He Who Dazzles Knows When to Shut Up

Postscripts. . .

Nothing on television is more visually stunning and poetic than figure skaters at the Winter Olympics, any Winter Olympics. On Tuesday, Verne Lundquist, the CBS announcer at Northern Lights Hall in Hamar, Norway, chose a single word--the perfect one--to define the performance of Natalia Mishkutenok and Artur Dmitriev, Russian silver medalists in the pairs competition.

“Dazzling.”

Equally so was Lundquist’s silence during their program. He let the pictures, sounds and crowd response speak eloquently for themselves in the same way that Vin Scully always understands when to shut up and not compete with an epic baseball moment.

Less dazzling has been commentator Scott Hamilton’s talkiness. His words often skate right over and draw attention from the athletes on the ice. He’s smart and articulate, and naturally the former gold medalist knows his stuff. What he doesn’t know is when to be quiet. What CBS should do is have Hamilton keep his comments on live performances to a minimum and reserve his laurels and darts for the replays. Otherwise, it’s like hearing play-by-play for “Swan Lake.”

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Yet Hamilton is a mime compared with some non-Olympics sportscasters who dish out hot-flaming oratory. One, in particular, comes irritatingly to mind.

It’s a bizarre sports commentator who can overshadow the event he’s supposed to be describing. Dick Vitale--the mouth from hell--is a bizarre sports commentator, a grating, showboating former coach who’s made his reputation by thrusting himself into the foreground of every college basketball event he’s assigned to cover by ESPN and ABC.

“Colorful” is the adjective frequently attached to Vitale. Yes, the way a fingernail scraping a blackboard is colorful. Vitale obliterates a basketball telecast by talking non-stop and shouting it into oblivion, using his tongue to grind it to dust.

You shutter when hearing Vitale relentlessly give details about Vitale, speak for the umpteenth time about his “diaper dandies” (a team’s freshmen) or again dip into his bottomless bag of trivia. At the mention of shoes you may get his top five list of sneakers, followed by his top five sneaky fast point guards, followed by his top five power forwards with pointy heads. A player has baggy shorts? Hear Vitale’s top five short players.

The man is merciless. And when he screams “BABEEEEEE!!!!”--as in “HEY, BABEEEEEE!!!!” or “MARK IT DOWN, BABEEEEEE!!!!”--his tubes are a thundering dunk that can shatter an entire backboard.

Imagine the scenario if Vitale were rinkside at the Winter Olympics, weighing in on the relatively genteel figure skating competition that’s been all but eclipsed by the frenzy over Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding “sharing the same ice.” You’d think they were sharing the same shower.

Of course, who needs Vitale to turn this into a carnival? On Thursday, for example, “CBS This Morning” had its cameras on Kerrigan and Harding as they practiced with other skaters on the big rink at Hamar. To his credit, Hamilton cautioned co-hosts Harry Smith and Paula Zahn not to “read too much” into any of this.

Yet from his monitor at the alpine skiing venue at Kvitfjell, Smith reported breathlessly that Kerrigan and Harding “skated right by each other.” A bulletin! And earlier, Zahn, from her post at a monitor in the snow at Lillehammer, reported that the two skaters “did not establish eye contact.”

Not dazzling, babeeeeee!!!!

Other Animals: KCET’s admirable “Life & Times” does more than provide a studio for talking heads.

Only recently, for example, it showed Jean Victor’s scrupulously fair, yet sensitive, poignant and quietly impassioned film chronicling the futile efforts of Peter Wallerstein and his Whale Rescue Team to stop the capture of three dolphins off the coast of California. The dolphins were sought for an exhibit at the John D. Shedd Aquarium in Chicago.

“Battle for the Dolphins” presented a classic clash between environmentalists and a marine mammal curator over whether these animals can thrive in captivity as they do in the sea. Each side said it cared about the dolphins.

The film artfully submerged you into the dolphins’ acoustic environment while conveying the “excitement and curiosity” that Wallerstein said he felt in their presence.

But watching the capture, viewers could only speculate about the terror the dolphins must have felt upon being plucked from the water by Shedd employees and hauled aboard their boat. There was something deeply sad about their ultimate relocation in a tank.

Save the dolphins--and also talented independent filmmakers like Victor who labor on modest budgets to do superior work dealing with challenging topics.

Infinitely bigger bucks were available to National Geographic and producers Dereck and Beverly Joubert to fund their recent PBS documentary, “Reflections on Elephants.”

What remarkable footage of free-roaming African elephants and their relationship to one another. One sequence showed huge adults actually going down to their knees in a cooperative effort to free a calf from a mud hole. In another touching sight, an elephant used its trunk to hold the tusk of a dead elephant--almost tenderly, like a treasured memento--as if reluctant to part with a comrade.

When it comes to especially intelligent animals, it’s always tempting--but a mistake--to anthropomorphize. In watching “Reflections of Elephants,” though, you couldn’t help marveling at these wondrous creatures and noting the qualities shared by their shrinking species and ours. While being repulsed, of course, by the thought of them being slaughtered for ivory.