Even Before Final, ABC Declares Cup ‘a Huge Success’
Even before it televises Sunday’s championship game between Brazil and Italy, ABC is proclaiming the World Cup a success.
“It’s been a huge success, and a big reason for that success is the attention it has gotten in newspapers across the country,” said Jack O’Hara, executive producer of ABC sports.
ABC, through its first 10 telecasts, averaged a 4.7 national Nielsen rating, which translates to 4.4 million households. Of course, the 9.3 for U.S.-Brazil on July 4 was a big boost.
ESPN, which got a 3.9 (2.5 million households) for Wednesday night’s Brazil-Sweden semifinal, has averaged a 2.2 (1.4 million households) for 28 live telecasts and a 1.8 (1.1 million households) for all 40 of its telecasts.
Univision’s telecasts have been seen in an average of 834,500 households, with an estimated 250,000 of those non-Latino.
O’Hara said the 4.7 rating far exceeds ABC’s expectations, even though it has been published that ABC expected to average a 4.5.
“That didn’t come from us,” O’Hara said. “I think that may have come from someone on the World Cup Organizing Committee. Whoever it came from, they knew what they were talking about.”
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Will the success of the World Cup pave the way for a successful U.S. professional soccer league?
O’Hara thinks it might and said his network has already made a deal to carry the new league’s championship game.
But others aren’t so sure.
Jed Drake, ESPN senior coordinating producer, said, “This event, as wonderful as it has been, will be just a wonderful memory by the time the pro league kicks off.”
Loren Matthews, ESPN senior vice president, said, “I think maybe some people are seeing too many positives coming out of this. I don’t know if major league soccer will make it or not, but if it does, it will have to make it on its own.”
Commentator Seamus Malin said the new league should not set standards that are too high.
“If the goals are modest and appropriate, I think it can succeed,” he said.
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Next up: The World Cup will soon be gone, and then along come the Goodwill Games July 23-Aug. 7 at St. Petersburg, Russia.
These are the third Goodwill Games. The others were held in 1986 at Moscow and ’90 at Seattle.
Ted Turner created the Goodwill Games to foster better relations between the United States and the Soviet Union after the U.S. had boycotted the 1980 Olympic Games at Moscow and the Soviets the ’84 Games in Los Angeles.
Now, the Cold War and the Soviet Union are long gone, but the Goodwill Games continue.
The Games, featuring the top eight teams or individuals in the world, will be televised in 117 countries, even though athletes from only about 55 of them will compete. Turner’s TBS will devote 64 hours of prime-time programming to the Games, ABC will offer 17 hours of weekend coverage, and Univision will offer selected Spanish-language coverage.
Nick Charles and Fred Hickman, co-anchors of CNN’s “Sports Tonight” news program, will serve as hosts of TBS’ coverage from a studio aboard a ship, the Olympia, in the Gulf of Finland.
Mark Jones and Julie Moran will be the ABC hosts.
Even though the Iron Curtain no longer exists, televising an international event in Russia is still difficult.
“We’re bringing in our own power generators,” said Don McGuire, the executive producer of Turner Sports. “We have to use our own electricity so we don’t put undue pressure on their system.”
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Wave of the future: Seattle-based Northwest Mobile Television, which recently became National Mobile Television, is the country’s largest mobile production company.
Previously, NMT did no more than lease production trucks and equipment to the networks for televising sports events--more than 3,000 last year.
Now with the networks facing financial cutbacks and looking to go outside for production, the company is getting into the production business and has brought in the highly respected Michael Weisman to head the project.
Weisman, former executive producer of NBC Sports, is the World Cup Organizing Committee’s executive in charge of broadcast and video productions. But with the World Cup winding down, Weisman, a 12-time Emmy Award winner, is moving on.
Weisman said former NBC chairman Grant Tinker was the first to approach him about his new job, in which he will be president and part-owner of the company’s new production division.
