Even When It Comes to Exhibitions, NFL Has Air Superiority

With the arrival of the NFL’s exhibition season come all those ticky-tack television policies.

First off, Channel 9 planned to televise Saturday’s 1 p.m. Raider-San Francisco 49er game at the Coliseum at 5 p.m. that day, but NFL policies say that tape-delayed exhibition games can’t be shown the same day before 11 p.m.

So Channel 9 this week switched the telecast to Sunday at 5 p.m., meaning weekly listings are incorrect.

Prime Ticket, which owns the cable rights to the telecast and will show it at 10:30 p.m. Sunday, also offered it as a live telecast to Prime Network, which serves 25 million homes around the country. Thus, a tape-delayed local telecast became a live national telecast.

The question became, can Prime Network show the game? Thursday night, after getting approval from the Raiders, the cable network decided to go ahead with the telecast.

Actually, what Prime Network does has no effect on Channel 9 or Prime Ticket.

All three outlets will show the same telecast, with Joel Meyers and Raider executive assistant Al LoCasale reporting.

Recommended viewing: Channel 9 will air a one-hour special, “Playing for Keeps: L.A.’s Sports Owners,” Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 11 p.m.

The original idea was to have the Raider telecast as a lead-in, but now that the game’s replay has been moved to Sunday, the special won’t have that advantage. It doesn’t really matter, though. This show, which was a year in the making, stands on its own. For local television, the production is first-rate.

Peter O’Malley, Gene Autry, Jerry Buss, Donald Sterling, Bruce McNall and Georgia Frontiere are interviewed in the piece put together by sportscaster Tom Murray and producer Bob Guerrero.

Al Davis is the only Los Angeles owner who declined to be interviewed, even though Channel 9 is carrying his team’s exhibition games. It is Davis’ loss. All the other owners are put in a favorable light, even though the show isn’t strictly a puff piece.

O’Malley, who was hesitant about being interviewed, comes off looking particularly good. His best line comes after this relatively innocent question: “How do you relax?”

O’Malley: “By avoiding interviews like this.”

When Fidel Castro taped an interview at his palace in Havana with ABC’s Jim McKay last month, he showed up several hours late, than rambled on for six hours, from 10 p.m. to 4 a.m.

The interview, conducted through an interpreter, has been edited, thank goodness. Part of it will be shown as a half-hour special Sunday at 4 p.m., with other parts to be shown during ABC’s 20-plus hours of Pan American Games coverage, which begins Aug. 3.

The Pan-Am Games’ opening ceremony next Friday will be televised at 5 p.m. by TNT, which is supplementing ABC’s weekend coverage with 26 1/2 hours of its own. TNT will show the Games from 5 to 7 p.m. on weeknights, from 6:50 to 7:50 p.m. on Saturdays and from 3 to 5 p.m. on Sundays.

Brent Musburger is the host for ABC. Ernie Johnson Jr., Nicole Watson and Nick Charles will share that chore for TNT.

ABC and TNT will use some of the same event announcers. Don Sutton, for example, will work baseball for both TNT and ABC. Additionally, there will be a hefty lineup of news and feature reporters, who may have the most significant roles.

ABC coordinating producer Curt Gowdy Jr. said: “We want to journalistically cover the event, but we also want to educate viewers about the country.”

ABC began shooting feature material in December, and Gowdy said the network has pretty much had a free rein to go where it has wanted to go.

Said Musburger: “This is the most unusual event I’ve ever worked. It’s more a political story than a sports story.”

Debut: For the first time, beach volleyball will be televised live by a major network Sunday when NBC shows the Miller Lite Milwaukee Open on “SportsWorld” at about 1 p.m., after the Buffalo Bills-Philadelphia Eagles exhibition game in London.

The Milwaukee tournament is the first of three beach volleyball events that NBC will televise this summer. The others are the U.S. Championships on Aug. 24 in Hermosa Beach and the World Championships on Sept. 7 in Las Vegas.

