Couch Potatoes Will Love Cold Playoffs
The forecast for this weekend is cold and colder as the NFL playoffs move into conference championship finals. Players hate it, many broadcasters dread it and TV viewers just love it.
“In the days of clean uniforms and AstroTurf, it’s kind of nice not to be able to see who made the catch or the tackle,” Fox studio analyst Terry Bradshaw said.
For that matter, who cares which teams are playing, as long as the weather is bad - the badder the better. If Natrone Means is buried in a snowdrift or Drew Bledsoe’s first pass is blown to Nantucket, so much the better.
“It’s like being out in your backyard, hogging in the mud,” said Howie Long, Bradshaw’s sidekick at Fox. “Everybody wants to be a kid in the mud again.”
Fox has the NFC championship, Carolina at Green Bay, where temperatures might not reach the teens and where there is a chance of snow. It could be a replay of the 1967 Ice Bowl. NBC, meanwhile, has Jacksonville at New England for another potential cold-weather blast.
“I think people like it when they can be in the comfort of their own homes and watch other people out doing stuff,” Fox analyst John Madden said. “I’ve always loved it in any sport, like a golf tournament and they’re having bad weather at Pebble Beach.
“In football, you have team against team, man against man - those matchups. And then you have man and team against the elements. It adds another dimension to the game. It’s not just blocking and tackling and kicking and running anymore. That doubles the interest in the game.”
Green Bay’s 1967 win over Dallas generally is considered the coldest game ever played in the NFL. Madden’s broadcast partner, Pat Summerall, was there for CBS, both in the booth and on the field.
“The field was just rock hard, and I found myself wondering what if I were playing today,” Summerall said. “I just didn’t know how they did it. It was brutal, and it didn’t matter how many clothes you put on.”
NBC had a game last Sunday, Pittsburgh at New England, that also will be remembered for its weather - fog so thick the broadcasters couldn’t see the scoreboard.
“The memory of that Dallas-Green Bay game lasted long after the ice melted,” Dick Enberg of NBC said. “Weather enhances a game. There are no more beautiful pictures on TV than slow motion of somebody running through big snowflakes. It’s almost like a portrait, it’s so beautiful.”
Out takes
“ABC’s Wide World of Sports” enters its 36th season Saturday with a couple of new features that just look old - “Wide World Classic” and “Spanning the Globe.”
The classic segment will draw on ABC’s library of vintage film and apparently found its genesis in the popularity of Classic Sports Network.
“We have such a huge library and there is a renewed enthusiasm for classic sports,” ABC coordinating producer Curt Gowdy Jr. said. “So we’re going to capitalize and do it on a weekly basis.”
Gowdy said the first week’s classic will look at Muhammad Ali’s “Rumble in the Jungle” with George Foreman in Kinshasa, Zaire, on Oct. 30, 1974.
“Spanning the Globe,” drawing from the Wide World tradition of showing sports you’ve never seen before, will cap off each show and serve as a wrapup of the week’s sports action around the world.