Lewis’ Vacation Was No Day at the Beach

Remember Brett Lewis, Channel 4’s weekend sports anchor? Nice smile, dry wit? Yeah, that’s the guy.

He was last seen filling in for George Michael on the late-night, nationally syndicated “Sports Machine” show on Christmas Day.

Then he went on vacation, or at least that was the official word from Channel 4.

But 5 weeks of vacation for someone who has been on the job less than a year? And during Super Bowl Week, to boot?

Actually, Lewis hasn’t been on vacation. At least not the kind on which you go to Hawaii and lie in the sun.

He’s been sleeping. Rather, trying to sleep.

Lewis suffers from a sleeping disorder--actually two--and he went to a clinic in Cincinnati to get treatment.

Besides insomnia, Lewis also has sleep apnea, meaning that once he manages to fall asleep, he often stops breathing.

It’s rare for one person to suffer from both disorders.

He’s better now and is back in Los Angeles. He will be filling in for Fred Roggin on the 6 o’clock news tonight, and then will resume his regular spots over the weekend.

During lunch at a restaurant in Toluca Lake, Lewis pulled out a photograph of himself in bed, wearing what appeared to be an oxygen mask strapped to his face.

The apparatus, he said, is called a C-Pap machine. He’s now using it to help him sleep.

It has taken some getting used to, he said, but the other night he slept 6 hours straight, then was able to sleep a little more.

“I woke up, looked at the clock, saw it was 7:30, and gave out a big, ‘All right!’ ” he said.

At the clinic in Cincinnati, it was discovered that, during a 1-hour test period, there were about 200 interruptions in his breathing pattern. At times, he quit breathing for as long as 30 seconds and at other times his breathing was labored for as long as 60 seconds.

Lewis said he has never been a sound sleeper, and in 1983, while working at a station in Dallas, his hometown, he began having sleepless nights.

The problem continued through the 4 years he worked in Miami, and worsened after he came to Los Angeles. He knew he needed help.

John Rohrbeck, Channel 4’s general manager, agreed and gave him time off, even though the timing was bad.

“The people at the station have been extremely supportive,” Lewis said.

Lewis said the most important thing he has learned is, when you can’t sleep, don’t stay in bed. You can’t just lie there, hoping to go to sleep, he said.

“With me, it became a psychological thing, where I hated going to bed,” he said. “I’d drive home from work dead tired, then get into bed and be wide awake.

“The best advice I can give people who have trouble sleeping is, get out of bed and watch TV, or do something mindless like that,” he said. Then, chuckling, he added, “I guess I shouldn’t say that.”

Golf woes: A year ago, when CBS televised the Nissan Los Angeles Open, it rained on the day of the final round, causing two delays.

At 3 p.m. (6 p.m. in the East) the leaders were only on the sixth hole, so CBS, seeing no hope of making it to the finish, cut away.

What L.A. viewers got instead was a USC-Washington basketball game, a battle for last place in the Pacific 10.

Channel 2 was bombarded with complaints.

The same thing could happen again this year. The forecast calls for a chance of rain Sunday, and there’s another college basketball game, this time UCLA vs. Oregon State, scheduled for 3 p.m. on Channel 2.

Sunday’s final-round Open coverage is scheduled to run from 1:30 to 3 p.m.

Add golf: All too often, a golf tournament runs long and television, preferring to not preempt prime-time programming, misses the finish.

Frank Chirkanian, long-time executive producer of golf for CBS, says one thing that would help alleviate the problem would be faster play.

“Players just keep getting slower and slower,” he said. “It shouldn’t take 4 1/2 to 5 hours to play a round of golf.

“I blame the college coaches. They tell these players, ‘Don’t shoot until you’re ready.’ ”

Chirkanian says the PGA needs to get tougher. “Each player in any foursome holding up play should be penalized a stroke at the 10th hole and told that unless they speed up, another 1-stroke penalty awaits them at the 18th.

