A Very Big Game, Very Little Exposure

Brace yourself for this one: When USC and UCLA play Wednesday night at Pauley Pavilion in the most important college basketball game between the two cross-town rivals in years, the game will be televised only on Fox Sports West 2.

What that means is, you more than likely won’t be able to watch it.

The splitting of Fox Sports West into a second channel has been a hot topic in sports television. The main reason is because almost no Southern California cable companies are carrying Fox Sports West 2.

The new channel’s affiliate list in the Greater Los Angeles area includes Marcus Cable in Burbank,

Glendale and Whittier; Buenavision in East L.A. and Boyle Heights; GTE Americast in Cerritos, and OpTel, which services apartment complexes and the like. That’s about it.

This has angered sports fans, but the furor so far is only a ripple compared to the tidal wave that will hit Wednesday at 7:30 p.m. That’s when many people who haven’t been paying attention will try to find the USC-UCLA game on television--and it won’t be there.

Who’s to blame?

The Fox people say they’re not to blame, that they had to start a new channel to handle their heavy load of sports inventory and that without Fox Sports West 2 the USC-UCLA game could not be televised at all, at least not live. Fox Sports West is committed to carrying a home Laker game against Cleveland on Wednesday, and moving the USC-UCLA game back to Thursday, where it was originally scheduled, wouldn’t help because Fox Sports West has to show the Kings and Mighty Ducks from the Forum that night.

The cable operators say it’s not their fault, that they never asked for a second channel and that they don’t want it because either they don’t have room for Fox Sports West 2 or they don’t want to pass along the cost--about 75 cents per subscriber per month--to their customers.

So who do you blame?

Try corporate America.

It’s all about money.

Schools, professional teams, television entities and cable companies are all trying to make money. Nothing wrong with that, but at some point something has to give. When is enough enough?

Fox, having tied up the rights to virtually all local sports, won’t farm anything out because that would defeat the purpose of forcing cable companies to carry Fox Sports West 2 and anteing up the cost.

What we have here is a mess. The Mighty Ducks are suing Fox Sports West, with Fox winning Round 1 when an Orange County judge on Wednesday denied the team’s request to have their games simulcast on Fox Sports West and Fox Sports West 2. This spat is part of a bigger feud between Disney, the Ducks’ parent company, and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., Fox’s parent company. Time Warner chairman Gerald Levin and vice chairman Ted Turner are also feuding with Murdoch, which results in Time Warner cable systems leading the battle in the anti-FSW 2 movement.

Meanwhile, the fans get caught in the middle. All they want is to be able to sit down and watch a big game. Is that asking too much?

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Merchant of sanity: In the 40 or so years Larry Merchant has been covering boxing, the first 20 as a sportswriter and the last 20 as a commentator for HBO, he has seen many crazy things.

But nothing quite like last Friday’s fight between Lennox Lewis and Oliver McCall, in which McCall appeared to have a mental breakdown and quit fighting.

“I’ve seen guys quit before in all kinds of ways--refusing to come out of their corner, taking a knockout, refusing to take the offensive, faking an injury--but nothing like what McCall did,” Merchant said this week from his home in Santa Monica.

“I have to give our producer, Rick Bernstein, credit. During the fourth round, he told me to go over to Georgie Benton [McCall’s trainer] and find out what was going on. That’s when Benton said, on the air, ‘You’re seeing a man who has lost his mind.’ That’s a strong statement coming from a fighter’s own corner.”

Has Merchant ever thought there was too much instability in boxing for a basically stable person such as himself?

“Boxing is endlessly fascinating,” he said. “I look forward to every fight with anticipation, never knowing what to expect. That’s the appeal.”

