksons’ exclusive agreement. Dick Ebersol, NBC Sports Chairman, called Greenburg and the two of them worked out a deal.

NBC would get to interview the Jacksons and HBO would get NBC’s footage from last year’s Kentucky Derby and Preakness coverage.

The result: Both networks are coming out with Barbaro documentaries. NBC’s “Barbaro: A Nation’s Horse,” will be shown on the West Coast on Sunday at 2 p.m. HBO’s “Barbaro” will air June 6, the week of the Belmont.

“Sure, there is going to be some overlap,” Greenburg said. “But as is the case when two artists paint the same picture, there will be differences.”

Another documentary

Brothers John and Brad Hennegan have produced a 97-minute documentary, “The First Saturday in May,” which features Barbaro. The film, which will be shown for the first time tonight at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York, follows six horses over a 16-month period leading up to last year’s Kentucky Derby. Barbaro just happened to be one of the six.

As a result, the Hennegans ended up with exclusive footage on Barbaro. And, in this case, they weren’t willing to share.

“We’re just two brothers with a small budget trying to get a film distributed,” said John, who lives in Venice.

As clear as duck soup

Who is and who isn’t televising the NHL second-round playoff series between the Ducks and Vancouver Canucks can seem confusing.

Game 1 Wednesday night was televised locally by KDOC and nationally by Versus. But the national telecast was blacked out in Los Angeles.

Game 2 tonight at 7 will be on FSN West and blacked out on Versus.

Game 3 on Sunday at 5 p.m. in Vancouver will be exclusively on Versus here and throughout the country.

Versus is available on all major cable and satellite carriers in the greater L.A. market but only through pay tiers. If you want to see that game and are unsure if you get Versus, contact your cable or satellite provider.

Cable operators would not say how many subscribers there are to the various tiers, but in the New York market, according to Newsday, 600,000 of Cablevision’s 3 million customers do not get Versus.

Game 4 Tuesday at Vancouver will be televised on FSN West, with the Versus telecast again blacked out in L.A. And there could be a problem here as well.

At 5 p.m., FSN West has the Angels at Kansas City, which probably won’t be over by the 7:30 start of the Ducks-Canucks game. Tom Feuer, FSN West and Prime Ticket executive producer, will step in as sort of a third producer to take viewers back and forth between games and use a double-box format when needed.

Game 5, if necessary, will be another Versus exclusive, with Games 6 and 7 on Prime Ticket.

Another role

When Prime Ticket televises the UCLA-USC track meet live at noon Saturday from Katherine B. Locker Stadium on the USC campus, Feuer, a track expert, will serve as one of the commentators working alongside play-by-play announcer Jim Watson. The other commentator will be Joanna Hayes, the 2004 Olympic winner of the women’s 100-meter hurdles.

Lindsay Soto will work the event as a reporter.

larry.stewart@latimes.com