No Joke; CBS Fires Musburger : Television: Tonight’s NCAA basketball telecast will be announcer’s last assignment for network.

The initial reaction dealt with the calendar, rather than the Sunday announcement that announcer Brent Musburger had been fired by CBS.

It was, after all, April 1, and it also was the day before Musburger was to handle play-by-play of the NCAA championship basketball game.

“CBS Sports announced today that it had declined to renew Brent Musburger’s employment agreement, which expires within the next few months,” CBS spokeswoman Susan Kerr told reporters. “Brent’s final event for CBS Sports will be the NCAA men’s championship game on Monday, April 2, 1990.”

“I heard it as a rumor in the locker room in Ft. Lauderdale,” said Frank Cashen, New York Met general manager whose announcer, Tim McCarver, was set to work with Musburger on the lead games of the CBS major league baseball series beginning April 14. “I dismissed it as an April Fool’s joke.”

A worker at CBS Sports in New York called the Associated Press with a similar reaction, insisting that it wasn’t true.

Reporters here had the same idea--which was quickly dispelled. “It is not a joke,” said CBS Sports President Neal Pilson. “It’s a difficult decision. It’s never easy to deal with individuals with whom you have personal or business relationships.”

The decision was apparently made when long-running negotiations between Musburger’s agent--his brother, Todd--and CBS officials broke off in Denver. Musburger’s 5 1/2-year contract that pays $2 million annually runs through July, but the network decided to relieve him of duties after tonight. “It wouldn’t have been right to have him start baseball and not be around to finish the season,” Kerr said.

Musburger issued a statement through his personal assistant, Jimmy Tubbs. “I was surprised, but it was a great run and I have a million memories, and I leave behind a lot of good friends,” Musburger said. “At this time, I’m going to take an extended vacation, and I’ll be working again someday, somewhere.”

“It wasn’t right out of the blue,” Tubbs said. “He knew for a couple of days that things were not going well in contract negotiations. Negotiations had been going on and they just broke off.”

Todd Musburger had asked for a CBS decision on a new contract by Sunday.

The difficulty in negotiations apparently had to do with Musburger’s role under the new contract. It was understood that his presence would be diminished--with, presumably, diminished salary--even though the network had added baseball and the 1992 Winter Olympics and 1994 Summer Olympics to its sports package.

“We have a great group of young broadcasters. They are our present and our future,” said Ted Shaker, executive producer of CBS Sports, who added that the network believed Musburger’s work load was “too much.”

Among those young broadcasters is Jim Nantz, who has handled studio work for the NCAA basketball tournament, and Greg Gumbel and James Brown, who have done play-by-play.

“We simply felt we wanted to give more opportunities to some of the younger people who currently work for us,” Pilson said. “There’s never a good time to have to announce a decision like this. We were asked by Brent’s representative to make a decision, and that’s what we did.”

Money, it was said, was not the prevailing factor to the decision. “It’s like a divorce,” Kerr said. “You can’t point to any one thing.”

Immediate speculation began as to Musburger’s replacement on the CBS baseball series, for which the network outbid NBC, paying more than $1 billion for four seasons.

One name mentioned was Al Michaels, who is under contract to ABC, but has been reportedly disenchanted with the network. He reportedly was suspended for two weeks recently when his teen-age daughter was hired as an on-site messenger at the U.S. Figure Skating Championships at Salt Lake City, violating a nepotism rule.

Another scenario had CBS elevating Jack Buck from his backup game assignments with Jim Kaat to the primary game with McCarver, an old friend who played with the St. Louis Cardinals, for whom Buck has worked since 1954.

Buck said he was surprised by the firing. “This was a sudden thing,” he said in St. Petersburg, Fla., where he is announcing Cardinal spring training games. “We talked about doing this game on April 14, this game the second week. There was no mention of Brent not doing baseball.”

McCarver was said to be meeting with CBS officials at the Mets training site in Port St. Lucie, Fla., and was unavailable for comment.

Still another had CBS hiring Vin Scully, the Dodger announcer whose contract with NBC ended when the network lost major league baseball to CBS. Scully worked for CBS from 1975 to 1982, doing pro football and golf.

He declined comment Sunday at Vero Beach, Fla.

Other names mentioned include Gumbel and Dick Stockton, the NBA lead announcer who does baseball for CBS radio and was a play-by-play announcer for the Boston Red Sox. Stockton would appear to be tied to the NBA broadcasts through June.

Pilson said that an announcement on the CBS baseball package would be made this week.

Musburger, a former newspaper sports columnist in Chicago, became host of CBS’s “The NFL Today” in 1975 and immediately became both known and criticized for bringing a bland personality to the broadcasts.

Later, he was criticized for shilling for CBS events on the air.

He has anchored the Masters golf tournament, the NBA finals, the Pan American Games and late-night coverage of the U.S. Open tennis tournament, among other events.

Bill Daniels, who owns the Prime Ticket sports network, said Sunday in Denver he had instructed network president John Severino to talk with Musburger about a new nightly sports news show that Prime Ticket will begin in August.

Times staff writer Jim Hodges contributed to this story.