HBO Had the Right Team for Holyfield-Cooper

HBO may have presented too much of a good thing in its recent cablecast of the Evander Holyfield-Bert Cooper bout. When it added Gil Clancy as a substitute for George Foreman, who was off training for Saturday night’s fight with Jimmy Ellis, it put together as good a team of boxing broadcasters as has been heard on the air in some time.

Clancy, Mr. Everyman, jibed nicely with Jim Lampley and Larry Merchant. He sometimes disagreed with Lampley in a non-contentious way that helped illuminate aspects of the fight. And he and Merchant, longtime sparring mates from the days when Clancy was managing fighters and Merchant was writing sports in Philadelphia and New York, played off each other neatly. It made for good commentary and keen analysis.

Foreman has been an entertaining guy as the third man on the HBO team -- certainly more personable than the stilted Ray Leonard -- but the fact is he doesn’t add much as an analyst. I suggest Time Warner take some of the money it expects to be getting from its upcoming big pay-per-view fights on TVKO and use it to add Clancy to its HBO mix permanently. Let Lampley, Clancy and Merchant handle the fight and employ Foreman every so often to add some funning.

Ernie Harwell is out of the running for a job as a New York Yankees broadcaster on WABC radio. John Mainelli, program director at ABC, said, “Harwell isn’t being considered. He never did contact us.”

Yankees general partner Robert Nederlander had recommended Harwell, the longtime broadcaster who had worked Brooklyn Dodger and New York Giant games before moving to Baltimore and Detroit. “The Yankees can recommend, but it is our choice and they have only the right of approval,” Mainelli said.

Harwell was dropped from Detroit station WJR, owned by Cap Cities, which also owns WABC in New York. WABC is conducting auditions for the second spot to work alongside John Sterling. Among those being considered are ex-players Lee Mazzilli and John Stearns, reporter Michael Kay and former White Sox broadcaster Wayne Hagen. Joe Angel left the Yankees booth after a year to return to Baltimore and work with Jon Miller.

The hustlers are out there trying to push pay-per-view. An attempt to put on a gimmicky Jimmy Connors vs. Monica Seles extravaganza fell through. The Home Shopping Network now is blowing smoke about a $33-million package that a pay-per-view college football national championship would bring. And Showtime is offering a one-on-one basketball battle between Julius Erving and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

These are pipe dreams or novelties. In talking up a college football championship game, Home Shopping’s Rick Kulis is trying to do an end run around the NCAA, which would promote such an event if it were ever to come off. And how about the arrogance of trumpeting this in the face of academic opposition to an extension of the college football season and with no consultation from college presidents?

It is noteworthy that Abdul-Jabbar, who showed little but contempt for the press when he was playing basketball, had a turnaround and was palsy-walsy when he was trying to sell his book. And he is now sweetness and light in helping to hawk this proposed February encounter in Atlantic City.

One of the choice tidbits in HBO’s “History of Sports Television,” aired frequently this month, is the admission by Frank Gifford that he and Bob Beattie did a voice-over in narrating the great downhill ski run of Franz Klammer in the 1976 Olympics. Their breathless commentary after the fact stands as one of the great con jobs of television. ... During the first half of last week’s Grambling-Southern U. game, NBC’s Ahmad Rashad periodically hyped the upcoming battle of the bands of the two schools at halftime. When the bands came on, astrutting and a-stomping, the audio was so poor, the trumpeting and oom-pah-pah sounded weak and hollow. ... Showtime cable’s boxing announcers continue to be an embarrassment. Buddy McGirt fought brilliantly from bell to bell to whip Simon Brown last weekend, yet the trio of Ferdie Pacheco, Mike Tyson and Steve Albert didn’t comprehend what was happening until McGirt floored Brown late in the bout.

With both women and men in the event, why is the endurance event on NBC Saturday called the Ironman Triathlon? A stout heart to watch in the competition is Claudia Kretschman, a 32-year-old mother of an 8- and a 5-year-old who is a critical care nurse in New Jersey. She trains by putting in a 50-mile bike ride, serving the kids dinner, putting them to sleep, working an 11 p.m.-7 a.m. shift, coming home to make the kids breakfast and send them to school and then knocks off a 10-mile training run. ... The papers and airwaves are full of figurations about how much Bobby Bonilla would be paid per hit, per home run, etc. Would that the inflated salaries of the CEOs of some of the country’s biggest -- and some of them failing -- corporations be put under the same kind of microscope.