TV COMMENTARY : Valvano Learning to Live With Criticism

Jim Valvano is willing to take the heat--most of it, anyway.

You don’t like his face?

“Personal criticism stings, but you learn to live with it,” he said.

His voice reminds you of screeching tires?

“If you don’t like me, I don’t know who else to blame but myself,” he said.

You think he blithely waltzed away from a big mess at North Carolina State, where he was basketball coach for nine years, and sidled into a cushy, high-paying TV job?

“I accept the criticism,” he said. “It was my watch, I was the boss. What I reject is people saying I don’t deserve a chance to go into another profession.”

Valvano is in the second year of his other profession, analyzing basketball for ABC and ESPN, and he’s branching out into football this year, too. He’ll be an ABC sideline reporter for the World League of American Football.

“I’m going to try to revive my days as a high school quarterback and that one year I coached football at Johns Hopkins,” Valvano said.

Valvano spent his 46th birthday in the ESPN studio in Bristol, Conn., analyzing the Patriot League and Mid-Continent Conference championship games as part of the network’s “Championship Week” lineup. It’s just two of 32 games, including 25 conference championships, that Valvano will help analyze on ESPN March 7-15.

“Each year, I’m learning,” Valvano said. “I’ve gone from just trying to keep that thing in my ear to hopefully being able to make some intelligent contributions.”

In his first year in TV, Valvano won cable sports’ highest honor, an ACE award, as best analyst-commentator. It came eight years after he won a national championship at N.C. State and one year after he quit as coach and athletic director in a swirl of controversy over NCAA violations and unproven allegations of point shaving.

“I understand people’s questions,” Valvano said. “I just don’t accept their premise. I was not found guilty of any wrongdoing. OK, I accept responsibility, and let’s go on from there. I thought I could bring something to the broadcast booth.

“In the 23 years I was in coaching, I’ve known both the good and the bad. You want to know what a coach is going through on the sidelines. I know. You want to know what it’s like to win a national championship. I know. You want to know what it’s like to go through an NCAA investigation. There’s no speculation. I know.”

If the New Jersey Nets had been a little more decisive, Valvano might have left TV last December to take his first NBA coaching job. Valvano met with Nets part owners Joe Taub and Jerry Cohen and thought he had an offer for a reported $2.7 million over five years. But the offer was withdrawn when Taub and Cohen apparently were overruled by other owners.

“That was a very close situation,” Valvano said. “The Nets really couldn’t make up their minds whether or not to give me the option to make up my mind. They couldn’t even make up their minds who was going to make up their mind.”

When the Nets deal fell through, Valvano fell back on his three-year, $900,000 TV deal, and he’s not complaining. He says he would entertain other offers, college or pro, but he’s not soliciting them.

“Look at the Nets. Just the mention of my name, and they’re a playoff team,” he said.

“But I love television. I think it’s pretty obvious that I do. Think about what I do for a living: I watch college basketball and talk, two of my most favorite things in the whole world. It beats heavy lifting.”

Even as an Iona coach back in 1980, it wasn’t hard to see television in Valvano’s future. Loquacious and funny, he was a natural for an industry that he quickly realized made no special place for naturals.

“Some ex-athletes and coaches think television is an easy profession,” ESPN coordinating producer Dave Miller said. “Jim always recognized this isn’t a simple job.”

Valvano came into TV armed with the advice of an old creative writing professor from Rutgers, where he was an English major.

“He said that you’ll find writing is a discipline long before it becomes an art,” Valvano said. “I thought that was a great lesson for all lines of work, including television.”

Valvano commutes to work from his home in Cary, N.C., where he lives with his wife Pamela and his youngest daughter, 11-year-old Lee Ann. His two older daughters, Nicole, 22, and Jamie, 19, share an apartment in Raleigh, N.C., where they attend N.C. State. Valvano says the two coeds are like the Odd Couple--”Nicole is Oscar, and Jamie is Felix.”

Valvano usually is on the road at least six days a week.

“I check in at home on Fridays to have an affair--with my wife,” Valvano said. “Cary’s a heck of a place to live, my family tells me.”

Nicole and Jamie usually come home to join a chaotic family dinner Friday night.

“I tell them what I did all week, and everybody tries to tell me in one evening what’s going on in their lives, and every once in a while my wife gets to say something,” Valvano said. “Then they hit me up for money.

“My oldest will graduate this year, and she’s already got a job. I told her she’d be off the payroll pretty soon, but she said if I do that, she’s going for her doctorate. My middle daughter is finishing her sophomore year in communications. Maybe she’ll be in the booth with me soon.”

Out takes: Bill Walton, former UCLA and NBA great and now a college basketball analyst for CBS, believes UNLV coach Jerry Tarkanian is getting a raw deal.

“I am disappointed they can’t work this out because in my opinion, Tarkanian made that program, made that school and made that town,” Walton said. “Now, they claim it’s an academic issue. Where were these people the first 25 years of Tarkanian’s career? I think he still should be the UNLV coach, if he wants to be.” . . .

ABC’s 5-month-old taped coverage of a gymnastics tournament featuring Kim Zmeskal and the Iditarod dog sled race on “Wide World of Sports” last weekend topped the week’s sports ratings list with a 5.3 Nielsen mark and a 6.1 Arbitron number. Second was NBC’s Portland-Chicago NBA game featuring Michael Jordan with a 4.7 Nielsen and 5.5 Arbitron.

“Proving that sports fans who think they understand TV really don’t know all that happens in the world of television,” ABC spokesman Mark Mandel said. “Last week, Sports Illustrated called Jordan the most famous athlete in the world, but I guess Kim Zmeskal is more popular.”