Great to see old friend and everyone’s hero in Chicago, Ernie Banks, on the cover of this week’s Sports Illustrated. He is featured in their annual “Where are they now” edition.
Still looks like he could hit 40 homers.
Here’s a SI cover with Ernie and Pete Rose in 1969. Note the date: Sept. 8. Cubs still held a 1 1/2 game lead over the Mets. Alas, it wouldn’t last.
My latest Chicago Tribune examines the record ratings for the World Cup.
You also can access the column via my Twitter feed at @Sherman_Report.
From the column:
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The TV in the restaurant’s bar had the Cubs game on Monday night. The owner, though, was completely oblivious to Jake Arrieta’s quest to throw a no-hitter against the Red Sox. His sporting mind was elsewhere.
“You watching the U.S. game tomorrow?” he said to a customer. “It should be something.”
That exchange wouldn’t have happened 12 years ago in Chicago, maybe not four years ago.
Clearly, this World Cup has been a watershed moment for soccer in the United States. Interest and awareness have been at an all-time high, delivering record ratings for ESPN.
ESPN hopes many of these new soccer fans will continue to tune in despite the elimination of the U.S. team.
Artie Bulgrin, ESPN’s senior vice president for global research and analytics, crunches the numbers for the network. It is his job to figure out what it all means not only for ESPN but also for soccer.
Here are a few items he is monitoring:
U.S. factor: ESPN would have hit the jackpot if the U.S. had beat Belgium, but the network and Spanish-language Univision more than cashed in with four tightly contested games featuring the Red, White and Blue. An estimated 21.59 million Americans tuned in to Tuesday’s game on ESPN and Univision, second only to 25.2 million for the U.S.-Portugal game.
To put it in perspective, the overall audience for those U.S. games was higher than any World Series or NBA Finals game, and comparable to the BCS title game. And Tuesday’s match occurred on a weekday afternoon. Imagine the numbers if it aired in prime time.
The entire scenario does beg the question of whether the World Cup has become the Olympics version of soccer for U.S. sports fans? Once every four years, Olympic figure skating and gymnastics pull in big numbers for NBC, then pretty much fade from view.
“There’s no question the World Cup is in a class by itself in terms of interest,” Bulgrin said.
Bulgrin, though, thinks a different dynamic is at work for soccer. He contends the momentum has been building with increased ratings for the Premier League and other international soccer telecasts in recent years.
It all came together for this year’s World Cup. Heading into the quarterfinals, ESPN is averaging a healthy 4.1 million viewers for all 56 matches, up 44 percent from 2010. Several non-U.S. games have done strong numbers.
“I think the ratings are where we had hoped they would be,” Bulgrin said. “What we’re seeing is a systematic increase from (the World Cup in) 2006 to 2010 to 2014 in viewing for international soccer. Clearly, the strength of the U.S. team helped out. However, you also have a lot of broad interest for many other teams. Americans are more familiar with many of the stars on the various teams.”
Ah yes, there’s nothing worse than the day after a big loss when you realize the party is over. There won’t be a tomorrow for our boys.
Of course, the World Cup will continue for the rest of the world. Maybe we should adopt Costa Rica the rest of the way. Americans do love the underdogs.
The U.S. performance definitely pulled in non-traditional soccer fans to the World Cup. Now will they still be interested in watching how this thing turns out? It will be another litmus test to gauge soccer’s progress in the U.S.
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The preliminary numbers are in for yesterday’s game, and they are big. ESPN pulled a 9.6 overnight rating, the best ever for a soccer game in the U.S. The final ratings numbers will be out later today.
That’s a huge rating, considering the game aired during a weekday afternoon. Clearly, there had to be big numbers in the East, as the extra time crept into prime time.
120 Sports, which made its debut last week (my post here), already is expanding its lineup.
Robert Channick of the Chicago Tribune reports:
One week after launching its national streaming sports network, Chicago-based 120 Sports has expanded its lineup to include a live morning show — with some familiar local names.