TV-Radio Notes

Television likes boxing because it guarantees a decent rating. Put a week-old boxing show on Channel 13 on a Saturday morning, as promoter Patrick Ortiz did last weekend with a card from the Chumash Casino, located on a Native American reservation near Solvang, and you get a 1.4 rating. A Mighty Duck game on Channel 9 that night got a 1.3. . . . DirecTV this week began a regular Bob Arum-promoted boxing series that will be on the second Wednesday of every month, and tonight at midnight Fox Sports Net, which includes Fox Sports West, begins a boxing series with a card featuring Gabriel Ruelas at the Fantasy Springs Casino in Indio.

Another sport that guarantees good ratings is figure skating. But these days, there is so much of it on television it is hard to tell what is real and what is a made-for-TV exhibition. What ABC has this weekend--the U.S. Figure Skating Championships--is real. The event is a prelude to next month’s World Championships at Lausanne, Switzerland. Figure skating, like gymnastics, is a sport in which women outrank men. ABC is putting the women’s finals on in prime time Saturday (8 p.m.) and showing the men’s finals a day late on Sunday afternoon. According to Lydia Stephans, ABC’s vice president of programming, women make up 65%-70% of the audience for figure skating.

CBS has 87 cameras at its disposal for Sunday’s Daytona 500. “No, we haven’t lost our minds,” CBS director Bob Fishman said. “There are 31 main cameras, but there are 87 [including 10 in-car cameras] if you count everything.” Among CBS’ new toys are two pop-up cameras on the grass just off the asphalt. If they get run over, they pop back up--hopefully. . . . The Nashville Network has a new show, “NASCAR Garage,” which makes its debut Sunday at 8:30 a.m., half an hour before CBS goes on the air from Daytona. The co-hosts of TNN’s show, which takes a behind-the-scenes and under-the-hood look at stock car racing, are Leslie Gudel, formerly of Prime Sports’ “Press Box,” and Chris McClure.

NBC has hired Ann Meyers to serve as a commentator on both NBA and WNBA games. She makes her debut Feb. 23 on a regional Seattle-Utah telecast with Dick Enberg. . . . Joe McDonnell has joined Jim Gott as co-host of KABC radio’s “Sportstalk.” . . . ESPN’s Chris Berman was named sportscaster of the year for a fifth time by the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Assn. . . . The KNX sports team of Fred Gallagher, Steve Grad, Bill Seward, Gil Stratton and Charleye Wright was named the best in radio by the Southern California Broadcasters Assn. Stu Nahan and Ed Arnold were named best team in TV.

The LPGA Los Angeles Women’s Championship at Oakmont Country Club in Glendale will be on Fox Sports West 2 on Saturday, delayed, 4-6 p.m., and Sunday, live, 1-3 p.m. Sunday’s round will be shown again on Fox Sports West from 5-7 p.m. . . . Ratings game: Sunday’s NBA All-Star game got an 11.2 Nielsen rating, the fourth-highest since 1975. The final night of the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show on USA got an all-time high 4.2 rating.

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What Los Angeles Is Watching

A sampling of L.A. Nielsen ratings for sports programs Feb. 8-9.

SATURDAY

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Event Ch. Rating Share College basketball: Stanford at UCLA 7 4.7 13 Wide World: speedskating, figure skating 7 3.3 7 Golf: Buick Invitational 4 3.0 9 College basketball: Georgetown at Syracuse 2 2.6 8 Boxing: Mark Lewis-Joel Garcia 13 1.4 4 College basketball: Marquette at Cincinnati 2 1.3 4 Hockey: Mighty Ducks at Edmonton 9 1.3 2 Hockey: Chicago at Colorado 11 1.2 4

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SUNDAY

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Event Ch. Rating Share Pro basketball: NBA All-Star game 4 14.2 30 Golf: Buick Invitational 4 3.3 10 Auto Racing: NASCAR Busch Clash 2 2.6 7 College basketball: Iowa at Illinois 2 1.9 5 College basketball: Tulane-Arizona 7 1.7 5 College basketball: Kansas at Iowa State 2 1.6 5 Skiing: World Alpine Championships 2 0.9 3 Hockey: Mighty Ducks at Calgary 9 0.9 2

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Note: Each rating point represents 49,424 L.A. households.