It Was a Long Wait, but the Eye Has It

You’re watching . . . oh, boy! CBS!

Yes, CBS. The NFL is back on CBS. Good old CBS, the network that gave us Phyllis George, Jimmy the Greek, Tom Brookshier and Jayne Kennedy. I can’t wait to see what CBS has for us next. Probably a halftime studio lineup of Murphy Brown, Morley Safer, the Nanny and Walker, Texas Ranger.

I am so happy for all my friends at CBS Sports . . . if there still is a CBS Sports. They had gone from working for the “Tiffany’s” network to working for the “Crazy Eddie’s Discount Appliance (Our Prices Are Insane!)” network. I believe the only sports CBS had left were the Masters golf tournament, the Final Four basketball tournament and the David Letterman stupid pet tricks.

Oh, and CBS does do the Winter Olympics, but this is better. Showing John Elway passing a football is a tad more thrilling than showing Herschel Walker pushing a bobsled.

CBS is paying billions of dollars for the rights to televise the football games of a conference that hasn’t won a Super Bowl for 14 years. Buying the TV rights to the American Football Conference is like buying the TV rights to Avis rent-a-car. The AFC is to the NFL what Fredo Corleone was to the Don.

But football is football, baby. CBS really missed being in the grid biz. After Fox came into the henhouse, CBS felt, well, violated. The NFL left. Pat Summerall and John Madden left. James Brown and Terry Bradshaw left. I think the only people who stayed behind were Jim Nantz and the janitor. Watching all those CBS people on Fox on Sunday mornings felt funny to me. It was like watching Willie Mays play for the Mets.

CBS’ counter-programming strategy was to load up on figure skating. Sunday after Sunday, I could see more people on skates on CBS than I could if I moved to Norway. International championships, national championships, regional championships. . . . I’m pretty sure CBS once televised the Greater Bakersfield championships. We got everything but Scott Hamilton and Kristi Yamaguchi doing “Les Miserables on Ice.”

I like figure skating, but this was too much of a good thing. I kept expecting CBS to give me blimp shots.

Having met the CBS president, Les Moonves, I liked him and have been rooting for him. CBS lost two of the oldest institutions in television, the NFL and Angela Lansbury. I can imagine how much that must have hurt. There wasn’t much I could do to assist Les and CBS, other than ask my cousin Roma to star in that “Touched by an Angel” series.

I read in this paper Tuesday that the CBS gang is going after “E.R.” next, if Warner Bros. television fails to extend a contract agreement with NBC. Moonves was quoted as comparing this to “Michael Jordan being a free agent. . . . That doesn’t happen very often.”

Jordan is dropping hints about becoming a New York Knick, which is as unsettling an image as when the NFL first went to Fox. But we, the public, adjust. Give us our games. If you show them, we will watch. If there is one thing that American men in particular know how to do, it is to change a TV channel.

I simply can’t believe the amount CBS is spending to get football back. This is the network that rued forking over a reported $1 billion for baseball, which nearly took the network down the tubes. I remember Dan Rather’s agitation at the CBS news division’s having to cut costs. If CBS spends $15 billion on football, Dan’s news budget could become whatever loose change he can find in a CBS sofa.

CBS can’t/won’t get its old TV team back. Fox still employs most of it, and Madden might jump to ABC. A rumor afloat is that ABC might move up “Monday Night Football” by an hour, making it a 5 p.m. kickoff on the West Coast. I suppose they could do what Hawaii does--tape-delay the game and keep it at 6 p.m. (Don’t forget, we don’t even get “Saturday Night Live” live.)

Who will do CBS football? Beats me. Phyllis is in the frozen chicken business. The Greek has gone to that great off-track betting parlor in the sky. Brooksie’s a successful businessman, off TV since cracking wise about the University of Louisville basketball team’s collective IQ. Jayne is the only one still on TV, getting all weepy on infomercials. Football back on CBS? Why, I bet Jayne’s psychic predicted this!

Congratulations, CBS.

Let’s see how those NBC peacocks like Sunday figure skating.