Olympic TV Is a Cash Register

If you see it on television, it’s the truth. There have been a bunch of surveys that say people believe what they see on television a lot more than what they read in newspapers. This is totally understandable. After all, there is no newspaper equivalent of “Baywatch.”

It was pretty funny to hear the protests when it became apparent this week that NBC actually was taping Olympic events at Atlanta and showing them at a later time when the television audience would be bigger.

About 40% of the action at the Olympics is being shown on tape, an act that apparently wouldn’t be worth criticizing at all except that the network doesn’t take a lot of time explaining what it’s doing.

It’s not that NBC is ashamed, and, in fact, the truth is just the opposite. Armed with statistics and samplings and research and the most powerful argument of all, ratings, NBC said it is merely giving television viewers what they want.

The whole issue is irrelevant anyway. A bus is going to show up on time in Atlanta before we get television back the way it used to be. That would be World Series games during the day, college basketball games that end before midnight or major league baseball games every Saturday.

Those days are as gone as, say, the Olympics representing the purest form of athletic achievement. Like all the other sports events in this country, they were for sale and NBC bought them.

For $456 million, NBC can do exactly what it wishes with the Olympics, including tape-delaying the closing ceremonies until the fall sweeps if it wants to, just as long as the ratings don’t take a dive like Mark Lenzi in a concrete Speedo.

The Olympics are a television show, just as much as they are a sporting event. That’s what has happened in just about every sport that uses a ball or a puck. Yes, sports events are just television shows.

This isn’t exactly a new trend, but it’s always a nice idea to get our heads out of our picture tubes so that we can experience, say, reality? Look at what’s at stake. Basically, it’s money, and lots of it. For instance, the NBA got a little more than $1.1 billion in a four-year deal with NBC and Turner. That’s the first time Shaquille O’Neal’s salary ever sounded more like the minimum wage.

It also explains why league schedule-makers put not one, but two games on NBC last Christmas Day. The two-time defending champion Houston Rockets played the Shaq-Penny Hardaway-Magic at Orlando and the David Robinson-San Antonio Spurs played the Charles Barkley-Suns at Phoenix.

By sheer coincidence, the schedule-makers basically worked for NBC. Hey, for $1.1 billion, if NBC wanted the Rockets to play on a runway at the North Pole dressed in fur-lined red outfits wearing funny little caps with bells on the ends, they’d do it. Heck, Dennis Rodman probably does the same thing without being asked.

The Rockets also were lucky enough to play a game in Indianapolis on Thanksgiving, but they did get New Year’s Day off.

League sources said that when the NBA’s network television deal is up in 1998, chances are pretty good the rights fee is going to go up. Chances also are pretty good that a basketball will remain round.

As for baseball, NBC, Fox and ESPN shelled out $1.7 billion over five years for the broadcast rights to the grand old game.

The only problems baseball has now are Marge Schott, how to avoid the biennial strike and figure out some new lyrics for “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” Instead of “Buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack,” it probably should be “Buy me some short term T-bills and a growth opportunity fund.”

If you have a problem with games that start too late and end too late, hey, those games were paid for by the network. Now be quiet and watch them, but pay special attention to the innovative “helmet cam” and how it brings the game ever closer to you.

The NFL’s four-year deal is for about $4 billion. It is a partnership between Fox, NBC, ABC, ESPN and Turner. College football becomes a lot clearer when you factor in ABC’s seven-year, $500-plus-million deal to televise the college football championship. It’s a deal that’s certain to send ratings soaring while at the same time eliminates CBS from meaningful postseason college football.

The networks are busy carving up sports properties to make sure they’re TV shows. Right now, NBC is the biggest sports programmer with the NFL, major league baseball, the Olympics, U.S. Open golf and Notre Dame football, among other sports TV shows.

ABC has “Monday Night Football,” college football and basketball, the British Open and others. Fox has football, baseball and hockey. CBS is reduced to the Final Four, the Masters and the U.S. Open tennis.

If anyone wonders what has happened to our sports, there’s your answer. Television bought them. It probably was the inevitable conclusion to the money trail, where more owners paid more money to more players and needed more money to keep doing it.

Is this bad? Not if you don’t mind a few inconveniences, like late games, tape-delays and strange broadcast times. There are no records kept in this department, but it is believed that the only two entities who ever stood up to television and won are Bob Knight and the Masters golf tournament. Knight refused to have his Indiana basketball team play late televised games during the week, and the Masters tells CBS every year how it will run its own broadcast.

You can bet your azaleas that nobody else would dare tell a television network what its job should be. Television networks changed sports events in the old-fashioned, capitalistic way. They bought them.

In truth, without the networks, there would be a serious cash flow problem in our sports leagues. And TV programming would have to change too. They’d have to look outside the lines for someplace to point a camera.