Chicago sports talk veterans Laurence Holmes and Dylan McGorty began hosting 120 Morning Run on the all-digital sports network Wednesday. NFL writer Eric Edholm will be an analyst on the morning show, which will run weekdays from 7 to 9 a.m.
The new morning show adds to eight hours of live evening programming already running on 120 Sports, which features video-driven sports reports delivered in two-minute segments for online viewers.
“After an exciting launch week, we’re pleased to introduce an additional block of original programming that provides an ideal way to catch-up on last night’s big sports moments and follow the latest developments of ongoing stories,” Jason Coyle, president of 120 Sports, said in a statement. “As 120 Sports continues to grow, our goal is to continue to add to our current lineup of live sports conversation.”
Sad to hear the news this morning that Errie Ball died. He was 103.
When I spent a day with him in Florida in 2008, he was a mere kid at 97. It truly was one of the memorable days in my career. Ball was the last living player from the first Masters in 1934. He played golf with Bobby Jones, for goodness sakes.
Even at 97, Ball still was giving lessons and displayed a swing that surely stood the test of time.
From my 2008 story in the Chicago Tribune:
STUART, Fla. — The oldest Master still has game.
Errie Ball wraps his hands around the driver with the same classic grip he has used for more than 90 years. His backswing is short and compact, definitely not as flowing as in his younger years.
But when his club meets the ball, the sound is unmistakable. There’s the distinctive pop of center-cut contact.
Ball’s drive flies straight through the wind, landing nearly 200 yards out. Then the 97-year-old does it again and again and again.
Admiring the robotic consistency of Ball’s shots, Gerry Knebels, the head professional at Willoughby Golf Club, said, “That’s like breathing for you and me.”
Ball is living, breathing golf history. He competed in nearly 50 majors dating to 1926 when he earned a spot in the British Open as a 15-year-old. He played rounds with Bobby Jones, Byron Nelson, Ben Hogan, Arnold Palmer, you name it. He went on to become an accomplished teaching professional at Oak Park and then had a 27-year stint at Butler National in Oak Brook, serving as the host of several Western Opens at the club.
Dapperly attired with gray hair, blue eyes and a firm handshake, Ball still can be found at the range, hitting balls and giving an occasional lesson at Willoughby.
But it’s the Masters, which gets under way Thursday, that marks Ball’s most significant moment in the game. He was in the field for the first tournament at Augusta National in 1934.
In fact, of the 72 players who entered what was then known as the Augusta National Invitational Tournament (the tournament was named the Masters in 1939), Ball is the lone survivor.
“Good Lord, I’ve outlived all of them,” Ball said. “Whew.”
Later I wrote:
Ball eventually left Atlanta to go to Mobile, Ala. In 1934, he received a letter from Jones inviting him to play in a new tournament at a new course called Augusta National.
Ball didn’t think much of the event until he got the invitation.
“I was thrilled to death,” Ball said. “We all were. We knew if Bob put his name on it, it would be top-notch.”
Ball, then 23, recalled thinking the course was beautiful. The atmosphere also was festive with on-course kegs and corn whiskey.
Ball had a great time until the final round. He putted the ball off the green on what now is the 12th hole and wound up shooting 86 to finish in a tie for 38th.
“I couldn’t get out of there fast enough,” Ball said.
Wanted to share Richard Sandomir’s terrific story for Sports on Earth on the most famous speech in sports: Lou Gehrig’s 4th of July address at Yankee Stadium in 1939.
Faced with a cruel fate, baseball’s “Iron Man” gave thanks in a speech that still resonates 75 years later, and will forever.
Sandomir writes:
When Lou Gehrig delivered his “luckiest man” speech on July 4, 1939, his oratorical skills were unknown. He could transform the mood of a stadium with his bat, but what could he do with words to convey the end of his career, if not his life? He lacked the magnetism of the man-child Babe Ruth, whose Brobdingnagian personality captivated the press and fans. Gehrig was an introverted mama’s boy, so lacking in charisma that writer Niven Busch had declared, in a 1929 New Yorker profile, that Gehrig was “not fitted in any way to have a public.”
