Winter Games TV Talk Comes Relatively Cheap Amateurs Swamp Cbs With Tapes Even Though Ex-Athletes Fill Most Jobs

Whenever the Winter Olympics are held, U.S. fans dream about skating like Peggy Fleming or skiing like Picabo Street.

They also fantasize about talking like Olympic commentator Dick Button.

CBS said it received hundreds of tapes from people looking for jobs as analysts for such events as bobsled, luge and figure skating during next month’s games in Nagano, Japan. Some came from people with no television experience who recorded a few minutes of commentary while watching a videotape.

“It was crazy,” said Rick Gentile, a CBS Sports vice president in charge of hiring for the Olympics. “There were people out there who thought: ‘Hey, I know the luge, figure skating, or skiing as well as the guys on TV, so I should be working for CBS.”’

They wasted time and postage. Of the 15 analysts hired by CBS for its broadcasts of the Feb. 7-23 Olympics, only one isn’t an ex-athlete or a former Olympian. That outsider, former United Press International journalist Paul Robbins, is one of the lowest-paid analysts in the history of modern network television - pocketing about $3,500 for his commentary on cross-country skiing.

While Fox Sports football commentator John Madden makes about $400,000 a game, CBS’s Olympic analysts are nowhere near that neighborhood. Olympic commentators next month will make from about $5,000 to $50,000, with figure-skating analysts at the top of the scale, Gentile said.

CBS’s ski-jumping analyst, Jeff Hastings, is in the lower financial echelon of Olympic commentators, earning $14,000 to talk about a sport in which he once was a four-time U.S. champion. It doesn’t bother him.

Hastings said making a lot more money as an Olympic commentator would mean he would have to become more like ABC’s Button, a two-time gold medalist in ice skating who is perhaps the most renowned commentator of Winter Olympics.

Button’s effervescent and sometimes acerbic style captivates some viewers and alienates others. He’s credited with uttering one of the most famous lines in Olympic broadcasting history after a routine by a skater in the 1988 games at Calgary, Alberta: “Now, that was an angry tango.”

“You couldn’t pay me $50,000 to be Dick Button,” said Hastings, who earns more than that as a vice president for Pro-Cut International Inc., a New Hampshire-based company that repairs brakes on cars and trucks.

Bonnie Warner, CBS’s luge analyst, got the network to pay her about $28,000 because she had more leverage than most. Warner wanted so badly to talk about luge at these Olympics that she delayed trying to have her first child. That wasn’t all. She postponed training for a promotion worth about $30,000 a year at her regular job, flying planes for United Airlines.

Those sacrifices, coupled with Warner being one of the few people in the world fluent in luge and television, enabled her to bargain.

“It’s a pretty good salary, but I’m going through a lot,” said Warner, a former San Francisco TV sports reporter and four-time national luge champion. “Besides, I knew they were in a bind, what were they going to do if I said no? Find another luge analyst?”

Jim Rippey’s decision to analyze snowboarding for CBS was a little less complicated. Rippey, one of the world’s top snowboarders, was going to try out for the Olympics when he said a call came this summer from his sponsor, Burton Snowboards Inc., telling him about a job with CBS.

“I was stoked,” Rippey said. “So I went to New York, did 10 minutes in front of the camera, they offered me the job.”

Although CBS won’t disclose salaries of its men’s ice hockey analyst John Davidson or figure skating commentator Scott Hamilton, they are drawing bigger paychecks than Park Smalley, who is making $12,000 as the freestyle skiing analyst, or Randy Bartz, earning $6,000 as the short-track speedskating commentator.

Just like many Olympic athletes, Bartz said participating isn’t about the money.

“Being CBS’s short-track speed-skating analyst isn’t going to impress anyone except maybe my girlfriend,” Bartz said. “I feel somewhat honored to be doing it.”

Bartz won’t get the chance to repeat that honor with CBS at least until after 2008, because NBC has the rights to the next five Olympics.

While CBS Sports Vice president Gentile said the network will miss the Olympics, he won’t miss the blizzard of audition tapes.

“That may be the one positive of us not doing the Games,” Gentile said.