Spreadin' The News

So yeah, did the New York thing this weekend.

A two-night, three-day mini-vacation of sorts in Manhattan with kids in tow. I've covered events in New York before, but never taken the whole gang down the tourist path in the city. We met up with my wife's parents at the Yale Club, midtown, across the street from Grand Central Station, which is an exceptional base of operations if one wants to see the sights. You can get anywhere from there, and we did -- the American Museum of Natural History, Central Park, Times Square, you name it. It's refreshing to travel with kids sometimes, if only to witness the wonder of seemingly banal endeavors, like taking a taxi or riding the subway. My 8-year-old son loved it; there was lots of information to process, which is right up his alley. By the end of the weekend, he pretty much had the subway lines memorized. The four-year old found her personal Nirvana at the American Girl Place on Fifth Avenue, which, for those of you without female children of a certain age, is "Cabbage Patch Kids" for the next generation. Our newest "kid" is named Lacey, she looks remarkably like my daughter, and she has lots of expensive clothes to wear courtesy of my father-in-law (not unlike my daughter herself). Given the great distances we had to walk every day and the fine layer of grime that covers one's skin after a full day in the city, my kids were troopers, so much so that my wife and I were willing to overlook the fact that both of them threw up during the bumpy flight back to Orlando. Ahh, parenthood.

Of course, in the media capital of the world, you're never out of touch, and so it came to pass that I watched the NCAA men's semifinals from the Grill Room of the Yale Club on Saturday night. While Memphis and Kansas were clearly the better teams on that night, the TV guy in me couldn't help but chuckle at what I know are pained grimaces on the faces of CBS executives at the moment -- Memphis-Kansas, while interesting, cannot hold a candle to North Carolina-UCLA in terms of grabbing the Middle Ground. Similarly, when Stanford beat UConn in the women's semifinals, denying us another round of Auriemma vs. Summitt in a championship game, my former colleagues in Bristol must have been punching figurative holes in figurative walls -- a sound perhaps matched by the good people at the Tampa Bay Sports Commission, the hosts of the 2008 Women's Final Four.

Shannon Owens writes in Monday's Orlando Sentinel that Stanford's win over Connecticut provides "indisputable confirmation the women's game is not confined to the Big East, ACC, and SEC." She's right, but that won't do much for the ratings on Tuesday night, which will pale in comparison to what Tennessee-UConn would have drawn. Given that women's college basketball, financially, has been a losing proposition in the modern era -- $169 million in the red for the 2005-2006 season alone, according to the U.S. Department of Education -- the prospect of getting drilled in the Tuesday night ratings by the likes of "American Idol" is precisely what the women's game doesn't need.

That same Department of Education report tells us that men's college basketball recorded a $240 million profit during that same '05-'06 season, "largely on two things the women still lack: a lucrative TV package and strong attendance." As I've written in this space before, television is reactive, not proactive; TV deals happen AFTER the consumer shows interest in a given sport, not before. For examples, see poker, NASCAR, mixed martial arts, or anything else that has blown up in the last ten years. Television did not and cannot create interest in these sports; it merely reflects it. One way to measure interest is through attendance -- an area where, as the article above correctly summarizes, the women's game suffers tremendously.

If the 330 NCAA institutions that offer women's basketball were reporting jam-packed arenas night after night, the 'lucrative TV package' would surely follow. That's how our business works. I can remember working the desk at ESPNEWS a few years ago and hearing a rival women's basketball coach lamenting the fact that UConn received such tremendous national attention "because they're in ESPN's backyard."

Umm, no. ESPN only got on board after Connecticut starting winning like crazy, and after the locals in Storrs started packing the rafters. Same thing in Knoxville, by the way. That same principle, in reverse, is also why the NHL has failed as a national television sport -- while hockey holds on to passionate fan bases in certain local markets, it doesn't resonate at a national or even regional level. TV cannot change that, no matter how hard the game is promoted.

Reactive, not proactive. Remember that.

As an aside, I like the women's game just fine, for a simple and selfish reason: the pace of the game is a half-beat slower than the men's, which makes it much easier to call as a play-by-play announcer. Having broadcast dozens of high school and college women's basketball games on Sun Sports and FSN Florida, I speak from experience. Time exists to set up storylines, give background on certain players, and break down the X's and O's -- much more so than with the men, high school or college. Of course, I recognize that this does nothing for most casual viewers, who would rather see end-to-end action than a well-executed back-door cut. Another reason why the men's game outpaces the women's game as a TV sport.

And speaking of basketball, and New York: tip of the cap to Magic assistant coach Patrick Ewing and Heat head coach Pat Riley, two members of the 2008 class in the Basketball Hall of Fame. No arguments here. The list of names that didn't make it, including Chris Mullin, Dennis Johnson, and Don Nelson, probably deserve a new blog entry, but for now, credit where credit is due. Ewing and Riley, along with Hakeem Olajuwon, all made it in their first year of eligibility, as they should. Fitting honors for careers that truly match the definition of "Hall of Famer."

Now, Dick Vitale? We'll save that for another day.