Knightmare for someone
For all his boardroom bravado, Donald Trump might seem like a big softie compared to the next king of reality television: Bob Knight.
Knight is scheduled to lord it over 16 Texas Tech students competing for the chance to play on his team in an ESPN show called “Knight School.” Filming for the six one-hour episodes, to be shown in February, starts next month.
The winner – assuming somebody survives the ordeal – will have a chance to become a walk-on for the 2006-07 season.
“From a public relations standpoint, this couldn’t be any better for Texas Tech,” Knight told the Lubbock (Texas) Avalanche-Journal.
That is, until the first kid runs afoul of “the General.”
Look out for moths
Not even our national pastime, it seems, is immune from the reality television craze.
A production company has followed the Japan Samurai Bears for much of their inaugural season in the independent Golden Baseball League, distributing cameras to players on the all-Japanese traveling team to capture priceless behind-the-scenes moments such as when one frantically tried to shoo a moth from the team bus.
“The level of fear this guy had about this moth was so huge that it was great,” said producer Matthew Asner of mod3productions.
The crew also shot footage of the players trying to pick up women in a bar.
“You get this sense of a fish out of water,” said producer Danny Gold, “but boy, when they get to that bar, they know how to pull their end.”
Bear-ly nothing left
Dwight Perry of the Seattle Times, on the Build-A-Bear Workshop in which kids can make their own NFL teddy bears and dress them in the jerseys or sweatshirts of their favorite teams: “Word has it that the Chicago Bears’ replicas are so realistic that you can knock the stuffing out of them from September clear through December.”
A dust-up for Dusty
Nearly three years later, Chicago Cubs manager Dusty Baker can still hear his mom blaring in his ear about his decision to let son Darren serve as a batboy in the 2002 World Series between the Angels and Giants.
Baker told Sports Illustrated that he was waiting to start a news conference about the tyke’s nearly getting run over by San Francisco’s David Bell near home plate when his mom called.
“She started lighting into me, like moms do, yelling, ‘I told you! I told you something bad would happen!’ ” Baker said.
“I was like, ‘Mom, I’ve got to go and talk to the press now.’ She said, ‘Oh, no! You tell the press to wait. I ain’t through with you yet.’ “
We knew him when
Boston Globe columnist Dan Shaughnessy, writing about colleague Peter Gammons’ recent induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame, noted that it’s a shame Gammons is most widely known as a television analyst and commentator for ESPN.
“He writes for ESPN’s Web sites and ESPN the Magazine, and you can find him in Baseball America,” Shaughnessy wrote, “but most young baseball fans know him solely for his TV work.
“That would be like knowing the late Joe DiMaggio only as a pitchman for Mr. Coffee, or knowing Bob Cousy only as a color analyst on Celtics’ broadcasts.”