Selection Show Almost Too Big for Its Brackets

Billy Packer recalls that he, Dick Enberg and Al McGuire were working a Big Ten basketball game for NBC in 1981 on the day the NCAA tournament selections and pairings were made in Kansas City, Mo.

“I remember Dick only had time to mention a couple of No. 1 seeds before we went off the air,” Packer said.

NBC had the tournament that year, but CBS has had it ever since and has turned the announcement of the selections and pairings into one of the highlights of the season.

The pairings for this year’s tournament will be announced live on CBS Sunday at 3:30 p.m.

Packer, who followed the tournament from NBC to CBS in 1981, went to Kevin O’Malley, then CBS’ executive producer for college sports, to suggest devoting a half-hour special to the selections and pairings.

Actually, such a thing was already in the works. During negotiations with the NCAA for the tournament in January, 1981, a proposal for a selections-and-pairings show was part of CBS’ package.

“The idea was well received by the NCAA,” said O’Malley, now the senior vice president of sports programming for Turner Broadcasting. “The way it had always been done was, after the selections were made, the schools were called and informed they were in and who they were playing and when. Then the NCAA called the wire services.

“What we wanted to do was turn the selections into a news event.”

The idea for the selections special, plus an offer to cover first-round games, helped CBS win the tournament bid on March 3, 1981.

CBS started out showing first-round games at 11:30 p.m. NBC had not been able to do that because it had Johnny Carson.

ESPN, which began operating in September, 1979, started televising early round NCAA tournament games in 1980. That, probably more than anything else, established the fledgling cable network.

ESPN set the standard for switching from one game to another, a system now employed by CBS, which has had the whole tournament exclusively since 1991.

The first year CBS did a selections show, the tournament field was only 48 teams, so the network had a little time to fill.

“We had reports from two site locations--Morgantown, W.Va., and Fresno,” Packer said. “I remember there were about 5,000 crazies on the Fresno State campus waiting to get the word.”

The Bulldogs got in for the second year in a row and lost to Georgetown in the second round.

Now that the tournament field has grown to 64--it went to 53 in 1983 and to its current configuration in ‘85--there isn’t time for CBS to visit such places as Morgantown and Fresno.

The selections and pairings are made by a nine-member committee before the information is passed on to CBS.

Tom Butters, athletic director at Duke and the chairman of the selection committee, and the other committee members arrived Thursday in Kansas City, near the NCAA headquarters.

With 30 of the slots predetermined as conference or tournament champions, the committee’s main job is to select 34 at-large teams and to seed the field.

“There will be some anxious moments this weekend,” Butters said before leaving Durham, N.C. “I’ll start to get that feeling in my stomach shortly after I arrive in Kansas City.”

Butters said he would spend most of Thursday afternoon by himself to “privately go through my thoughts.”

The selection process will begin today at noon and, Butters said, will be pretty much concluded by late Saturday night.

Lest one thinks Butters is able to show any favoritism toward Duke, he said: “Whenever Duke is being discussed, I have to leave the room. It’s the same thing for the other athletic directors and conference commissioners. When schools they have ties to are discussed, they have to leave the room.”

Although ESPN is no longer involved in tournament game coverage, it still has a major presence.

ESPN will have its own selections show at 3:30 p.m., although it might be a little behind CBS, which gets its information direct from the NCAA.

ESPN will have 10 half-hour or hour specials previewing, reviewing and analyzing the tournament, beginning Monday at 4:30 p.m. with a half-hour preview of Thursday’s first-round games. A preview of Friday’s first-round games will be shown on Tuesday at 7:30 p.m.

John Saunders and Chris Fowler will share host responsibilities for the specials, with Bill Raftery, who will also be a part of CBS’ coverage, and Dick Vitale providing analysis.

On Sunday at 9:30 a.m., ESPN also will offer live coverage of the selections and pairings for the women’s NCAA tournament.

