Abc To Liven Up Golf Coverage

Here’s a news flash to start the day: The British don’t view their sports on television the way Americans do.

OK, so if you’ve ever watched Wimbledon or almost any other athletic endeavor from across the pond, that fact isn’t news. The Brits don’t go for all those close-ups we get here, and they surely don’t care for all the talking that we former colonists seem to like with our commentators.

For the ABC crew that will carry this weekend’s British Open, using the BBC’s rather staid coverage as their base, the trick will be to take the most conventional and turn it into something to satisfy the American palate.

The network will add nine cameras to the BBC’s 31 for the very purpose of putting an American spin on the tournament. The site this year, the Royal Troon Golf Club in Scotland, has been friendly to U.S. players who have won the past four times the Open has been played there.

The player who may extend the American winning streak to five is Tiger Woods, who has become as much the center of attention over there as he has here. Producer Jack Graham is planning a wait-and-see approach to ABC’s coverage of Woods, meaning he’ll see how close the youngster is to the lead before turning the cameras loose on him for Saturday and Sunday.

In addition to some technical scrambling, ABC will have to juggle announcers. Lead analyst Curtis Strange will actually play in the Open, and depending upon how well he does, he may not be available to the network for long stretches of time. In that case, Ian Baker-Finch, who won the 1991 Open, will take over much of Strange’s duties. Meanwhile, veteran British announcer Peter Alliss will be working extensively for the BBC, so he’ll have little ABC air time as well.

There’s plenty of air time to go around. ESPN will carry 5 hours of coverage today, starting at 6 a.m., with ABC taking over for the weekend, with third-round coverage starting Saturday at 7 a.m. and the final round commencing Sunday at 6:30 a.m.

Around the dial

Inevitably when two longtime rivals meet in some athletic endeavor, some well-meaning announcer is quick to point out that the participants “don’t like each other.”

Normally, that’s just a trite expression, but there’s apparently an element of truth to it in the case of tonight’s Johnny Tapia-Danny Romero junior bantamweight fight on HBO, starting at 6 p.m. from Las Vegas. The two men, who both grew up in Albuquerque, N.M., and were trained by Romero’s father, became estranged when Tapia left the Romero gym. HBO will station Nicole Watson in New Mexico to gauge local reaction during the fight.