King Kaufman's Sports Daily
Hype shortage: The Stealth Olympics are a month away. Plus: Bruce Sutter makes Cooperstown.
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Jan. 11, 2006 | The Winter Olympics are a month away, and the hype machinery is just starting to wheeze through the lower gears. Has there ever been a less ballyhooed Olympic Games?
There have been times in the last month when I've gone an entire day without having a thought, willing or otherwise, about the Turin Games. Those days are gone now with the figure skaters qualifying and everybody tut-tutting over Bode Miller's "60 Minutes" comments about skiing while "wasted."
But such Olympian peace would have been unthinkable so close to any Games of the last two decades. It goes without saying that Summer Olympics and those Winter Games held in North America are blockbusters around here, but there was also a lot more buzz leading up to Nagano, Lillehammer and Albertville.
Or maybe I'm just missing it, running between the raindrops, as it were. The Olympics are on NBC again, and I rarely find myself watching the Peacock. I mostly watch sports, and other than the Olympics, NBC's big ones are thumb wrestling and celebrity Boggle.
But I don't think that's it. NBC has been slow to pound the drums. It was just this week that I got the first press release announcing that there will be 416 hours of coverage -- 24.5 per day -- on "the Networks of NBC Universal," which include NBC, USA, MSNBC, CNBC, NBC HD, XNBC, NBC The Magazine, the Artist Formerly Known as NBC, Triumph the Insult NBC, NBC Ate My Balls, Abbott and Costello Meet NBC, and Universal HD.
There doesn't seem to be the customary five-ring bombardment that makes any sane person sick of the sight of the Olympic logo long before the children of all nations start twirling ribbons to the sweet sounds of a French horn at the Opening Ceremony.
I have actually bought products in the last six months that did not have the Olympic rings on the package. Incredible!
I don't get it. There's no shortage of American stars. Apolo Ohno, the short-track speed skater who won a controversial gold medal in Salt Lake and has looks and style to burn.
There's Miller, the free-spirit skier who famously doesn't care about medals or money and who has that great story, growing up in the woods with his hippie family. "We had running water," he told Bob Simon on "60 Minutes" last week, nodding at the stream that runs past his boyhood home.
That was a few minutes before he mentioned that he'd occasionally gone down the mountain uncomfortably close to the previous night's victory celebration, an admission so unsurprising to those who've heard of Miller before that "60 Minutes" tucked it at the end of its story. Then it trumpeted the revelation in press releases as though it were headline news.