The sanctioning Assn. of Volleyball Professionals has come up what is called a “rally clock,” so that a match will fit into the time constraints of live television. The AVP’s version of a shot clock starts and stops with live action.

A match is limited to 8 minutes of running time, meaning it will last only about 45 or 50 minutes of actual time.

Calling the action will be Chris Marlowe, whose volleyball career began at Palisades High, where he also starred in basketball, leading Pali to a City championship in 1969. The commentator will be Marlowe’s regular Prime Ticket sidekick, or set-up man, Paul Sunderland.

One hour of Sunday’s 1 1/2-hour “SportsWorld” will be devoted to the volleyball tournament.

Also on the show will be the NFL’s Fastest Man competition, taped at Palm Desert. Among the competitors are three-time winner Darrell Green of the Washington Redskins and two-time winner Ron Brown of the Raiders. The announcers are Charlie Jones and Paul Maguire.

TV-Radio Notes

For a three-day period beginning Saturday, SportsChannel will be free to the 1.7 million cable homes its affiliates serve. Sunday at 11 a.m., Chuck Dolan, SportsChannel America’s principle owner, and Bob Wright, NBC president, will discuss the pay-per-view plans for the Barcelona Olympics. Sunday night at 7, tape-delayed coverage of an all-star high school football game at Hershey, Pa., will be shown, with Jimmy Cefalo and Joe Namath reporting. Monday night at 7, there will be the unveiling of a new Dodger pregame show, with former Ram Jack Snow as the host. At 7:15, the show switches to Dodger Stadium, where SportsChannel’s Dodger and Angel announcers look at the season to date. Then at 7:30 will be the Dodgers’ game with the New York Mets. . . . The Dodgers and Mets on CBS last Saturday got a 5.5 national Nielsen rating, the highest regular-season baseball rating since the Dodgers and Mets got a 6.4 last Aug. 25.

Saturday night at 6, HBO will offer an attractive boxing doubleheader from Norfolk, Va.--lightweight champion Pernell Whitaker facing Poli Diaz and Michael Moorer taking on Alex Stewart in 12-round heavyweight bouts. HBO plans to have Jim Lampley and new commentator George Foreman interview Evander Holyfield. . . . The USA network will televise promoter Dan Goossen’s boxing show at the Country Club in Reseda next Tuesday night, when Gabriel and Rafael Ruelas fight in separate 12-rounders. . . . TVKO’s next pay-per-view show will be on Aug. 9 from Atlantic City, N.J., with Riddick Bowe fighting Bruce Seldon and Bobby Czyz meeting Bash Ali.

Joe Buttitta, the former Angel TV play-by-play announcer and Channel 5 sports anchorman who was a finalist for the UCLA play-by-play job on KMPC that went to John Rebenstorf, is now a teaching pro at the Westlake Golf Course. Buttitta, 49, who has a three handicap at Wood Ranch, is getting his PGA card and may try the Senior PGA Tour. . . . The first NFL exhibition telecast of the season will be the Hall of Fame game, Detroit Lions vs. Denver Broncos, on ABC Saturday at 9:30 a.m. Highlights of that day’s induction ceremonies will be shown at halftime, and ESPN will have a one-hour special on the ceremonies at 3 p.m.

Prime Ticket will carry the final three days of the Volvo Tennis/Los Angeles tournament at UCLA next Friday through Aug. 4, with Donald Dell and Barry MacKay calling the action. MacKay seems to be everywhere. He does Wimbledon for HBO, the U.S. Open for CBS and the USA network, plus a variety of assignments for USA and other cable outlets. MacKay was an NCAA singles champion at Michigan in 1957 and the nation’s No. 1-ranked amateur when he won 17 tournaments in 1960. When he turned professional in 1961, he won $50,000, a huge sum for those days. He later went on to become a successful tournament director in Northern California. It was at one of his tournaments at the Cow Palace in San Francisco in the mid-1970s that PBS asked him to do the commentary, thus starting his broadcasting career.