“I couldn’t be more excited about this,” Weisman said. “I’ll be able to put together my own staff and do what I like to do best--producing major sports events.”
Weisman said his new office will be in West Los Angeles.
TV-Radio Notes
This is a big weekend for ABC. Not only does it have the World Cup final, but also the British Open and the start of its baseball coverage Saturday and Monday. John Saunders will be host of ABC’s baseball coverage. . . . XTRA will offer radio coverage of Sunday’s World Cup final. . . . Univision has added U.S. Coach Bora Milutinovic as a guest analyst for Saturday’s third-place game and Sunday’s championship game. He will join Andres Cantor and Norberto Longo at the Rose Bowl, and Jessi Losada will serve as host from Univision’s main studio in Miami.
This weekend’s games will be the first attended in person by Univision announcers since the opener in Chicago. Imagine the Fox network having Pat Summerall and John Madden calling football games off monitors in its Hollywood studios. That’s what Univision is doing with its announcers, having them call games from its Miami studio. “It’s absolutely terrible,” said the Dodgers’ Jaime Jarrin, one of this country’s most prominent Spanish-language sports broadcasters. “Univision is the largest Spanish-language network in the world, it goes everywhere (to more than 20 Latin American countries). But it’s a disgrace the way it has handled the World Cup. And there’s no excuse for it. They say it is the only way they can do all 52 games, but they could at least have one announcing team at the primary game (on any particular day) and then have another in the studio to handle the others. To make their announcers call games off a television monitor is terrible. They miss out on the excitement of being there, and on the feel of the crowd.”
TNT televised the World Cup in 1990, and Ted Turner’s network gets involved in this World Cup with a two-hour live entertainment special, “Hollywood Backstage at the World Cup,” Saturday night at 6. Producing the show, in association with Sports Illustrated TV, is Coca-Cola Big TV, which did a Super Bowl special last January. Pat O’Brien will be the host, with Lesley Visser and Jim Gray serving as reporters. Guests include Hakeem Olajuwon, Alexi Lalas, Tony Meola and John Harkes, plus a long list of celebrities from the entertainment and music fields. Ted Shaker, former executive producer of CBS Sports and current president of Coca-Cola Big TV, is the executive producer of the show, which will be televised from Paramount Studios in Hollywood.
It was announced earlier this week that ESPN has hired Visser to work on “NFL GameDay,” and Fox will announce today that it has hired Channel 11 entertainment reporter Lonnie Lardner to serve as a feature reporter on its new pregame show, “Fox NFL Sunday.” . . . ESPN, which besides Visser has Robin Roberts, Andrea Kramer and Pam Oliver on its NFL football staff, recently conducted a poll in which 1,042 people were asked, “Would you like to see more women sportscasters?” The results: 67% said yes, 25% said no, and the rest had no opinion.
Former UCLA basketball star Roy Hamilton, a respected sports producer for CBS, has been hired by Fox. Hamilton will head the crew that consists of play-by-play announcer Thom Brennaman, the radio voice of the Chicago Cubs and son of Cincinnati’s Marty Brennaman, and commentator Anthony Munoz. . . . NBC’s coverage of the All-Star game Tuesday earned a Nielsen rating of 15.7, the highest in three years. The share was 28 and the telecast was watched by an estimated 50 million. . . . Kudos to Prime Ticket’s Alan Massengale, who was at the game and was able to get one-on-one postgame interviews with Tony Gwynn and Mike Piazza.
The Southern California Sports Broadcasters Assn. has established a scholarship program, with two winners, male and female, to be selected from nominations by area college athletic directors. The winners will be announced later this month. . . . The lack of interest in track and field will be explored on the Sports Illustrated segment on ABC’s “Wide World of Sports” Saturday. Bob Kersee says the way the sport is run in the United States is “just boring! “ . . . Tom Lasorda is the host of a two-hour special, “Now it Can Be Heard,” to be carried by Channel 4 at noon on July 23. The show will let viewers experience close-up conversations among managers, players and umpires.