“That way if one player is holding things up, his partners will get all over him.

“Now they fine a slow player $1,000. That’s absurd. A guy wins $180,000, and you fine him $1,000. He pays that and throws in a $500 tip.”

Add Chirkanian: He’s been involved with golf on CBS since 1958. His first assignment was as director of that year’s PGA Championship.

He’s had quite a career and is well respected in the golf world. Now, at 62, he may be ready to call it quits.

“I have a year left on a 5-year contract,” he said. “When it expires, I’ll have to decide what I want to do.”

“Mary Jane (his wife of 13 years) likes to shop, so I may have to keep working. Seriously, I’m just not sure what I’ll do.”

TV-Radio Notes

Above and beyond the call of duty: ABC’s Keith Jackson, despite getting the news Saturday morning that his mother, Polly Bragg, had died in Georgia, still worked that afternoon’s Michigan-Purdue basketball game at West Lafayette, Ind. His mother suffered a stroke in November. “If she were here, she would have said, ‘Son, just do your job,’ ” he said. . . . A case of the flu last weekend didn’t keep Chick Hearn from extending his streak on consecutive games worked, which has reached 2,193.

KMPC’s Jim Healy compares Hearn’s streak to the one held by Joe Hernandez, the Santa Anita race caller who collapsed on the job on Jan. 27, 1972, and died a few days later. Hernandez went 37 years without missing a workday. Hearn has gone 23. . . . Correction: The football game that kept Hearn from making a Laker game in November, 1965, the last one he missed, was between Arkansas and Texas Tech, not Arkansas and USC, as reported in this space last week.

Channel 5, which has been getting dreadful ratings for Clipper games, has dropped a Feb. 26 telecast from Detroit because it falls during a rating sweeps period. The date will be made up with a telecast from San Antonio March 13. . . . It’s not quite Broadway, but ESPN boxing commentator Al Bernstein, who is also a professional singer, isn’t complaining. He recently worked Todd Foster’s first pro fight in Foster’s hometown of Great Falls, Mont., made a contact there and has been invited back to sing at the Heritage Inn in Great Falls next Friday. . . . HBO offers an attractive welterweight card Saturday night at 7 from the Las Vegas Hilton: Lloyd Honeyghan vs. Marlon Starling and Mark Breland vs. Seung Soon Lee. . . . Mike Tyson will be Roy Firestone’s guest on “SportsLook” on ESPN Monday at 3:30 and 11 p.m., and Frank Bruno will be on Tuesday’s show.

Recommended viewing: The Millrose Games, possibly the top meet of the indoor track season, will be held tonight at Madison Square Garden and shown Saturday at noon on NBC as a 1-hour edited show. The announcers, Charlie Jones, Frank Shorter and Dwight Stones, attend the meet but don’t call the action until early the next morning. “It makes for a very long workday,” Jones said. “But I’m not complaining. This should be a great meet.” . . . “The History of College Basketball,” a 1-hour show narrated by Curt Gowdy and produced by Rasha Drackovitch of San Francisco, will be on Channel 4 Sunday at 9:30 a.m.

Sunday’s Strub Stakes will be previewed tonight at 8:30 on Channel 56, and the race will be on ESPN. Coverage Sunday begins at 4:30 p.m., the race about 4:45. . . . Former pitcher Jim Kaat, who has done a nice job as a college baseball announcer for ESPN, has been hired as a full-timer by the cable network and will appear regularly on “SportsCenter.”

Dick Vitale interviews Indiana Coach Bob Knight on “SportsCenter” Sunday night at 8. . . . Jim Zrake, former executive producer of sports for the USA network, has been named to a similar position at Los Angeles’ Z Channel. . . . Loyola, the nation’s top scoring team, faces St. Mary’s, No. 2 in defense, tonight at 7:30, and the game will be televised in the LAX area by American Cable Systems on Channel 27. Terry Runzler and Mario Palladini report.