TV COMMENTARY : Button and McKay: Up Close and Personal

One wants to be charitable and hope that Dick Button got out of Calgary without sustaining a rap in the mouth. But he did seem to be asking for it with all those snotty remarks about women figure-skaters competing in the Winter Olympics as ABC Sports wrapped up its Herculean coverage from Calgary.

Now that the spectacular closing ceremonies are over (they are over, aren’t they?), lessons can be learned from ABC’s marathon. Some of them come under the heading, “What Not To Do.”

Button and anchor Jim McKay went overboard dismissing and deriding skaters who were not in medal contention during Saturday night’s melodic thriller, perhaps as a way of hyping front-runners who’d appear later. But when top-ranked Debi Thomas of the United States ker-plopped near the finale, Button and McKay suddenly suffered fits of charitability.

Wouldn’t it have been humane to be as forgiving of the lesser lights as of the big stars? The commentators didn’t seem to realize how impressive even the lower-scoring skaters are to those of us klutzes who can barely walk outside and fish the morning paper out of a mud puddle without some sort of life-threatening mishap.

Button was in there yapping whenever anyone made the slightest mistake. “We are seeing some weak performances tonight,” he moaned. He was right; the weak performances were his and McKay’s. Peggy Fleming, also commenting, was more compassionate and intelligent.

Even Button, however, recognizes a crowd-pleaser when he sees one, and 18-year-old Midori Ito of Japan gave the night’s most ingratiating performance. As the crowd cheered, she wept, and the ABC camera was there for a screen-filling, heart-tugging close-up. And this, we were reminded again, was what the Olympics were all about and what made ABC’s coverage the glory that it was.

Television is a constant battle between words and pictures. Hardly any of the words at the Olympics were memorable. Those fascinating facts we learned about Swiss bobsledder Hans Hiltebrand are, gee, kind of hard to recall right now.

But the pictures? Fantastic, whether from a ski-cam, a sled-cam or a chopper-cam. Whether a portrait of the pain or joy on a competitor’s face, or a vast view of snowy mountains’ majesty in unspoiled Alberta.

Actually, by week’s end, the commenting grew less obnoxious. Perhaps, like some viewers, the announcers were exhausted. Or perhaps they noted the big laugh Johnny Carson got one night when, after a noisily appreciative ovation from his studio audience, he chided them, “I know what it is. You’re just glad I’m not Jim McKay.”

The “up close and personal” profiles were indeed irritating, and included some of the fakiest “real-life” footage since the old “March of Time” newsreels. But they were not the worst thing about the coverage. The worst thing was the daily late-night post-mortem hosted by Frank and Kathie Lee Gifford.

First off, the reports did not recap the day’s highlights. They seemed designed primarily to display extraneous filler that couldn’t be squeezed into regular coverage. Then there’s the charisma quotient of Frank and Kathie Lee: zilch, zero, zip. If they co-hosted a morning program it would have to be called, “Go Back to Bed, America.”

The late-night show could have been organized as a truly visual replay of victorious, dramatic and emotional moments--a boon for those who missed the daytime or prime-time stuff and a blessing for those who wanted to savor the replays.

Instead we got two marshmallows by the fire.

McKay noted that ABC had more than 20 hours of coverage on the last weekend alone. That meant probably two or three hours of commercials.

Toting up the miscalculations and excesses perpetrated by ABC Sports in its Olympics coverage is relatively easy. The high marks for technical merit still tend to obliterate the low marks for artistic impression.

Normally what one longs for in the dead of February is a breath of spring. What ABC proved, among other things, is that a breath of winter could be just as refreshing.