Reality Ruins Hollywood Ending

By Leonard Shapiro
Special to washingtonpost.com
Tuesday, January 8, 2008 1:17 PM

In a perfect Hollywood world, the Washington Redskins would have held on to beat the Seattle Seahawks on Saturday, then won three more playoff games to honor the memory of their murdered teammate, Sean Taylor, and give Joe Gibbs his fourth career Super Bowl title before he walked off into the sunset, heading toward a NASCAR garage just on the other side of a rainbow.

But as Gibbs himself demonstrated Tuesday in announcing his resignation as team president and head coach, this is the real world, despite the impression NBC play-by-play announcer Tom Hammond would have had us believe when the Redskins tied the game at 13-all on a Santana Moss touchdown catch. At that point, Hammond just had to say "and Sean Taylor watches from the heavens above!!!"

Only a few minutes earlier, the usually far more rational analyst Cris Collinsworth, arguably the best in his business, informed viewers that "there are guys on the sidelines talking to Sean Taylor, and whether you believe it or not, they do. The magic with Sean Taylor is starting to happen again."

Clearly, this was not CC's best work.

Later on in the broadcast, when the Seahawks regained their composure, and a comfortable lead on their way to a wild-card round playoff victory, Taylor's name was rarely mentioned again. The Hollywood ending story line was over and done with, and it was time to abandon that heaven-sent theme and move the broadcast in a different earthly direction toward some frozen Wisconsin tundra.

The broadcasters focused instead on Seattle head coach Mike Holmgren's return to Green Bay, where he once took the Packers to a Super Bowl title, and quarterback Matt Hasselbeck, who played for him there as a back-up to Brett Favre. The Sean Taylor magic was gone, and quickly forgotten, as if he'd somehow stopped watching "from the heavens above."

By no means is any of this meant to denigrate the memory of Taylor, or the Redskins remarkable late-season run to the postseason in the four games following his funeral in the Miami suburbs. It was a story you had to write and talk about all along the way, because the Redskins were playing such spirited football down the stretch, no doubt inspired by Taylor's memory and Gibbs' Hall of Fame ability to do his best work in times of crisis.

"If your team is not in the playoffs, you have to root for the Redskins," NBC's Keith Olbermann said in the pre-game show. "It's the best story in football."

But NBC's production Saturday started with a predictable pre-game piece every media organization in the country had already done focusing on Taylor's teammates talking about their fallen comrade. That was followed by the above mentioned remarks during the game from Hammond and Collinsworth, and it all seemed just a tad over the top, and even a bit exploitive.

As Olbermann said, the Redskins already were a great story, with no further heavenly references necessary.

Rocket Man Fizzles

Talk about must-see TV, it doesn't get much better than Monday's live broadcast of Roger Clemens's first news conference since he was mentioned as a steroid abuser in the Mitchell Report on the use of performance enhancing drugs in Major League Baseball.

There was Clemens in such full fury at the injustice of it all that at one point his attorney, Rusty Hardin, had to pass him a note that read "lighten up." Clemens never really did, and if he'd had a baseball in his hand, he might have beaned every reporter in the room for not at least giving him, in his words, "the benefit of the doubt."

During the session, a 17-minute audiotape was played of last Friday's telephone conversation with his former personal trainer, Brian McNamee. The tape left open more questions than it answered, if only because Clemens never did specifically say to McNamee something to the effect of "why did you tell Mitchell I used steroids."

Eight times during the call, McNamee asked Clemens, "what do you want me to do?" and Roger the Dodger never said to him, "well for starters, how about telling people it's just not true, I made it up and you did it to save your rear end from landing in jail."

Perhaps there were legal ramifications in all of this, considering all the lawsuits flying around these days and a Congressional hearing Clemens says he'll attend next week in Washington. But the news conference raised more questions than it answered, and when Clemens stormed away from the podium, his petulance hardly evoked much sympathy for his cause.

I watched the news conference on CNN's Headline News, and the cable network also did viewers no favor by constantly interrupting the taped recorded conversation because of foul language that was being used by both men. Last time we looked, CNN is on cable, where any and all profanity is usually tolerated, and in this instance, the gaps in the tape gave new meaning to the expression "taken out of context." The dirty word policing was absolutely unnecessary, and never should have happened.

