Sportscasts Suffer Without George Michael

So I'm listening on the radio to the bizarre finish of the Washington Wizards one-point victory over the Golden State Warriors on Sunday, a game that ended with Gilbert Arenas making three straight free throws to win the game with one-tenth of a second left on the clock.

One of those free throws was awarded when Golden State coach Don Nelson protested a foul call against Arenas. Nelson apparently said a very naughty word we can't repeat on a family website and was hit with a technical foul, allowing the Wizards to steal a victory instead of having to play overtime.

So now I'm watching the 11 o'clock news on Channel 4 Sunday night, hoping to view the replay of Arenas driving to the basket to see if the foul call was warranted (it was), and whether Nelson's antics on the sidelines were worth a technical (couldn't tell).

Most of all, I was hoping to watch a video clip of Nelson's post-game news conference. Nelson has never been particularly shy in his pre- or post-game comments on any subject, and I felt certain the veteran coach almost certainly would go off on the officials for making such a controversial call. I also was pretty sure if he did, Channel 4 and sports anchor Lindsay Czarniak would show me the tape.

Nelson clearly was not a happy fellow afterward, though you'd never know it from the Wizards report that night on Channel 4. Instead, I had to read about it in Monday morning's Washington Post sports section, with Nelson moaning that Wizards coach Eddie Jordan "was out on the floor. If they gave me one (a technical), they should have given him one. I was out on the floor. We were both out on the floor. I was standing next to him for a minute."

But I never saw Nellie on tape on Channel 4, though a fairly mild post-game clip of Jordan was aired after the game highlights. I also didn't find out the real reason for the technical, again until I read in The Post that Nelson had come out on the floor and said to game official Tony Brothers "Tony, you are a (expletive) idiot," at which point fellow referee Derrick Stafford hit the coach with the fatal T.

Maybe all of the above sounds like a bit of a nit-pick. Maybe the Channel 4 reporter or camera crew covering the game headed for the Wizards locker room instead of trying to find Nelson, and came up empty. It would have been a major journalistic lapse on their part, but then again, so what else is new on local TV news?

Still, why do I think that if George Michael were still in charge, I'd have seen that tape of Don Nelson in full bluster on that 11 o'clock sportscast? Maybe his own Channel 4 camera crew might not have gotten the shot, but Michael--Now Hear This!!!--surely would have moved heaven, earth and every satellite dish in the sky to somehow, somewhere find a piece of Nelson tape--from Comcast, ESPN, NBA Films, a home video, whatever. If not, at the very least he would have told viewers what caused the tech, and read a Nelson quote.

Also knowing George, if the reporter and camera crew covering the game had come back to the station with no tape of Nelson, the explosion from Channel 4's newsroom on Nebraska Avenue when George came to the office the next day might have registered 8.4 on the Richter Scale.

But Michael is gone now. Sadly, he did his last newscast for the NBC owned and operated station this past Friday night and I suspect not a disparaging word was said by anyone about no Don Nelson videotape, unless Michael picked up the telephone himself to chew someone out, just for old time's sake.

Clearly, sports on Channel 4 will never quite be the same, nor will local sports on any of Washington's four major over-the-air outlets. With his semi-retirement after 27 years on the air, no longer is there a must-see local sportscast or a larger than life sportscaster in town for the first time since Warner Wolf's pioneering "let's go to the videotape" sportscasts began airing on Channel 9 in the 1970s.

No station in recent years has devoted as much time to its sportscast as Channel 4 has been offering viewers. And I suspect without Michael around to browbeat his news director for a few more seconds of air time, maybe even an extra minute or two, the duration of the station's sportscast will eventually shrink from its current seven or eight minutes a night to the three or four minutes everyone else in town now seems to get.