Cable Players Were Ready for Prime Time

It wasn’t so long ago that only a few hockey games, road Laker games and selected USC and UCLA football games were on television. Volleyball and most other minor sports? Never.

But 10 years ago, Bill Daniels and Jerry Buss started Prime Ticket, and these days, having a smorgasbord of local sports on television is taken for granted.

Prime Ticket, which became Prime Sports in March of this year, has undergone tremendous growth and change, to the benefit of the Southern California sports fan.

Prime Sports is now available in 4.7 million homes over 175 cable systems and via home satellite dishes.

Daniels’ original investment in the company was $5 million. Buss put up the television rights to the Lakers, Kings and Forum boxing.

Daniels, called “the father of cable television,” bought out much of Buss’ interest in 1988 and sold Prime Ticket in August of last year for more than $200 million.

The company is now owned by Liberty Sports of Dallas, which changed the name.

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The first president of Prime was Tony Acone, but the company didn’t really start growing until John Severino came in as president in 1988.

Severino was the longtime general manager of Channel 7 who once had been president of the ABC network. Severino resigned his Prime job in 1992.

Succeeding Severino was Roger Werner, former president of ESPN, and the growth continued. One of Werner’s many accomplishments was the formation of a Spanish language network, and Prime Deportiva is now a national service.

Werner left Prime after last year’s sale to Liberty and is now heading a project to launch two new cable channels, Outdoor Life and Speedvision.

Liberty, to its credit, promoted from within. Kitty Cohen, former vice president of finance, was named general manager, and Pat McClenahan, who joined the company as a senior producer in 1992, was named vice president of programming and production.

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So, where does Prime go from here? Cohen is currently on maternity leave, but McClenahan addressed that issue the other day.

Prime has just about every L.A. team in the fold, except the Dodgers and Clippers.

McClenahan said he is working a deal with the Clippers in which seven or eight home games could be shown on Prime this season.

The Dodgers are another story. The Dodger philosophy has always been not to televise home games on basic cable.

“We’ve had talks with the Dodgers,” McClenahan said. “There are some hurdles there.”

Brent Shyer, the Dodgers’ director of broadcasting, said, “One concern is, we do not want to do anything to devalue or diminish our deal with KTLA.”

But the biggest hurdle is money. The Dodgers reportedly get $15 million a year from Channel 5--which on Wednesday lost the Angels, after 35 years--or about $300,000 a game, a price too steep for Prime.

“We’re pretty far apart there,” McClenahan said.

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One of the best things Prime did was create “Press Box,” its nightly news show, in 1990. Tom Reilly, a respected senior producer from ESPN, was brought in to head the production and the result has been a first-class show that rivals ESPN’s “SportsCenter.”

Anchors such as Alan Massengale and Larry Burnett have given the show stability, and newcomers such as Leslie Gudel, Paul Sunderland, Randy Sparage, Andre Aldridge and Tom Kirkland have fit right in.

Liberty added the new people earlier this year when it expanded to a national show that serves the 13 other regional sports networks it either owns or is affiliated with. Different editions were broken down by time zones.

The format for the show changes next Wednesday. The early edition, on Prime at 6:30, is being eliminated. That way, the half-hour editions, which now are done with half-hour breaks in between, can be fed to the other networks continuously. The half-hour break is gone.

This will allow the networks to go directly to “Press Box” right after an event.

Liberty’s takeover of Prime has given the company more of a corporate environment, but one way bigger is better is that it allows Prime to compete with the big boys, such as ESPN.

There is now talk of a merger of Liberty and Fox, which would align Prime and Fox’s cable channel, fX, and give Prime even more power.

It has been an interesting first 10 years for Prime, with prospects good for an interesting second 10.

TV-Radio Notes

NBC’s Breeders’ Cup coverage Saturday begins at 8:30 a.m., with the first post at 8:52, because the network has Notre Dame-Boston College at 12:30 p.m. Tom Hammond returns as host of the Breeders’ Cup, and Tom Durkin will call the races. Trevor Denman, who should be calling at least some, if not all, of the races, returns for a seventh year as an analyst. . . . Because of the Breeders’ Cup, Mike Willman and Kurt Hoover will do a special edition of their radio show, “Thoroughbred L.A.,” on KMAX-FM (107.1) tonight at 9.

ESPN’s award-winning “Outside the Lines” show celebrates its fifth anniversary with a special edition next Tuesday at 4:30 p.m. . . . The next edition of “Real Sports With Bryant Gumbel” will be on HBO Tuesday at 10 p.m. One segment deals with Jerry Jones, another with Nike.

A Laker preview special, taped at the team’s training camp in Honolulu, will be shown on Channel 9 Saturday at 7 p.m. and repeated Sunday at 9 p.m. . . . The Nashville Network (TNN) will televise this weekend’s drag races at Pomona, on Saturday at 4 p.m. and Sunday at 4:30.

Pete Rose begins doing some of his national radio talk shows from the KMAX studio in Arcadia next week. When he’s at KMAX, his partner will be Joe McDonnell. . . . KMAX program director Keith James last week suspended the “Sports Gods,” night-time hosts Dave Smith and Joey Haim, and told them to clean up their act. They said they would, but at times this week were still up to their old off-color antics. They do have some raw talent, though.