Boston Garden Didn’t Look So Great ‘Upclose’
The TV Repairman: Roy Firestone got the right guy in Bob Cousy to explain the wonder and majesty of the Boston Garden in his ESPN “Upclose” tribute to the soon-to-be-razed old gal atop Boston’s North Station.
They called the legendary parquet playing surface “Cousy’s floor,” because of the stupefying things he did on it, but he debunked the legend by pointing out, “It probably wasn’t a good floor at all because of the dead spots and screws always coming loose. They said these things gave us an advantage, maybe forgetting we had Bill Russell and about eight other Hall of Famers along the way.”
It’s not air conditioned, the spoiled have been screaming for years, forgetting that the place opened in 1929 and there was no such thing then.
The locker rooms: pegs on the wall. “An open toilet (1),” said Red Auerbach. “That was back in the days when the owner of the Garden (usually the owners of the Bruins) used to try to make things miserable for us, saying, ‘Hey, you don’t like it, where you gonna go?”’
Bow your head, folks, America just passed by.
Showtime has the replay of last weekend’s Oliver McCall-Larry Holmes pay-per-view title fight Saturday night. Highlights of victories by champions Julio Cesar Chavez and Felix Trinidad, the knockout by and disqualification of Terry Norris, and Bruce Seldon stumbling to the World Boxing Association crown are included, making it a better show than the original, which saw the main event go off at 12:17 a.m. EDT.
You can take the word of the Jersey Turnpikes of the U.S. Basketball League that they did not draft Rebecca Lobo, all-everything for Connecticut’s women’s NCAA champs this season, as a publicity gimmick (wink). After all, Nancy Lieberman played in the summer league just a decade ago.
What does it say about the rest of the National Basketball Association when just about all the great ratings the pro game gets on NBC and Turner are tied to Michael Jordan’s appearances?
Who won the Masters? All that mandolin music put me to sleep about an hour into the telecast last Sunday.
If you flipped on ESPN late Wednesday afternoon, you could be excused for thinking it was a home video of a kid playing with boats in a bathtub. Both the defender and challenger semifinal races were called off after four hours with the boats almost at anchor in a dead calm.
How many of the crack tennis commentators on the tube insisted that Pete Sampras was an all-timer and might reign as No. 1 among the men for years if he so desired? Has a guy with a seemingly insurmountable lead on the computer ever lost the top spot (to Andre Agassi) as rapidly as Pete has?
With George Foreman and Riddick Bowe in the employ of HBO and Mike Tyson the proud possessor of a deal with Showtime, where would a unification bout be held if it ever comes to be, the Disney Channel?
ABC Sports begins its series of four specials on women in sports, entitled “A Passion to Play,” on Sunday with an episode that chronicles two of the best, Katarina Witt and Nadia Comaneci.
“I think I’ve spent a lifetime working for this moment,” said Donna de Varona, former Olympic swimmer and ABC announcer who was instrumental in getting the series started. “These are ‘firsts’ in TV. We’re doing things I’m proud of and excited about.”
De Varona will be the host of the final of the four episodes, a look at motherhood and sports, on May 14. The second episode on April 23 looks at African-American women in sports, and the third examines women’s involvement in extreme sports such as ice climbing and kayaking.
“We live in a very diverse society, and I think our programming has to reflect that,” ABC Sports president Dennis Swanson said.