Yet in fewer than 300 words, Gehrig transformed how the public viewed him. No longer a magnificent ballplayer, he was a dying young man, grateful for his life, not complaining about his limited future. He gave them the essential Gehrig: no different than the decent man he had always been, but now faced with altered circumstances. He did not sound like a professional speaker. He lacked a baritone like Gary Cooper, his doppelganger in The Pride of the Yankees, which made Gehrig’s speech so much more effective. Gehrig simultaneously became a symbol of courage and the soul of the Yankees’ cold-as-steel empire. Had he died in 1971, not 1941, he would have been recalled for his statistics and humility. But by offering nothing but gratitude, for a life that would end two years later, days before his 38th birthday, he was canonized a sports saint.
Later, Sandomir writes:
The speech has been dubbed, with some hyperbole, “baseball’s Gettysburg address.” The connection to Lincoln is strained, perhaps, but the speech is still so good and so concise that it suggests a ghostwriter, perhaps a pal like Fred Lieb of the Sporting News. There are many nice touches, and there is nothing hackneyed. Gehrig spoke of “grand men,” “that wonderful fellow” and “that smart student of psychology.” Three sentences begin with “When you have,” emphasizing his message through parallel structure. Notice the short phrases that followed the dash in five sentences: “that’s something,” “it’s a blessing” and “that’s the finest I know.” By breaking up each thought, he let his thankfulness linger, as if he were punctuating those thoughts with a “Wow!” In the last sentence, he returned to his misfortune, elevating his disease to a “tough break” yet still minimizing its severity.
“The speech resonates, because it speaks to everyone who has suffered illness or lost a loved one,” said Jonathan Eig, author of Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig, a 2005 biography. “Gehrig says we shouldn’t think about ourselves and whatever troubles we might have. Instead, we should think about all the good fortunes we’ve had in life. To die is to lose everything, everyone we’ve loved, but he looks at it from another angle and says death helps him see all he has been blessed with — his family, his friends, his teammates, his career. He chooses life. He chooses optimism.”
Sandomir also details Gary Cooper’s version of the speech in Pride of the Yankees.
One night in Port Moresby, New Guinea, he was dozing in his tent when a cloudburst threatened to cancel the night’s show. But 15,000 troops were waiting on a muddy slope. So Cooper, Merkel and Brooks headed to the stage covered with canvas tarps, along with accordionist Andy Arcari. When they finished their act, a soldier shouted, “Hey, Coop, how about Lou Gehrig’s farewell speech to the Yankees?” The soldiers had recently seen Pride, so it was not a surprise that more troops demanded he play the Iron Horse again.
“The boys began to shout in union for the farewell speech,” he said. He asked that they let him step inside a tent, to give him time to remember the speech as well as he could. “I don’t want to leave out anything,” he said he told them. As he jotted down the words, a tent pole slipped, and rain poured down his neck. Finally, with the speech done, he came out and recited it. “It was a silent bunch that listened to it,” he wrote.
Last night, Boston defeated the Yankees 8-5.
Game time: 3:38.
Somebody please tell me that’s good baseball for a prime time Sunday night game on ESPN. I’m sure somebody will, claiming I am off-base over my obsession with slow play in the game.
I tuned into the game at 9:30 Central (10:30 ET) with the intent of watching the conclusion. Trouble was, it only was the top of the sixth. Are you kidding? I bailed.
Here’s the link to the box score. Yankee pitchers gave up eight walks and both starters threw a ton of pitches without even making it to the sixth inning.
Sorry, that’s not the kind of baseball I want to watch. And I won’t.
Chris Strauss of USA Today has an interesting piece about attending broadcast school at NFL Films.