TV-Radio Notes

CBS Radio will have a special “Selections Sunday” program at 4 p.m., and KMPC and XTRA will carry the call-in show. John Rooney and Ron Franklin are the hosts. . . . KMPC and XTRA also will carry CBS Radio’s tournament coverage, which begins with the second round on March 20. . . . Prime Ticket’s “Press Box” Sunday night at 10 will be expanded by 15 minutes to cover the pairings.

Recommended listening: NFL Hall of Famer Jim Brown, who usually has interesting and pertinent things to say, now has his own show on XTRA Sunday nights, 6 to 8. XTRA’s Rich Swartz is Brown’s co-host. . . . XTRA, like KMPC, is offering extensive exhibition baseball coverage. The station has Dave Campbell in Arizona covering the teams there, and Steve Mason this week was in Vero Beach with the Dodgers. . . . KMPC will celebrate St. Patrick’s Day on Wednesday by broadcasting its mid-day and afternoon shows from Brennan’s in Marina del Rey.

Channel 5’s first Dodger telecast will be Sunday morning at 10 a.m. The station’s first Angel exhibition telecast of the season will be the following Saturday. . . . Scheduling 50 Dodger and 50 Angel telecasts wasn’t all that difficult, according to Tom Arnost, Channel 5’s general sales manager. “If you took a transparent schedule of KTTV’s Dodger schedule last year and placed it over our Angel schedule, you’d find only a couple of conflicts,” Arnost said. “Our sister station in Chicago (WGN and Channel 5 are both owned by the Tribune Co.) televises 195 baseball games without much of a problem.”

Channel 5 offers another Dodger special Saturday at 8 p.m., “New Faces,” which will focus on Tim Wallach, Jody Reed and Todd Worrell. . . . The new Angel radio broadcast team of Bob Starr and Billy Sample has the makings of a good one, particularly if Starr bears down with his preparation. Things like: “And the right fielder throws it to the third baseman, who relays it to the catcher” just don’t cut it, not even during the exhibition season. . . . All 29 Angel exhibition games will be broadcast, but nine, including two this weekend, will be carried by K-LITE because of conflicts on KMPC.

Dodger broadcaster Don Drysdale and wife Ann Meyers, who will work the NCAA tournament for CBS, had their second child Wednesday night, a girl, Drew Ann, who weighed 8 1/2 pounds and measured 21 inches long. Mom said she will be ready when the tournament starts next Thursday. . . . Versatile Chris Marlowe will handle the play-by-play on Saturday’s UCLA-Arizona game that will be on Channel 5. It is Marlowe’s first basketball assignment for Raycom, the producers of the Pacific 10 package. Dan Belluomini will be the commentator. . . . UCLA fans were rightfully miffed that Thursday night’s UCLA-Arizona State game was not televised.

Recommended viewing: Channel 9 has been showing a five-part series all week on Biola’s basketball program, and the excellent series has been condensed into a half-hour special that will be shown Sunday at 3 p.m. Host Gary Cruz, producer Scott Johnson and cameraman David Cronshaw went on a trip to Northern California with the team in January. What is refreshing is to see college athletics in its purest form. Coach Dave Holmquist says he is more concerned with his players’ learning to care about one another than going 30-0. . . .

Bob Costas and boxing promoter Bob Arum will be Irv Kaze’s guests on KIEV tnight from 7 to 8. . . . ABC, the only major network still televising boxing, has Floyd Patterson’s adopted son Tracy facing Jesse Benavides on “Wide World of Sports” Saturday in a tape-delayed bout. . . . Saturday night’s pay-per-view card featuring Michael Carbajal against Humberto Gonzalez at the Las Vegas Hilton includes a three-bout undercard that begins at 6 p.m. In the night’s third bout, Oscar De La Hoya faces Jeff Mayweather. . . . ABC will have Richard Petty in the booth for Sunday’s delayed coverage of the Atlanta 500 at noon. . . . Channel 7 sportscaster Todd Donoho has been named host of the Henry Mayo Memorial Hospital Golf Classic to be held May 22 at the Valencia Country Club and Vista Valencia Golf Course.