TV TAKES ONE MORE TURN AT PLATE WITH ‘WINNER’

TV and sports have a curious marriage. The medium that has done the most to boost professional sports toward megamoola usually can’t do a sports story worth a hoot.

Except for an occasional winner such as “The Deadliest Season,” a powerful 1977 drama about the violence and hypocrisy of professional hockey, the cupboard is bare.

Part of the problem is the look--using klutzy, uncoordinated actors to portray athletes.

The other night on CBS, for example, “Murder, She Wrote” popped on a neat little mystery about murder in the world of professional tennis. Several important characters--supposedly top tennis pros--were laughable, though. One in particular, who was patterned after stormy, athletically gifted John McEnroe, looked like he was swatting flies instead of a tennis ball.

When actors aren’t impersonating jocks, jocks are increasingly impersonating actors, witness a recent episode of ABC’s “Who’s the Boss?” It celebrated baseball’s opening day by featuring Billy Martin, Dodger Steve Sax and Bob Uecker, who also stars in his own series, “Mr. Belvedere.” And there on a recent episode of NBC’s “The A-Team” was Chicago Bears lineman William (The Refrigerator) Perry, laboring mightily to project emotion as well as bulk.

TV series with sports themes also fare poorly. In 1976, CBS briefly offered America a pathetic comedy named after Jim Bouton’s gossipy “Ball Four.” NBC gave a fleeting 1983 trial to “Bay City Blues,” a promising dramatic series about a minor league baseball team whose back-roads existence did not attract enough viewers. TV’s current sports series is “First and Ten,” Home Box Office’s crude comedy about a professional football franchise owned by a woman.

Theatrical movies also have an undistinguished sports pedigree. Very few have had the soul and passion of prizefighter Jake LaMotta’s story, “Raging Bull.” Or the social relevance and intensity of “The Great White Hope.” Or the poignancy of the baseball friendship in “Bang the Drum Slowly,” which was drawn from a much-earlier TV play.

Far more typical is the tear-jerking of Gary Cooper’s Lou Gehrig in “The Pride of the Yankees” and, much, much worse, the silly hero-worshipping of William Bendix’s Bambino in “The Babe Ruth Story.” What a joke. Ruth used bats bigger than William Bendix.

Jocks have been gods for so long that good stories defining them as mortals have always been a hard sell. And media coverage of drugs and alcoholism in sports has hardly dimmed the glow, perhaps making movie and TV producers even more timid about taking athletes down a notch or two.

Now comes ABC’s “A Winner Never Quits,” at 9 tonight on Channels 7, 3, 10 and 42, with Keith Carradine as the real-life Pete Gray, a one-armed outfielder who played briefly in the majors near the end of World War II when first-line baseball players were scarce. Mare Winningham plays his girlfriend.

His disability made him hot box office, but Gray resisted being known as just another “one-armed geek.”

Gray, who would catch the ball, stick his glove under his stump, roll the ball across his chest and then throw it, was close to being a miracle. He hit only a light .218 in 77 games for the St. Louis Browns in 1945, but his being able to hit at all at that level was astounding.

“When I tell people we had a one-armed guy playing in the majors, they won’t believe it,” Bob Bauman, a trainer for the defunct Browns, once said. “A midget, yeah. But not a one-armed guy.”

“A Winner Never Quits” passes the superficial first test. Carradine moves like an athlete, handles the bat (left-handed) like a hitter and is surrounded by real-life players. The result: an authentic look.

The two hours are pleasant enough, moreover, and easily as compelling as most--zzzzzzz--baseball telecasts.

Unfortunately, Burt Prelutsky has written and Mel Damski directed a story that is also flat and predictable. Well, of course , it’s predictable. Would ABC have bought a movie about a one-armed player who didn’t make it?

You always know where you’re headed. Gray had his right arm amputated after a childhood accident in a Pennsylvania coal town. Hard work, grit and athletic skill lift him above adversity and ridicule. He pays his dues in the minors before being signed by the Browns.

Looming climactically ahead is The Big Game, in which Gray becomes a heroic match for James Stewart’s one-legged major leaguer in “The Stratton Story.”

Unlike Stratton, though, Gray has his big moment in slow motion.

That’s when you get The Big Lump In The Throat.

Carradine reveals little about Gray, although giving a nice hard edge to this flawed man who only reluctantly gives moral support to a one-armed youth and becomes a semi-great humanitarian.

We’ll never know if that squares with the real Pete Gray, who is now 71, living in Pennsylvania and as much a mystery as the man on the screen.