COMMENTARY : This TV Tag Team Is Loads of Fun

Soon after someone said, “SportsCenter is NEXXXXXXT,” the owner of that television voice chirped a combination of words never before heard by human ears. The words sped along and rose in intensity until by the end the speaker seemed to be chewing them while growling: “If you don’t bake the biscuit, you CAN’T PUT THE BISCUIT IN THE BASKET.”

We’re talking hockey highlights here, men wearing big mittens and carrying crooked sticks, everything moving too fast for the human eye, let alone the ear, which also has heard that same television voice saying, “He finds GARBAGE on the doorstep AND GOES TOP-SHELF.”

Because the two television sets in my house are separated by some distance, I am allowed to watch ESPN’s SportsCenter as long as the volume is such that the big show’s tag-team partners, Keith Olbermann and Dan Patrick, cannot be heard by the person at the civilized end of the house. Accidentally in the vicinity one night, she said by way of commentary on my SportsCenter habit, “What language are those guys speaking, exactly?”

Readers of long memory may find it curious that I actually have seen a hockey highlight. Transformed into solid matter, my hockey interest would weigh no more than the latest piece of thread holding Cam Neely’s face together. Yet when Keith Olbermann does hockey highlights, I am transfixed--not by the game’s Tonya Harding thuggery but by Olbermann’s ability to articulate a zillion words in 7.9 seconds even as he mentions so many Russian names that he seems to be speedreading aloud the early pages of a Tolstoy novel.

With Olbermann and Patrick, SportsCenter has achieved perfect pitch. They have fun telling us about the fun. Here’s Olbermann over an NBA highlight: “Zo to L.J. to Muggsy back to Zo--and Mourning becomes eclectic.” Patrick works with an elegant irreverence that allows him to keep his job after gently nudging his ESPN bosses inside a program tease: “Still to come on the revenue-producing portion of the network . . . “

When ESPN announced it would cover, live, Mike Tyson’s news conference announcing his post-penitentiary plans, Olbermann thought it too much of a bad thing. He ended the announcement with a curl of his lip: “ESPN Asia will be carrying it in Mandarin at 1700 Greenwich Mean Time.”

Early on in the umpires’ hassles with owners, an arbiter’s beefy face filled the SportsCenter screen. The umpire spoke of owners and players cutting up the financial pie. He said umpires not only weren’t given a whole piece of that pie, they didn’t even get any crumbs--after which Olbermann, with raised eyebrows, said, “What a shock, an umpire using a food analogy.”

One starry, starry night Vincent Van Gogh’s name came up on SportsCenter. Don’t ask how. I have no idea. We were sailing along with college basketball highlights when Vincent came to Olbermann’s mind. That same night he mentioned Joan of Arc, James Brown, Siegfried & Roy, Rodney Dangerfield and Alice Cooper, somehow bringing them into narratives that usually included the phrase “ . . . from way downtown, BANG,” though sometimes it was “ . . . from way downtown, CLANG.”

The Tampa Bay Devil Rays, as a nickname, offended some people. So Olbermann suggested an alternative: the Tampa Bay Muffin Spencer-Devlins.

We have heard of those poor teams and downhearted performers who in defeat “drool the drool of regret on the pillow of remorse.”

During the baseball strike, neither Patrick nor Olbermann made much pretense at objectivity; the phrases “baseball from hell” and “the irregular season” recurred. As owners persuaded the naive and the desperate to become scabs in the absence of striking major league players, Olbermann’s body language of scowls and one-eyebrow-cocked-askance-in-contempt spoke directly to the viewer. But just in case the camera blinked, Olbermann made certain we knew what he thought. The scabs were “self-deluding weasels who are taking advantage of other people’s pain.”

At the same time, he found fault with Frank Thomas, the Chicago White Sox star who said that signing autographs and posing for pictures with fans distracted him from his professional duties. Thomas said, “This isn’t Barnum & Bailey.” Which caused Olbermann to snarl on air, “Right, Frank. But Barnum & Bailey’s clowns NEVER WENT ON STRIKE.”

The person who watches TV at the other end of my house would never understand the novel’s worth of truth spoken by Olbermann in a few words: “For Howard Cosell, sports was a stage, not an existence.” . . . “Attention, Kmart shoppers, plenty of quality free agents available. Andy Van Slyke technically, and, of course, Vince Coleman pyro-technically.” . . . The Lakers play in “the decreasingly Fabulous Forum.” . . . The Daytona 500 is not only the Super Bowl of stock car racing, it is “the Wightman Cup of NASCAR” and “the Westminster Kennel Club Show of NASCAR.” . . . Baseball’s acting commissioner is “Bud ‘Small Market’ Selig.”

I have learned a lot by listening to the big show’s tag-team partners, most recently a piece of information about the late-19th-century newspaper editor named Horace Greeley. As part of SportsCenter one night, we were told that when Greeley advised young men to go west, he meant they should go from New York to Pennsylvania.

What that had to do with sports, I don’t know. Maybe the Knicks were playing the Sixers. Still, I thought it a fascinating piece of information and, in the spirit of sharing and communicating, I repeated the Greeley story to the other person in my house.

She replied, “Bring me a cookie when that’s over.”