There’s a Time That No News Is Bad News

The minute the football season ends, some people start looking around to see what other sports are being played. They wake up on Sunday morning, eat breakfast, go to church, risk a hernia lifting the newspaper off the porch, then turn on their televisions and start flipping channels.

CBS is carrying live coverage of a golf tournament in which Clint Eastwood apparently is engaged in a spine-tingling match against James Garner.

NBC is running another in a series of bouts in its “Boxers You Never Heard Of” anthology.

ABC is televising a football game, if you want to call it that. It is the Pro Bowl, the game that had its last hard tackle sometime around 1973.

And ESPN is showing a basketball game between Saginaw Valley State and Philadelphia Textile.

Within the next few weeks, there will be many equally outstanding sports events on Sunday afternoons.

Bruce Jenner will host a celebrity shotput competition between the cast of “All My Children” and the cast of “Knots Landing.” (“An excellent heave by Donna Mills!”) Some actor will accompany Curt Gowdy in a Costa Rica fishing expedition to catch Charlie the giant tuna. Martina Navratilova will beat Wendy Turnbull in the quarterfinals of a tennis tournament for the 4,297th time. And a British golf announcer will whisper during the final round of the Whoopi Goldberg-Tallahassee Open while Lanny Wadkins lines up a putt.

You know, you really get sick of watching football, right until you run out of it.

Then you miss it.

Does anybody know if the USFL is still going to play this year? Don’t we have a season opener coming up soon between the San Antonio Guncleaners and the Orlando Woolridges, or whatever their names are? Shouldn’t we look forward to a league where guys have so much trouble getting paychecks, they can’t even afford cocaine?

Nah. Guess we had better forget about football for a while. The baseball season opener is only about nine weeks away. We can survive until then.

For one thing, we can go to hockey games. At this moment, only 21 teams are in the running for the National Hockey League’s 21 playoff spots.

Then there is pro basketball. The big news this week is the player who missed practice for the 82nd consecutive week and checked into Mel’s Revolving Door Drug Rehabilitation Center, where a wing has been named after him. “He will be slapped with a stiff $20 fine and given only one more chance,” the team’s general manager said.

You can tell this is a slow time in the sports world just by looking at the results on the small-type page.

Sunday’s thickest Los Angeles newspaper carried all the results you have been waiting for. Horst Bulau led the 70 meters in the Canadian ski jumping championships at Thunder Bay. Somebody named Szabo took the 200 breaststroke in the big international meet at Boulougne-Billancourt, France. And Pomona-Pitzer beat the absolute living hell out of Mills in women’s basketball.

Jimmy the Greek and Pete Axthelm had both gone with Mills in that one.

There should be a law that between the last football game and the first baseball game, newspaper sports sections should be forced to print a headline that reads: “Sorry. Nothing Today.”

Oh, sure. Some people enjoy other sports. Some people want to know more about Jon O’Drobinak of Hammond, Ind., taking first prize in that $150,000 bowling tournament Saturday at Grand Prairie, Tex.

OK, fine. He had a whole bunch of strikes and a couple of spares. One time his ball curved nearly a foot.

What is a guy supposed to do with his weekend afternoons if he doesn’t like to watch bowling or golf? Is he supposed to watch (ugh) public television? What if this is the sort of guy who thought “Jewel in the Crown” was a TV show about the Preakness? What if he thought Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos” was a documentary about soccer?

It is the birthright of every American to sit home on weekends and smoke cigars and belch and watch football or baseball. You should not have to watch a college basketball game on television unless it’s the Final Four and you should not have to watch a stock-car race unless you live in North or South Carolina.

February is a crummy month.

Maybe somebody else was perfectly happy Sunday to sit home and watch the AT&T; Pebble Beach National Pro-Am, which used to be the Crosby. Maybe some other guy’s idea of a good time is Jack Lemmon losing a shoe in a sand trap.

But not this guy.

This guy thought the tournament would have been a lot more interesting if Clint Eastwood had aimed a .44 Magnum at James Garner just before a big putt and said: “OK, now make it.”