Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, September 16, 1995 TAG: 9509180026
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JACK BOGACZYK
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
The revelation Thursday that the Mike Tyson-Buster Mathis Jr., bout would air Nov. 4 on the Fox Network instead of pay-per-view was a hair-raising announcement, orchestrated appropriately by Don King.
Fox will pay $10 million for the rights to what figures to be another mismatch, albeit with longer potential than Tyson's 89-second return to the ring last month against Peter McNeeley. Showtime, which was to air the bout on pay-per-view, will now use its regular channel, leaving the PPV audience to the Evander Holyfield-Riddick Bowe bout on TVKO.
Maybe. Holyfield-Bowe might move to the previous night, or the following night. The only sure thing about the entire situation is that Fox will get a huge rating during the November ratings sweeps. Some analysts say Tyson's fight will be viewed in more than 11 million households. His return on Aug.19 was viewed by 1.3 million customers.
That's a PPV boxing record, but miniscule to the audience potential in over-the-air TV. Maybe Fox, with its many UHF affiliates, can't deliver the kind of Nielsen numbers on the NFL that CBS did, but it will put heavyweight boxing back in a familiar place. Remember the Gillette-sponsored ``Friday Night Fights'' of the grainy-pictured days of the early 1950s?
Tyson-Mathis will be the first prominent heavyweight bout on prime-time network TV in more than a decade. The last major heavyweight bout on free TV was May 20, 1985 on NBC, when champ Larry Holmes met Carl ``The Truth'' Williams, with a Marvis Frazier-James ``Quick'' Tillis undercard bout. Holmes fought several times on NBC in his title years.
HE'S BAAACK: Larry Holmes just won't quit. The ageless - no, he's 45 - former heavyweight champ returns to USA Network's ``Tuesday Night Fights'' next week for his 67th pro bout, against Ed Donaldson (11-4) in Bay St.Louis, Miss.
``I thought the last time Larry retired, he meant it, but when they mentioned Donaldson as an opponent, he couldn't pass it up,'' said USA blow-by-blow voice Al Albert. ``I guess Larry thought they meant Sam Donaldson.''
WOMEN'S WORLD: When the NCAA renegotiated its telecast contract with CBS to extend rights to the Division I men's basketball tournament, the women's national championship game was dropped and moved to ESPN. It's apparent the cable network intends to take the female side of March Madness quite seriously.
ESPN announced the women's basketball schedules for ESPN and ESPN2 this week. Included are a record 64 games, including 61 live, and 25 of the 63 games from the NCAA Tournament. The U.S. National Team that will compete in the Atlanta Games next summer also will appear eight times in exhibitions against college teams.
ESPN will air a women's college basketball season preview show for the first time, on Nov.16, wrapping up that season with prime-time live coverage of the women's Final Four semifinals and championship from the Charlotte Coliseum on March 29-31. The final is moving from a Sunday afternoon to a 6:30 p.m. Friday start.
Virginia, which will host the NCAA East Regional at University Hall in March 1996, has two regular-season dates on the ESPN schedule, against Tennessee and N.C. State.
NEW KICKOFF: The ``CBS Sports Show,'' the network's Saturday anthology series, brings college football to the mix today (4 p.m., WDBJ). The studio show will devote about 20 minutes weekly to the sport, with a prominent coach scheduled in-house each week. Miami's Butch Davis, who will be in Blacksburg next Saturday, will guest today. CBS, which doesn't have college football telecasts until the postseason Sun, Orange and Fiesta bowls, returns to regular-season coverage in 1996 with a schedule from the Big East and Southeastern conferences.
BIG RYDER: The Ryder Cup - that's golf with a patriotic twist - will have plenty of play next weekend from Oak Hill in Rochester, N.Y. The U.S.-Europe battle, with 23 telecast hours, will begin Friday at 8 a.m. with 10 live hours on cable's USA Network.
Then, NBC Sports takes over a week from today with shows at 8 a.m. and 4 p.m. The last half-hour of the early show will be pre-empted on WSLS (Channel 10) by the Miami-Virginia Tech football telecast. The Ryder Cup finishes next Sunday with a 61/2-hour show on NBC starting at 9 a.m.
OVERTIME: WJPR/WFXR (Channel 21/27) received numerous phone calls on the first day of the NFL season when the Roanoke-Lynchburg station didn't switch away from overtime in the Carolina Panthers' opener to the Washington Redskins' 4 p.m. kickoff. There's good reason for it.
The NFL doesn't permit it. Fox Network stations in Richmond and Norfolk, among other locations, faced the same dilemma. NFL telecast rules allow only the station in a team's home market - Washington in this case - to switch away from a game in progress for the start of another game.
There's one exception to that rule, when one team leads the game in progress by at least four touchdowns. Obviously, one in OT didn't meet that criteria.
SONNY DAYS: Sonny Randle, the former coach and NFL receiving star, and host of the radio show ``Sports Minute,'' is as busy some Saturdays as he was when he was coaching Virginia, East Carolina and Marshall.
Last Saturday, he was the telecast analyst for SportSouth in Lexington at the Liberty-VMI game. Then he drove up I-81 to Weyers Cave and took a private jet - provided by a Marshall alumnus - to call the Tennessee Tech-Marshall telecast in Huntington, W.Va.
``I still love the game,'' Randle said in the VMI press box.
AROUND THE DIAL: The field for the 13th annual Skins Game, scheduled Thanksgiving weekend on ABC, has been selected. U.S. Open champ Corey Pavin, defending Skins champ Tom Watson, Fred Couples and Peter Jacobsen will play for $540,000 at Bighorn in Palm Desert, Calif. ... The Boston College-Virginia Tech football telecast on ESPN last week did a 2.8 rating, 13 percent below the average Thursday night CFA game a year ago. ... The NCAA men's basketball schedule that will be finalized by ESPN in about two weeks will feature more than 200 games on ESPN and about 130 others on ESPN2.
by CNB