This Top 25 Is a Little Too Current

Putting Lance Armstrong or Tiger Woods or Michael Jordan on the cover of your magazine is a tested and reliable strategy of moving those magazines off the newsstands and supermarket impulse-buy racks.

TV Guide, in an impressive triple crown bid, decided last week to release the same issue with three covers -- one with Armstrong, one with Woods, one with Jordan, collect ‘em all! -- but needed a reason to do so. Thus, TV Guide presented its “25 Most Awesome Sports Moments of the Last 15 Years” -- designed to pump sales during the dry midsummer days, or, to quote the text inside, “count down the 25 most gasp-worthy moments of the past 15 years.”

These are TV moments, granted top-25 status by the magazine because “We saw them all with our own eyes,” which explains why hockey cracks the list only twice. And the “most awesome” hockey moment of the last decade and a half in the eyes of TV Guide is?

Would you believe Game 4 of the 1993 Stanley Cup finals between the Kings and the Montreal Canadiens?

Not Game 2, and Marty McSorley’s involvement in the infamous Stickgate. No, TV Guide goes for Game 4, during which Montreal goalie Patrick Roy “stopped a shot the opposing Los Angeles Kings argued was a goal. With a cocksure wink, caught on TV, Roy assured the Kings that it wasn’t -- and that he was in total control.”

This awesome moment checked in at No. 14, six slots ahead of the New York Rangers’ winning their first Stanley Cup in 54 years. Evidently, TV Guide employs very few Ranger fans or King fans or hockey fans on its editorial staff.

The list starts reasonably enough with Armstrong’s first Tour de France triumph and Woods’ first Masters victory claiming the top two spots, followed by Jordan’s 1998 NBA Finals-winning shot and Christian Laettner’s winner for Duke against Kentucky in 1992.

The fifth slot goes to Cal Ripken Jr. for breaking Lou Gehrig’s consecutive-games-played streak in 1995, which seems a bit high for someone who punched the clock every day; an admirable act, but not necessarily awesome.

On the other hand, TV Guide points out that “You know you’ve achieved a milestone when it gets ESPN’s Chris Berman to keep his mouth shut for 18 minutes.” So there was a public-service element to Ripken’s streak-breaker. Let him have his No. 5.

The magazine reveals a foot fetish with its next three selections: Kerri Strug’s gold-medal-winning vault on a injured ankle at the 1996 Olympics, Adam Vinatieri’s kicking the New England Patriots past the Oakland Raiders in the 2001 playoffs, Curt Schilling and his blood-red sock inspiring Boston to a Game 6 victory over the New York Yankees in the 2004 American League championship series.

Completing the top 10 are Phil Mickelson’s 2004 Masters breakthrough and Serena Williams’ 2002-2003 Serena Slam, which deserves mention somewhere on this list, but not necessarily ahead of Pete Sampras’ career-closing 2002 U.S. Open triumph, a made-for-TV event if there ever was one. Yet Sampras, evidently lacking in the telegenically awesome department, didn’t make the top 25.

Some dubious choices follow: Afleet Alex’s Preakness victory at No. 12 (ahead of Brandi Chastain’s unforgettable Women’s World Cup-winning penalty kick and Michael Phelps’ sensational Athens performance); Illinois’ comeback against Arizona in the NCAA basketball tournament at No. 18 (thus honoring a brain-lock by Arizona Coach Lute Olson); and Robert Horry’s Game 5-winning shot against Detroit in the NBA Finals at No. 24 (thus honoring a brain-lock by Rasheed Wallace).

What do all these have in common? They all happened during the first six months of 2005.

There is a danger in trying to be too up-to-the-minute.

Conspicuously absent from the top 25 are Barry Bonds’ 73rd home run in 2001, Mark McGwire’s 70th home run in 1998 and Marion Jones’ five-medal haul at the 2000 Olympics. Wonder how this list might have looked had it been compiled before the BALCO debacle.

Other big oversights: Michael Johnson’s mind-blowing, 19.32-second 200-meter sprint at the 1996 Olympics, Arizona’s outlasting the Yankees in Game 7 of the 2001 World Series, the last play of the St. Louis-Tennessee Super Bowl, John Elway’s last two Super Bowls and, a staggeringly unfathomable accomplishment that never gets its proper due in the national media, the Angels’ 2002 World Series victory.

Yes, before Arte Moreno, before Vladimir Guerrero and before Disney disengaged itself from the project, the Angels, with nothing but despair to show for their first four decades, actually won the World Series. Some of us even saw it happen on television.

As these moments go, it doesn’t get much more awesome than that.

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Gender Divide on Sports TV

“Women’s Sports Go Unreported in Television News,” read the headline atop the report released by the Amateur Athletic Foundation of Los Angeles this week, a curious piece of timing considering the recent television news coverage accorded Michelle Wie, Danica Patrick and Venus Williams.

The foundation-commissioned report, titled “Gender in Televised Sports: News and Highlights Shows, 1989-2004,” asserts that women’s sports received 6.3% of television airtime in 2004, a decline from 8.7% in 1999. This is the fourth such study by the foundation, which published similar reports in 1990, 1994 and 2000. Each report compiled data drawn from a six-week sample period of sports news programs from the previous year. Among the latest study’s findings:

* On Los Angeles network affiliates KNBC, KCBS and KABC in 2004, men’s sports stories outnumbered women’s sports stories 9 to 1. On FSN West’s “Southern California Sports Report,” the ratio was 15 to 1. On ESPN’s “SportsCenter,” it was 20 to 1.

* In 2004, 58% of local network affiliates’ news programs included no women’s sports stories, with 48% of FSN West and ESPN news shows featuring nothing about women’s sports.

* Women’s tennis accounted for 42.4% of the women’s sports stories featured on the selected news programs in 2004.

A similar study of 2005 probably would produce higher numbers for women’s sports coverage, though an asterisk probably would be required. Women competing against men -- Wie in golf, Patrick in auto racing -- is a concept that hasn’t gone out of style, fascinating media and viewers ever since Billie Jean King matched forehands with Bobby Riggs in 1973.

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Larry Stewart is on vacation.