On Television

...4) "a fighting Indian...

...He's hardly a genius in using the medium...

...Basketball's emerging Huntley and Brinkley play an unintentional game on these shows, a sort of give-and-go...

...The color man's role is to lend his expertise to the play-by-play man's reportage...

...Then Russell observes, "My, my, strange things do happen...

...Nixon's the man who took a 15-point lead in the polls after the 1968 Republican Convention," CBS correspondent Dan Rather had explained at the A. J. Liebling Counter-Convention a few days earlier, "and through the use of TV he managed to run it down to one-seventh of a point lead by Election Day...

...During the important speech of April 26 I felt I was witnessing something historic, another of those notable blunders that have marked Richard Nixon's political career from time to time...

...Schenkel, in particular, reports events like golf matches as if they were battles in a holy war...

...The blame would fall squarely on the pro basketball fans, a rabid minority bloc growing larger every night of the month-long play-off spectacular, judging by the latest Nielsen polls...

...Schenkel, for example, is a master of saying the same thing in slightly different ways...

...Chris Schenkel will say it was another superhuman effort by a great American orator??the 28th in a row??and Big Bill will conclude: 'He's really played his game, now let's get to the real one.' " Instead ABC presented an analysis of Nixon's verbal hook shots by Tom Jerriel, ABC News' regular re-bounder at the White House...

...One respects the rookie broadcaster's authority when he says of a complex maneuver on the floor during a Knicks-Celtics game, "Now, that's the Celtics Four-play...

...Together these two hardworking journalists??they seem to cover everything that moves for ABC??have brought to sport the high standards usually associated with TV reporting of domestic and international affairs: well-intentioned and upbeat, with a tendency to look at the positive side of things...

...and (5) "a young man America's Indians can be truly proud of...

...Every top TV sports-caster has a unique style of getting it first, as they used to say at the wire services, and getting it wrong...

...he's not choosy...

...Do you, Bill...

...But that's nothing anyone would want to admit in public, at least in the presence of New York or California basketball fans...

...It was over in about three minutes, making this the closest thing in the annals of TV journalism to the oft-heard phrase "instant analysis"??not so much because the President had said nothing important, I would guess, but because the speech had created a backlog of important commercials the American people were waiting to hear before the game finally could be played...

...I don't remember much about the President's speech on the war that night, except that it wasn't very clear, but I did take down a few notes on my scorecard regarding ABC's commentary...

...Where Howard Cosell, Russell's only predecessor, tells us the way it is??to the best of his knowledge of a sport (Cosell's training is in the law)??Big Bill is both honest and learned in his field...

...Though he may not know how to stop inflation or end a war, he does know how much the basketball play-offs mean to the voters...

...Jackson's forte is giving the incorrect facts...

...Offhand, I can think of a few more important things: the Superbowl and??by really stretching??maybe the seventh game of the World Series...

...Television's play - by - play announcer, for anybody unfamiliar with this art form, traditionally tells the viewer everything his eye can see, such as who is passing the ball and who receives it...

...The three represent a new trend in sports reporting??often the bellwether for advances in TV journalism...

...It was Schenkel, broadcasting historians fondly remember, who said when somebody made the mistake of using a metaphor from Joyce Kilmer's "Trees" during a football game, "Ah yes, that was a wonderful poem she wrote...

...Only if he was here, Chris," Russell said...

...So I was a little surprised by President Nixon's decision to commandeer the tube on April 26 at 10 P.M...

...Throwing a tough-minded authority like Bill Russell in with these two flagwavers was a stroke of genius on ABC's part...

...Our only hope of fully understanding what the President said," my notes read, "is to have the 'color' commentary after Nixon's fast break done by Mumbles Russell...

...This is not to imply that Schenkel is a slouch in the facts department...

...On Television LATE-SEASON DRIBBLINGS BY MARVIN KITMAN The recent New York Knickerbockers-Los Angeles Lakers basketball play-offs, featured on the ABC network, may not have been the most important thing in the world...

...During the Stanford-Washington football telecast in the fall of 1970, Schenkel referred to Washington quarterback Sonny Sixkiller as: (1) "a full-blooded Cherokee...

...His debut this year as the so-called "color man" on NBA Basketball is probably the most important thing to happen in the field of TV commentary since the invention of Eric Sevareid...

...The man is a sports fan, with a record of appreciating the function of televised sports: It takes the people's minds off things like wars, especially when they are not going well...

...As I recall, the President himself once hid in the White House TV den watching a Purdue-Ohio State football game when 250,000 antiwar demonstrators came to Washington...

...He is serving as the public's ombudsman, a critic-in-residence commenting on the foibles of the traditional TV reporters as well as the shortcomings of the players and referees...

...It was the 28th in a series of important speeches preempting prime-time TV programs since 1969, a body of work which has come to be known around the television networks as "One Man's Search for Peace in Our Time with Honor," or "Return to LBJ's Place...

...In the 1940s, for instance, Bill Stern and Harry Wismer pioneered in making up details...

...After listening to a whole season of this, I'm still not convinced that either Schenkel or Jackson is aware of Russell's revolutionary role...

...I called the White House press office to find out if the President wasn't really going to speak an hour earlier (preempting something like The Marty Feldman Comedy Machine on ABC), or the next evening, when the Knicks and Lakers were off...

...When the preemption of the basketball game for the President's latest thrilling episode was leaked to TV reporters the night before, it seemed a terrible mistake...

...There have been breakthroughs in sports reporting before...

...I really couldn't understand Nixon's thinking at all...

...2) "an outstanding representative of the first Americans...

...Thus Teddy White might conclude in The Making of the President 1972 that by delaying the start of a professional basketball play-off game the night of April 26, Dick Nixon finally kicked off his political campaign in a serious way...

...If he lost New York and/or California by a small percentage, as he lost Illinois in 1960, nobody would be able to say that television gave him the shaft...

...Schenkel watches a player throw up an off-balance, poor-percentage hook shot which happens to go in and observes, "Gee whiz, what a shot that was...

...Sometimes Jackson gets the wrong player being fouled, sometimes the wrong type of foul...

...3) "Washington's outstanding Indian quarterback...

...Time ran out before he could refer to Sixkiller as a credit to his race...

...That's right, Chris [or Keith]," he usually explains, embellishing his colleague's facts with finely minced gobbledy-gook...

...Every play-by-play man has his own strengths...

...But the invention of the informed critic, like Bill Russell, is bound to have a more wholesome influence on the medium...

...EST)??exactly the time the first Knicks-Lakers playoff game was scheduled to begin??just to make another important speech...

...The only advantage deriving from the President's manipulation of the media this time may have been an accidental introduction of several foreign policy students to the basketball show that followed, particularly to Bill Russell, the former coach and star center of the Boston Celtics...

...Russell, incidentally, was the tall one (6'9"), always standing next to Chris Schenkel or Keith Jackson, the alternating play-byplay announcers on this most unusual reporting team...

...During a Lakers-Milwaukee Bucks semifinal play-off contest, he went so far as to give the wrong score...

...It was a joy to listen to Schenkel make the most obvious remark on a fantastic twisting overhead shot in the Knicks-Celtics semifinals: "I don't think even Wilt Chamberlain could have blocked that shot...

...Generally he also gives both the lateral and vertical movements of each player, the assumption being that each and every viewer is blind??a wise assumption on radio...

...Not only that," added Russell, "he's mad, too...

...After a bad call upset the New York coach in the fourth Knicks-Celtics playoff game, Jackson, who uses a lot of big words, explained, "Coach Holzman is absolutely irate...

...For the first time there is diversity of opinion on the TV games...