The night before, a far calmer Clemens appeared on a much-ballyhooed "60 Minutes" interview, sitting across from Mike Wallace, who had said publicly a few days before the session that he considered Clemens a friend. So shame on CBS for allowing him to do the interview in the first place.

Friends aren't supposed to interview friends on network television news shows that pride themselves on being journalistically sound, and producers should have insisted that someone else sit in that seat across from Clemens. If he'd refused to talk to anyone other than Wallace, CBS should have told him "fine, and don't let the door hit you on the rear end on the way out."

But as usual in the TV business, ratings concerns sadly trumped journalism, and Wallace conducted the interview. Somewhat to his credit, he did ask a number of pertinent questions and looked properly skeptical at times. But this usually fearless and relentless interviewer either has lost some speed on his own fastball, or was just sympathetic enough toward his friend to give him a semi-intentional walk.

Clemens admitting that he ingested the powerful prescription painkiller Vioxx, (now banned by the FDA) "like it was skittles" also spoke volumes about the pitcher's willingness to do whatever it took to keep pitching effectively. That's also called drug abuse, whether he used injected steroids or not, perhaps the most telling bit of information in the entire segment.

Out of Its League

Fox generally does a decent job as a National Football League rights-holder, but the broadcast of Monday night's BCS title game was about as pedestrian an effort as we've seen in a long time for a big-time, prime time sports event.

The low-energy game announcers, play-by-play man Thom Brennaman and analyst Charles Davis, were mostly deadly dull, and Davis's constant use of the term "dialed up" -- as in "he dialed up a safety blitz" -- became more maddening as Ohio State's nightmarish evening wore on. Where were high energy announcers Keith Jackson or Brent Musburger when you really needed them?

Fox doesn't do much college football during the season, but college presidents and the NCAA love to see the billions in rights fees the network is prepared to pay to televise the BCS bowls when the games count the most. Never mind that ABC and ESPN generally do their best work in the college game. Money always talks in these situations, even if the broadcast looked bargain basement at times.

The pre-game show hosted by Chris Rose (who?), with panelists Eddie George (the former Ohio State Heisman Trophy-winning running back), Florida coach Urban Meyer and Jimmy Johnson, one of the great rogue college coaches when he was at Oklahoma State, was mostly an embarrassment.

The only good news? Fox chose to air spirited performances from the two school bands at halftime, and allowed the panel only about 12 seconds of banal blather before the second half began.

Say It Ain't So

Did we really hear an ESPN SportsCenter anchor say "Reservations for Six!!" over the highlight of a touchdown, followed by "Dinner for Two!!" when they also added a two-point conversion?

I couldn't tell who said it because so many of these boo-yah anchors seem to sound so much alike these days, but come on. At the very least, the offending golden throat ought to be banned to the Food Network kitchen for some serious dish washing duty, the sooner, the better.

E-mail of the Week.

Wow, what did Ken Beatrice ever do to you? Sure, Ken had his faults¿which you and others at the Post amply documented over the years--but he was a lot more knowledgeable about sports than any sports-talk host in Washington today. He would actually take calls and do interviews about something other than the Redskins, a nice change from those in sports radio who find even talking with any seriousness about topics such as hockey, or even the Nationals, as a waste of time.

Most importantly, he knew what he was talking about. His oft-repeated phrases such as "More games are lost than won" are as true as ever these days if you watch the NFL, and I still think his insight on what makes a good vs. a bad coach is incredibly important and yet hardly ever talked about. He often said that a good coach adapts his system to the personnel he has, instead of just having a pre-arranged system of offense or defense and slotting his players into pre-existing roles.

Sure, I'm a little sentimental about Ken Beatrice because I listened to him all through my childhood, but there are lots of people, like me, who grew up in the D.C. area in the 1980s and had Ken Beatrice as their only outlet to hear sports talk. Many of them remember him with fondness.

Eric Fingerhut,

Rockville, Md.

Leonard Shapiro can be reached at badgerlen@hotmail.com or badgerlen@aol.com.