From Deseret News archives:
ESPN's Vitale taking buffoonery to Basketball Hall of Fame
There's no truth to the rumor that Bozo the Clown was also inducted.
There's no denying that Vitale is the Clown Prince of Basketball Broadcasters. To call him "manic" is an understatement. His enthusiasm has a tendency to slide up (or is that down?) the scale into buffoonery.
Of course, we live in a world where ESPN SportsCenter hosts are more concerned with cracking jokes than dispensing information and Fox's NFL studio show looks like an old episode of "Hee Haw."
Vitale, obviously, is not my favorite sportscaster. His presence won't keep me from watching a game I really want to see. But unless it is a game I really want to see, I'll flip the channel when I hear his distinctive voice.
But ... there's an argument to be made that his high profile has raised the profile of college basketball on television. And for that reason, perhaps, he deserves a spot in the Hall of Fame.
Or maybe he was just voted in to annoy fellow inductee Pat Riley.
Clear as mud: From the What-the-Heck-Does-This-Mean file ... the ratings for Monday's night's exciting NCAA men's basketball tournament final — when Kansas came back in the final minutes and then beat Memphis in overtime — declined 8 percent from the 2007 title game.
And the ratings for Tuesday night's relatively unexciting NCAA women's basketball tournament final — when Tennessee beat Stanford by 16 points in rather uneventful fashion — increased 30 percent from the 2007 title game.
I have absolutely no idea what this means.
Playing with numbers: It is true that more people watched the women and less people watched the men than last year, but that doesn't mean there's any real comparison between the two.
The men's final averaged a 12.1 rating; the women's final averaged a 3.0 ratings.
By the way, Monday's episode of "Dancing With the Stars" did a 13.6 rating.
I'm not exactly sure what that means, either. But it scares me.
All is forgiven? Forgiveness, thy name is apparently New York Mets.
The team has announced that Darryl Strawberry has been hired as a television analyst for SportsNet New York, working alongside former teammates Keith Hernandez and Ron Darling during pre- and post-game shows for 15 games.
The three were teammates on the 1986 Mets team that won the World Series. That was before Strawberry's drug problems, suspensions and prison time.
And now the Mets are putting him on TV. And, no, I am not making this up.
E-mail: pierce@desnews.com
