It Figures That Packer Won’t Skate Around This

He is San Antonio’s problem now, and, really, if the city leaders were truly prepared for this Final Four, they’d have posted signs around Riverwalk:

Beware!

Billy Packer is on the loose, and he’s asking questions.

Proceed at your own risk.

Alas, it’s too late for that now.

Within hours of landing in San Antonio on Wednesday, Packer was running up to unsuspecting women, getting in their faces and demanding to know what they watched on television last Saturday night -- figure skating or the NCAA basketball tournament?

“What I was proving is that the ratings are total baloney,” Packer said during a CBS conference call Thursday. “I do it all the time.”

Packer was fired up by a published report claiming more people watched the women’s final at the World Figure Skating Championships last Saturday than the men’s NCAA basketball tournament. And as Saint Joseph’s learned during this tournament, when Packer is fired up, it’s time to duck and cover.

“Here’s what I did,” Packer said. “I do very sophisticated polls, OK? I did interviews with 17 women from the time I left my house [Wednesday] till I got here, and I picked out women between 20 and 50. They can have no identification -- like someone wearing a Georgia Tech baseball cap. And I asked them.

“Not one single woman knew that ice skating was on. Nine watched the college basketball tournament.”

Seventeen women. Evidently, sophisticated poll research is in the eye of the beholder.

“Do you want to add zeroes onto that?” Packer said. “You want to go to 170? You want to go to 1,700 women? Do it yourself. It’s kind of interesting to see how it relates to the real world.”

He didn’t stop in San Antonio. Packer took his cause to the bartenders of the Charlotte and Atlanta airports, asking them what people were watching there Saturday night, and to the skies, interrogating a stewardess as to her weekend viewing habits.

“[One] thing that I realize, and I will take for granted, we all know this -- they don’t do any surveys of people in bars and restaurants,” Packer said. “So here’s what I did. In the Charlotte airport and the Atlanta airport, I went to those facilities that have multiple television screens. There were five of them that I could get to.

“Of the five, three of the guys who were tending the bar didn’t work on Saturday night. Two of them did. So I said, ‘Let me ask you a question. What was showing on these multiple television screens Saturday night?’

“The guy said the NCAA basketball tournament.

“I said, ‘Well, how many people came up and said, “Let’s switch that over to ice skating?” ’

“They said, ‘Are you kidding? What are you talking about, ice skating?’ ”

Packer said, “It never ends with this.... Back in the days when there were only three networks and we had one TV in the household [and] everybody sat down and watched it, the Nielsen [ratings] were reflective of what people did in America. Today, they have no reflection of what people are doing in America.

“One lady, a stewardess, looked at me and was very nasty. She said, ‘What, do I look like an ice skater? Are you crazy? I watched the basketball.’ ”

Winding down, Packer mused, “We have a good time with life. You know, some people get on an airplane, they sit down, they go to sleep. I like to have some fun.”

Air travelers of America, you have been warned.

Available for viewing this weekend:

TODAY

* NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament Semifinals

(Channel 2, 3 p.m.)

Topic for further research: On CBS, it’s the men’s Final Four -- Georgia Tech versus Oklahoma State, followed by Connecticut versus Duke, as big as it gets for men’s college basketball. And on ABC, beginning at 4 p.m., it’s week-old figure skating, a tape-delayed exhibition from the World Championships at Dortmund, Germany.

* San Jose Earthquakes at D.C. United

(Channel 7, 1 p.m.)

The much-ballyhooed debut of Freddy Adu. Young Freddy is here on a daunting mission, to save Major League Soccer from itself. At the very least, you’d expect MLS to cut the kid a break. But, no, this is when MLS has decided to trot out Adu and its new season -- amid the crunch of Final Four weekend and the opening of baseball season.

* PGA BellSouth Classic

(Channel 4, noon)

Curious about golf, Adu began dabbling in the game and says he now shoots in the mid- to high 80s. And he is 14 years old. Tiger Woods is a fixture in these “athlete of the year” polls, but let’s see him dance through an MLS defense, free himself at the far post and back-heel a low-driven cross into the net.

* Dodgers at Angels

(Channel 9, 7 p.m.)

It’s the Freeway Series, all right. And only Arte Moreno was smart enough to buy the all-summer express-lane pass.

SUNDAY

* San Antonio Spurs at Lakers

(Channel 7, 12:30 p.m.)

Last spring, the Spurs ended the Lakers’ championship run at three in a row. This spring, the Lakers have won 11 games in succession and, despite all the distractions and all the injuries and all the nonsense, began this weekend atop the Western Conference. The torch really wasn’t passed in 2003; it was just lent out to light some barbecues for a year.

* Calgary Flames at Mighty Ducks

(Channel 9, 1 p.m.)

The mighty disappointment mercifully drags to a close with this one. They said the Ducks would have trouble winning without him this season, and they were right. The Ducks really missed Jean-Sebastien Giguere.

* Kings at San Jose Sharks

(Fox Sports Net, 1 p.m.)

With an NHL work stoppage looming in the fall, this could be the Kings’ last game for a long while, maybe until 2005. That gives the team some time to find some goaltending.