BARCELONA ’92 : Some Olympic ‘Moments’ Worth Forgetting : Here is one vote for ending prime-time coverage of the so-called Dream Team now. Enough Already!

“Dick Enberg’s Moments” is a nightly feature of NBC’s prime-time coverage of the Barcelona Olympics.

On Monday night, Enberg’s role was to introduce another of NBC’s idyllic, romantic and glamorous music videos about Olympic athletes, the over-produced icon this time being comeback U.S. swimmer Pablo Morales, who was shown moving through the water in a slow-motion ballet while Marc Cohn sang about an “Old Soldier.”

Features like “Dick Enberg’s Moments” and athlete profiles (is there anyone competing in Barcelona who hasn’t courageously overcome adversity?) are part of NBC’s strategy to hold the audience. The plan is to package prime-time videotaped coverage of hours-old news at the summer games like a magazine show, turning each page slowly to string out the evening and keep viewers breathlessly hanging on until the end.

It doesn’t always succeed.

My moments. . . .

On Monday night, I dozed off while waiting for NBC to show U.S. swimmer Anita Nall in the 200-meter breaststroke, an event that NBC kept promoting as if the network were going to cover it live. I already knew the result (the favored Nall got the bronze) from watching that morning’s TripleCast, the alternative pay-cable coverage that NBC is offering in concert with individual cable operators. When I awakened, NBC was keeping viewers in suspense over another swimming event that had been completed in the morning.

When watching the coverage, you have the feeling you’re trapped in a time warp.

NBC’s prime-time string-along strategy was especially infuriating Sunday night when it turned its telecast of the women’s road racing into a manipulative marathon.

Despite a gratingly schmaltzy commentary that constantly explored the minds of the competitors a la Carnac the Magnificent (“She knows that behind her are biking’s giants”), NBC made its taped coverage of the race a compelling drama that gave you an emotional stake in the fates of individual riders. But then, network gamesmanship intervened.

As the race neared completion, with the gold medal still in doubt, NBC cut away for what was billed as a routine commercial break, vowing to return afterward for the event’s conclusion. Instead of a commercial, though, it was back to the studio, where smoothie host Bob Costas introduced what was to be the first installment of “Dick Enberg’s Moments.”

That consisted of Enberg narrating footage of past Olympiads. Stow it. You wanted to see the end of the race, and NBC was giving you numbing history.

After “Dick Enberg’s Moments,” Costas hyped the next day’s coverage.

Then Costas said, “We’ll be back after these commercial messages.”

Then, after the commercials, instead of Costas, Los Angeles-area viewers got a news minicast from KNBC-TV Channel 4, bisected by more commercials.

Then it was back to Costas in the studio.

Finally--after keeping viewers dangling for about 20 minutes--NBC returned for the conclusion of the race, won by underdog Australian Kathryn Watt.

The result: It was less a pure athletic event than a slick production encasing an athletic event.

Meanwhile, back to Monday, when NBC built its prime-time coverage around the U.S. team’s eight-hour-old, 103-70 trouncing of Croatia in men’s basketball.

The Croatia game “could be” a tough test for the dominant U.S. team, an obliging Channel 4 anchor John Beard said on the evening newscast Monday, pretending that the game had not been played in a bit of deception tailored to hyping the Olympics prime-time coverage that would follow.

Here is one vote for ending prime-time coverage of the so-called Dream Team now. And no more Charles Barkley stories either, unless he actually murders someone in Barcelona. The fuss over Barkley throwing an elbow at an Angolan player is overblown coverage at its worst. It would have merited hardly any attention had not coverage of the Dream Team itself been so bloated.

“The Dream Team . . . is it?” Enberg asked Magic Johnson during NBC’s Tuesday morning Barcelona block. “It definitely is,” Johnson replied.

Oh, stop it. Enough already about the Dream Team, which swiftly has become as much a marketing phenomenon as an athletic phenomenon (witness those Nike, Visa and McDonald’s commercials).

It’s mystifying why some local sportscasters still get their jollies ridiculing the Dream Team’s competition, as if the United States was solving its problems at home by mashing Angola and the world in basketball. Gloating about these lopsided victories is like getting whipped up over a pride of lions devouring a wildebeest.

The Dream Team doesn’t make for dream television, and credit NBC, at least, for not bothering to show the final few minutes of the U.S.-Croatia massacre. Where NBC has acquiesced, however, is in not adequately explaining why declared pros have been allowed to participate in Olympics basketball and tennis, but not in other sports. If it’s slaughters we’re after, why not let Evander Holyfield box for his country? And Michael Jordan can play basketball for the United States, but Cecil Fielder can’t do the same in baseball?

Don’t look for the answers in the next “Dick Enberg’s Moments.”

A colleague suggests that NBC is purposely mucking up its regular Barcelona coverage to persuade more viewers to buy its TripleCast coverage.

Yet even the commercial-free TripleCast has not been flawless. On Monday morning’s live coverage of Greco-Roman wrestling, for example, the TripleCast spent about five minutes describing one match while showing pictures of another.

Score one for consistency, though. Even when the words and pictures meshed, it was still tedious.