Dodger Fans: Put On Your Blue Pajamas for Ch. 11 Marathon

They’ve had “Twilight Zone” and “I Love Lucy” marathons, and now comes a Dodger marathon.

Channel 11, beginning at 11 tonight, will devote 24 hours to the Dodgers.

Spanning the 100-year history of the Dodgers, the program will originate from Dodger Stadium and conclude Saturday with coverage of the 7 p.m. game against the Houston Astros.

Greg Wyatt, a producer and host, came up with the idea after last season.

“Originally, it was just a joke,” he said. “But (program director) Don Tillman liked the idea.”

Wyatt and producer Bill Brandt have been working on the project since December. They spent two months in New York doing interviews and compiling highlights.

Besides Wyatt, other hosts include Don Drysdale, Ross Porter and Tony Danza.

The program will include tributes to Jackie Robinson, Pee Wee Reese, Walter O’Malley, Walter Alston, Kirk Gibson and Orel Hershiser. More than 70 celebrities are involved.

Three memorable games, originally televised on Channel 11 and edited into one-hour segments, will be shown:

--Game 5 of the 1981 National League Championship Series against Montreal, won by Rick Monday’s home run.

--A pennant-drive showdown against Atlanta on Sept. 11, 1983.

--A June 26, 1988, game at Cincinnati in which the Dodgers came from behind to win in the ninth inning on Steve Sax’s three-run double.

At 4 p.m. Saturday, a two-hour special, “100 Years of Blue,” will be shown.

Fireworks after Saturday night’s game will also be televised.

A videotape of the entire 24-hour show will be sent to the Baseball Hall of Fame.

NBC, facing Saturdays without baseball, is doing just fine.

On April 7, NBC had a Jorge Paez fight that drew nearly twice as many viewers in Los Angeles as the third round of the Masters on CBS. The fight got an 8.0 rating, the golf a 4.4.

Last Saturday, NBC’s PGA Seniors Championship outdrew the younger guys in the Heritage golf tournament on CBS in most markets. The overnight Nielsen for the Seniors on Saturday was 3.8, while the Heritage drew a 3.4. The national rating was a 3.4 for both golf events.

This Saturday at 1 p.m., NBC tops itself with the first of a series it is calling “The Greatest Fights Ever.” This show takes an in-depth look at the 1974 George Foreman-Muhammad Ali fight in Zaire.

A replay of this fight hasn’t been on network television in 15 years. If you’re a fight fan, you won’t want to miss it.

Add boxing: Here’s another show fight fans won’t want to miss, if they can get it.

“Knockout! Hollywood’s Love Affair With Boxing,” with Anthony Quinn as host, is a one-hour special that will be shown for the first time on the American Movie Classics cable network next Thursday at 8 p.m.

Highlights from such boxing films as “City for Conquest,” “Requiem for a Heavyweight,” “Champion,” “Somebody Up There Likes Me, “The Set-Up,” “Raging Bull” and the “Rocky” series are shown.

Quinn, himself an amateur boxer, played aging fighter Mountain Rivera in “Requiem for a Heavyweight.”

Recommended viewing: Nadia Comaneci is featured on ABC’s “Wide World of Sports” Saturday, along with delayed coverage of the Wood Memorial and a report on the Paris-Roubaix bicycle race.

Donna de Varona and Bart Conner handle the Nadia segment, filmed last weekend in Reno.

Comaneci is not only shown performing but also talks about her relationship with Constantine Panait, the married father of four who helped her escape from Romania last November, as well as her relationship with Nicolae Ceausescu, Romania’s leader before being executed during the revolution, and her reported suicide attempt.

Of her escape, Comaneci tells Conner she had to crawl on her hands and knees through fields that were mined, and had to scale a large fence.

“It was not a movie,” she says. “You have just one chance. If you get caught, you don’t know what would happen . . . probably something pretty bad. I didn’t know what I was doing.”

A number of major Southern California cable companies picked up the wrong ESPN feed Tuesday night, bringing the cable network’s coverage of the Angels and Oakland into this market. What was supposed to have been shown here by all Southland cable companies was Minnesota-Seattle.

The mistake didn’t set too well with Channel 5, which also televised the Angel game.

Channel 5’s telecast got only a 4.9 Nielsen rating. “We should have gotten at least a 6,” station spokesman Ed Harrison said.

Harrison said the station has sent out letters to cable companies reminding them of the proper procedure.

ESPN, meanwhile, is making plans to send out scrambled signals to remedy such mixups.

Suddenly, it seems hockey is bigger than basketball in Los Angeles--at least, bigger than Clipper basketball.

Many SportsChannel viewers weren’t too thrilled last Monday to learn that a Clipper-Portland telecast would not only preempt the end of the Minnesota North Stars-Chicago Blackhawks game but also cause the Winnipeg Jets-Edmonton Oilers game to be delayed.

SportsChannel said it was contractually obligated to televise the Clippers live.

Another problem SportsChannel is faced with is having to delay some of its hockey telecasts because of Dodger or Angel telecasts.

To remedy the situation, SportsChannel is trying to get affiliates to put the hockey on an available basic channel, giving subscribers the games free of charge.

Film destroyed: Late Monday night, a fire, apparently started by an electrical short in a ceiling fan, ravaged the Continental Cablevision studios in the Westchester area, causing more than $5 million in damage.

The cable company has produced its own coverage of Loyola Marymount basketball since 1983, plus local high school sports, and all that footage was destroyed in the fire.

TV-Radio Notes

ESPN’s 11th consecutive year of NFL draft coverage will run from 9 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Sunday. Something new this year will be a continual scroll on the bottom of the screen, keeping viewers up to date on the selections. . . . Sunday’s Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach, televised to the rest of the nation by ABC, will be blacked out in Los Angeles. The race is tentatively scheduled to be shown the following Sunday. . . . Saturday’s Grand Prix time trials, to be held at 11:30 a.m., will be on Prime Ticket that night at 9:30. ESPN will tape five support events this weekend, including Saturday’s Toyota pro-celebrity race, for later airings. Lap-by-lap announcer Paul Page, pit-area reporter Jack Arute, Channel 5’s Ed Arnold, KLOS’ Joe Benson and Power 106’s Monica Brooks will be among those driving. A rivalry is brewing between Page and Arute, who both will wear microphones. In a twist, Emerson Fittipaldi will call the race, which will be aired June 17. Arnold, now known as Haybale, has already crashed two cars in practice.

Prime Ticket is in the process of moving from Inglewood to new offices at 10000 Santa Monica Blvd. in Century City. The facility includes a $7-million production studio. . . . Tom Kelly, hospitalized for four days after suffering severe chest pains on April 8, has recovered. . . . The first segment of this year’s Steve Garvey Pro Celebrity Sports Series will be shown by Prime Ticket Wednesday at 7 p.m. It’s a skiing event taped at Deer Valley, Utah, which benefits Special Olympics.

The CBS baseball game Saturday will be the Angels at Minnesota, with Dick Stockton and Jim Kaat reporting. . . . ABC’s “Earth Day Special” Sunday at 9 p.m. includes a segment with Magic Johnson and Michael Douglas. It was filmed on March 28 at the Sports Arena after a Laker-Clipper game. . . . CBS has an Earth Day-related show tonight at 8, “Dolphins, Whales and Us.” Sports director Bob Fishman, who has been battling cancer, was a major force behind this show.