Unbelievable News? Not From This Source

There are certain news events of such magnitude that you can, for the rest of your life, remember when and how you first heard about them.

Certainly, if you are old enough, you can remember how you heard of the John Kennedy assassination. Or the Robert Kennedy or Martin Luther King assassinations.

In the sports world, you no doubt remember where you were and what you were doing when you heard that Magic Johnson was retiring because of HIV.

Michael Jordan’s retirement in the prime of his career fits into the same category.

Most sports fans probably got the news first from Pat O’Brien while watching Tuesday night’s American League playoff game between the Toronto Blue Jays and Chicago White Sox on CBS, even though NBC broke the story.

At about 10:25 p.m. EDT, on “Dateline NBC,” Jane Pauley reported that, according to sources close to the NBA, Jordan would announce his retirement the next morning.

NBC, you would figure, would be the network that should break such a story because it is the NBA network.

But in the West, CBS beat NBC. That’s because “Dateline NBC” was delayed three hours here. No big deal to NBC, though, because the networks don’t care about anything west of New York.

O’Brien, joined by CBS colleague Jim Gray, who got a vague response from Chicago Bull owner Jerry Reinsdorf, first reported the speculation during the top of the sixth inning of the baseball game, around 7:45 p.m. PDT, more than two hours before Westerners would get Pauley’s NBC report.

In the top of the seventh, O’Brien, with Gray, who by then had also talked with the Bulls’ other owner, Eddie Einhorn, came back to pretty much confirm the report.

As things turned out, O’Brien erred when he didn’t ask Jordan during a 20-minute conversation before Tuesday night’s game about possible retirement. There had been a line in a story on Jordan in that day’s Chicago Sun-Times speculating that Jordan might retire after this season.

O’Brien later said he had read the story, but it was nothing concrete, only speculation about retirement next year. O’Brien also said that he was there to cover baseball, not basketball. But reporting is reporting, and a simple question during a 20-minute conversation would certainly have been appropriate. In this case, more than appropriate.

Generally, though, O’Brien is as good a sports reporter as there is on network television. If there is someone who you would tend to believe, even with a story as unbelievable as Jordan retiring, it would be O’Brien.

He has spent the last 13 years building credibility at CBS Sports. When it comes to sports reporting, be it hard news or light features, O’Brien ranks with the best.

O’Brien, liked and respected by colleagues and competitors in the business, is the consummate pro.

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Besides his work for CBS Sports, O’Brien is a contributor to “Entertainment Tonight,” a contributor to the CBS Evening News, does three syndicated radio shows and writes a column, “Inside People” for the magazine Inside Sports. His prime-time CBS show “How’d They Do That?” is currently in hiatus but has been picked up for at least another nine-week run.

He will also soon become one of three hosts of the popular Sunday night radio show, “Bob Costas: Coast to Coast,” which will become simply “Coast to Coast.” O’Brien will serve as host of the show during the most of the basketball season, with Costas handling the baseball season and Dan Dierdorf the football season.

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Add O’Brien: He hasn’t done too badly for a guy from Sioux Falls, S.D., whose dream as a kid was to be a rock-and-roll star.

O’Brien, whose father worked in a meat-packing plant, made enough money as a member of a rock-and-roll band to afford college. He went to the University of South Dakota even though he barely had the grades to get in.

O’Brien, 45, credits a political science professor at South Dakota, William O. Faber, with giving him a purpose in life and pushing him in the right direction. O’Brien finished at South Dakota with a 3.9 grade-point average and went on to Washington to study economics at John Hopkins. While there, he got a job as a copy boy at NBC and ended up being David Brinkley’s personal gofer.

From there, O’Brien landed a job as a news producer for WMAQ-TV in Chicago, during which time he had long hair and a wardrobe of mostly T-shirts. But one day there was no one to cover a breaking story, so he ended up on camera. He got a haircut, grew a mustache, put on a tie and launched his on-air career.

In 1977, after a record cold winter in Chicago, O’Brien came to Los Angeles, where he became a news reporter for Channel 2. He and his wife, Linda, and 6-year-old son, Sean, still live in Studio City.

When Van Gordon Sauter, the general manager at Channel 2, went to CBS as the president of sports in 1981, he took along O’Brien, who had won four local Emmy awards for news reporting.

When O’Brien told Sauter he had never done sports, Sauter told him, “You’re a good reporter, and a good reporter can report on anything.”

Sauter knew what he was talking about.

There’s rarely a major sports event on CBS that O’Brien isn’t a part of. This weekend, when CBS goes with half-hour “Baseball ‘93” pregame baseball shows rather than the abbreviated weekday pregame shows, O’Brien will serve as host from the CBS studios in New York. And he will be joined by his friend, Tom Lasorda.

TV-Radio Notes

ESPN2 got a boost Tuesday night when James Worthy and A.C. Green just happened to be the scheduled guests on “Talk2.” To get their reaction to the Michael Jordan retirement, the main ESPN network went live to its new sister network and other television outlets across the country, including Channel 4 in Los Angeles, picked up their comments and credited ESPN2. . . . Prime Ticket’s “Press Box” scored somewhat of a coup when it got rookie stars Mike Piazza of the Dodgers and Tim Salmon of the Angels together this week for an interview.

Channel 9 will take a look at the making of the Mighty Ducks in a one-hour special Sunday at 6 p.m. Said host Tom Murray: “I guess you’d call it a duck-umentary.” . . . The Ducks, whose flagship radio stations are KLAC and Orange-County based KEZY (95.9 FM), also have radio affiliates in the San Bernardino-Riverside area (KCKC), in Bakersfield (KGEO) and in hockey-starved Minneapolis (KFAN).

Recommended viewing: “Amazing Games,” the outstanding series that features outrageous and exotic sports from around the world, begins its fourth season on ESPN Monday night at 7. Raider radio commentator Bob Chandler is the host. The first episode features Florentine football from Italy, maybe the most unusual and brutal of all sports. Fights are broken up by officials carrying swords. Too bad ESPN is giving this show a time slot opposite “Monday Night Football.”

XTRA’s “Too Much Show” guys, Steve Mason and Rick Schwartz, who are always up to something crazy, rewarded a listener Thursday night with a ride on the Goodyear blimp on Sunday, when it will hover over the Raider-New York Jet game at the Coliseum. Another listener will get the same thing tonight. . . . Ann Meyers Drysdale and Breeders’ Cup executive Mike Letis will be Irv Kaze’s guests on KIEV tonight at 6:30.