Strauss writes:
MOUNT LAUREL, N.J. – It’s the first day of mandatory minicamp for many pro football teams, but six NFL veterans are indoors working on a totally different type of conditioning drill. Rather than running sprints or participating in 7-on-7′s, each member of the group, which includes retirees Sage Rosenfels, Brendon Ayanbadejo and Antonio Garay, free agents Deion Branch and Brady Quinn and Detroit Lions quarterback Dan Orlovsky, is seated alongside each other in a converted kitchen at NFL Films’ South Jersey headquarters. With their large frames squeezed into medium-sized chairs, the players are instructed by vocal coach Arthur Joseph to “get back in stature” before cradling their right hands around their necks.
Each guy moves his left hand up to his face and jams two fingers into his mouth. In unison, they all bellow out the word “hat,” letting the obstructed middle letter hang in the air for six long seconds. The “vocal yoga” exercise is just one element of Joseph’s “Your Studio Voice” class at the NFL Broadcast Boot Camp, a program sponsored by the league’s Player Engagement office which completed its eighth annual edition last week.
The four-day curriculum gives participants a crash course in how to break into broadcasting, with panels and classes on subjects like show preparation, radio game coverage, the television studio show, interview technique and even tape study.
“One of the biggest misnomers that people have is that [broadcasting] is going to be easy,” ESPN senior coordinating producer of NFL studio production Seth Markman tells a packed conference room last Tuesday morning, the first of two 12-hour days.
“It’s not. I promise you it’s not. Everybody’s mentioning how much work you guys have put in to get to this level of play. It’s the same thing. It’s preparation. It’s reading. It’s watching the film.”
Brady Quinn? Wasn’t he the original Johnny Manziel for Cleveland.
Strauss writes:
The experience is often worth the wait. By the time they wrap up on Thursday, each of the 24 attendees will have participated in a mock studio show, interviewed each other live on SiriusXM NFL Radio, written and read scripts for a teleprompter and done standup segments from a local Sports Authority store.
All of these activities are overseen by top executives, producers and announcers from ESPN, FOX, NFL Network and more, with network studio hosts James Brown and Curt Menefee working with the players in the studio and ESPN’s Ron Jaworski helping them explain how to break down game film for mass audiences.
“This group seemed to be very aware of football on television,” Jaworski told For The Win. “I got the sense that these guys are really interested in making it a career. They aren’t just here kicking the tires. They want to make it a profession.”
Really, time to forget about this hockey stuff. Eddie Olczyk needs to go all-in on horse racing.
Everyone knows Eddie O loves the horses. However, it takes some guts to pick two longshots in your debut as a horse race analyst.
From NBC:
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NBC NHL analyst Ed Olczyk correctly picked the longshot winner in both races last night (Saturday) in his on-air horse racing debut on NBCSN’s coverage of the $500,000 Gold Cup in the “Breeders’ Cup Challenge Series: Win and You’re In.”
Olczyk correctly picked 14-1 longshot Majestic Harbor in the Gold Cup race featuring 3-5 favorite Game On Dude. Majestic Harbor, with the win, earned a berth in the Breeders’ Cup Classic on Saturday, Nov. 1 in primetime on NBC.
In the earlier race on NBCSN, Olczyk correctly picked the winner Sheza Smoke Show in the Senorita Stakes. Sheza paid $23.20 to win on a $2 bet.
After anxiously awaiting the return of Tiger Woods, CBS might not be able to show one of his shots live this weekend.
And for good reason: Woods might not be around Saturday.
As of this writing, Woods is in a tie for 81st after yesterday’s 3-over 74. The cut currently is at 2-over.
Woods is set to tee off at 1:12 p.m. ET today. The Golf Channel will be the main beneficiary, covering every shot once the network comes on the air at 2:30 ET.
Woods has some work to do to make the cut. Even if he does, it still might not impact CBS unless he makes a big move today.
If Woods barely advances, he will get an early tee time on Saturday. That means Golf Channel gets him again with its early coverage of the third round at 1 p.m. ET. Woods could be long gone by the time CBS hits the air at 3 p.m. ET.
So Jim Nantz, Nick Faldo and company will be pulling for Woods to throw up a 65 today. C’mon, Tiger.