PAGE
i
By JIM GRIESCH
Basketball fans in small town America (Glasgow, et. al.) will get a tremendous chance to follow many teams in depth this year. Radio coverage here will feature both the Scotties and the Trojans. Hank Royce has spent the last quarter century or so bringing you the play-by-play of Glasgow, and now Barren County, games.
He admits he's a "homer." Cawood Ledford has been doing UK games about as long, and everybody knows he roots for Kentucky. Dittoe Bud Tyler for Western. Mention Wes Strader in that group, too. '
The late Ed Kallay was the biggest exponent of home-team advocacy that Kentucky every knew, and all the people in Louisville loved him.
To the south, both Vanderbilt (with Paul Ell's) and Tennessee (John Ward on the Tennessee Vols' network) have announcers who are pro-Vandy, pro-Vols.
The people who listen to all of those guys are fans of the teams. They want to hear from those teams' coaches, and from their favorite stars.
The fun and relaxation they receive from these guys is worth a ton of gold every night. And, the fans wouldn't have it any other way.
They want the local viewpoint, but most want it fairly, and cleanly.
Those announcers, and 1,000 more just like them all over the country are popular with everybody they reach.
But what about a man (woman) who sits in a booth and tells 30 million viewers or listeners on a national network the happenings of a particular game?
Should he or she be a homer? Should he root for one team instead of the other?
Over the past 10 or 12 years, a few certain announcers with built-in biases have reached microphones that reach into nearly every home in this country. And the subtle garbage they have gotten away with has gotten ridiculous.
The two most blatant homers are Dick Enberg and Chris Schenckel.
Enberg does the TVS national college basketball telecast every week, and Schenckel used to do the NBA game of the week for ABC.
Enberg seems to make a point of putting in a good word for the UCLA Bruins every game he does, no matter who is playing! He was the UCLA announcer for six years.
For instance, two years ago, during a Sunday afternoon game in which Marquette blitzed the University of Louisville in a wild second half rally, Enberg blurted out, "Both teams are playing the UCLA high post offense."
Why the UCLA high post offense? UL   may   have,   considering coach Denny Crum's tenure as an assistant to former UCLA coach John Wooden. But,  Marquette's offense does not resemble the UCLA game. UCLA uses a center out high, with one forward on the baseline, the other out in a wing even with the center. One guard floats off to the open area to the left or right, and the point guard passes inside, makes a shuffle cut between the wing and center, then starts people sliding in and out of the free throw lane. Usually, the players spend a lot of time in there. Marquette's game is more free lance. But a lot of teams use high post offenses.
Two year ago, Enberg was reporting a UCLA-Notre Dame game from Pauley Pavilion. He made a dramatic speech leading into the game about how UCLA was "going for its 91st home victory in a row, the longest in college basketball."
He did not use the word "ever" in describing the streak, but with his professional use of tone, inflection, voice, expression, awe, and enthusiasm, he left no doubt in my mind about what the streak was:
He was telling perhaps 30 million people a liel All he had to do was to check with NCAA records to see if that streak was the longest or not. Two schools, that I know of, had longer streaks than UCLA's. (The Bruins' streak was ended later that year at 98 by Oregon.)
St. Bonaventure won 118 in a row in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Most UK fans know that the Cats had a streak of 129 from 1943 to 1955.
If you say it is not important, do you stop to think what kind of effect such a statement MIGHT have on UCLA recruiting? How many potentially great basketball stars might be favorably impressed by such gaudi ness?
Then, there was the halftime interview he did with Wooden at another UCLA-Notre Dame game, in which he told the viewers that "I just love this man." He then leaned over and patted Wooden on the knee.
Last year, during the final game of the NCAA tournament, which involved Marquette and North Carolina, Enberg was talking about something and made the remark that UCLA had only lost five games in 12 years at Pauley Pavilion. It had nothing to do with that game I!
If he's going to do this, why not force NBC to run a desclaimer on the screen professing Enberg to be an unpaid (or could it be paid?) member of the UCLA sports publicity staff, or that he represents that schools' vested interests.
He's not a bad announcer otherwise. He's got a good knowledge of the game, but he tends to be too chummy with UCLA. He knows all of their habits, girlfriends, parents, pets, etc. That's usually a function of a more local announcer.
Chris Schenckel merely tends to think the world ends west of the Hudson River. He once pleaded with Mrs. Penny Tweedy, owner of the horse Secretariat, to race him in New York, so that "New Yorkers can see this wonderful horse."
Doesn't anyone in New York watch an event originated out of state?
Schenckel was the announcer for the NBA telecasts when the New York Knicks won the title in the late 1960s and he became so enthralled with the Knicks' style of play that he proclaimed their passing-motion, team-oriented style a "new style of basketball." College teams had been playing team ball for years. But, that didn't stop Schenckel.
Other coaches have used the media to their advantage. This fall, Digger Phelps said that in last year's UK-Notre Dame game, the fans were wild because they were also celebrat ing Kentucky's first bowl trip in football in 25 years, and that "it was sick." They were condoning UK's probation by the NCAA. This was in a national magazine.
Who's kidding whom? Notre Dame fans are among the most rabid in the world. They are most obnoxious, loud, beligerant, and arrogant.
But here was Phelps, using nationally distributed magazine to take a pot shot at Kentucky, a team which beats him nine out of ten times. Besides, you don't think Phelps was mad because his team was beaten by 38 points late in the game, on a night when his own team shot 53 percent
from the floor do you? If you will remember, Notre Dame had a chance to move from nationally ranked number two to number one because top ranked Michigan had just been beaten the night before.
That couldn't have had anything to do with it, could it? Nahh.
Johnny Wooden used the national press to propagate the idea that he never recruited outside California. The media were so nice to Wooden.
No one ever questioned him on anything. He used the national press as a psychological weapon better than most coaches use their own local press, and the national guys went along like docile sheep. I have a theory on that. A lot of the Las Angeles-based network people are fans of UCLA. That is a natural assumption. They like sports, UCLA is available, and these guys like an ego trip as much as the next fellow. So they climbed aboard during the Bruin's rise through the 1960s.
They like Wooden, so he had immediate access to people who could get him on nationwide television in quick fashion.
He carefully molded an elite group of followers who helped in the psyching out of future opponents by a consistent elaboration of the UCLA story, both through wire service stories and through short film clips of UCLA victories.
The total social mystique of the California life-style, plus the adroit Chamber of Commerce campaign being waged in popular song, magazines, newspapers, even movies, helped bring UCLA into a basketball focal point.
Wooden's claim that he recruited only Californians has never been refuted, but it really holds little water.
All of his earliest stars, the guys who really brought him his titles are from such California towns as Philadelphia, Pa., New York, N.Y., Tallahassee, Fla., South Bend, Ind., Gray, Ind., Kansas City, Mo., and a couple of little towns in North Carolina, not to mention Portland, Ore., where his last All-American came from.
Sadly, it was an over-eager press that helped build them to a point where any college playing UCLA was at a distinct disadvantage.
Think about that.