Ebersol

Faced with a number of choices on how to replace Marv Albert on his network's NBA coverage, NBC Sports president Dick Ebersol last week went back to the option he wanted seven years ago, Bob Costas. But will Costas rue the decision?When NBC snagged the rights to the NBA away from CBS in Ebersol immediately approached Costas -- whose first big broadcasting break was calling games for the Spirits of St. Louis of the ABA in the mid-1970s -- about taking the lead play-by-play slot.However, Costas begged off basketball, arguing to Ebersol that Albert's presence on that sport would be as personally important to Albert as baseball would be to Costas.

ATLANTA -- Attention, female television viewers: NBC is looking for you.Between Friday's opening ceremonies of the Summer Olympics and the closing on Aug. 4, NBC is determined to make its presentation as female-friendly as possible, and for good reason.Unlike most televised sporting events, where women make up approximately 40 percent of the audience, the Olympics bring roughly a 50/50 viewer split of men and women.And that's why over the 17 days that the Olympics unfold here, the NBC effort -- a total of 171 1/2 hours at a cost of $456 million -- will be less about the cold recitation and reporting of event results and more about the warm and fuzzy telling of the stories of the athletes who will take part in the proceedings, on the theory that women prefer warm and fuzzy over cold and no-nonsense.

ATLANTA -- After just one telecast, his network is done with baseball until October, but, from the sidelines, NBC Sports President Dick Ebersol is keeping an eye trained on how the grand old game performs for Fox.During a recent interview, Ebersol, whose network passed on a regular-season deal for a five-year All-Star Game and postseason package, said baseball's regular-season value to a network is "lost" because there are so many games available to the...

It's only been a couple of weeks since Craig Kilborn abruptly left the late night/early morning "SportsCenter" on ESPN, but, for viewers who like their highlights served with a touch of insouciance, his defection to Comedy Central is a profound loss.Those of us who miss the loving tributes to basketball heroes like Gheorghe Muresan, Arvydas Sabonis and, of course, Jerome "Pooh" Richardson that made Kilborn so funky fresh, are left with the same kind of TV betrayal we felt when, say, McLean Stevenson left "M*A*S*H" for "Hello, Larry."

Want some good news about NBC's taped Olympic coverage? Here it is: There won't be as much of it from Salt Lake City for the Winter Olympics in two years, or for the next Summer Games in Athens in 2004. Indeed, Dick Ebersol, the chairman of NBC Sports, said all of the figure skating and hockey from the Games in 2002 will air live, as well as a chunk of speed skating. And there will be some live competition from Greece in four years, where the time difference between Athens and Baltimore is only eight hours.

File Joe Montana's new gig with NBC Sports away under the heading, "Nice work if you can get it."The recently retired, awaiting-Hall-of-Fame-induction quarterback yesterday signed a sweetheart of a multiyear deal with the Peacock network, in which he'll only have to work about 10 weeks a year, get paid a reported $750,000 a season and get shuttled into New York from San Francisco when he has to work.Best of all, Montana, who will fill in on the "NFL Live" set when Joe Gibbs' racing duties call him away, won't have to do any of that nasty analysis from the booth, but will work from the safety and security of the pre-game studio, where there's more time to form an opinion and fewer opinions are needed.

It wasn't all that long ago -- last summer in fact -- when NBC Sports President Dick Ebersol was equating the Fox network with a "pushcart" while his Fox colleague David Hill was calling Ebersol "puerile."Maybe it took winter's chill to make the two men grasp how much they had in common and how much they truly needed each other.Yeah, right.More likely, yesterday's stunt at halftime of the AFC championship game, in which the cast of Fox's pre-game show appeared with the gang from NBC, was a cute little trick to keep viewers from heading out of the room, or worse, channel-surfing.

No one could ever accuse Jim McKay of signing up for another Olympics because he's resume building. Or because he needs the paycheck. "It sounds like fun," says McKay of his handshake deal to cover his 12th Olympiad. "It's one more time around the block." ABC, McKay's home network for 40 years, last year agreed to lend him to NBC for the Winter Games. "I remember when NBC locked up the games for what seemed like forever, I looked at my wife and said, `Well, Margaret, that's it. It looks like our Olympic days are over,' " recalls McKay, 80, at his farm in Monkton.

It's taken many years, 24 to be exact, and a few knockdown, drag-out arguments between HBO executive producer Ross Greenburg and analyst Billie Jean King, but when the pay-cable channel's coverage of Wimbledon opens Monday, it will feature more women's play than men's."

In the topsy-turvy world of network television, you just never know where your next great idea or hire is going to come from. At Fox, for instance, the best addition to its football crew, pre-game show analyst Cris Collinsworth, came straight from the head of one of its chief competitors.When NBC was forced to fold up its NFL shop, Collinsworth, the mainstay of its pre-game show, was wavering between coming to CBS for its New York-based, AFC-centered show or going to Fox's NFC-oriented program, which originates from Los Angeles, and told his agent he thought he would go to CBS.However, Collinsworth, a former Pro Bowl receiver with Cincinnati, said NBC Sports Chairman Dick Ebersol advised him to take the offer from Fox."