Keith Olbermann

When MSNBC moved a couple of months ago from its longtime home in New Jersey to 30 Rockefeller Plaza in Midtown Manhattan, Keith Olbermann got his pick of offices. It was a nice perk for the anchor whose bracing mix of irony and stridency made him the first big star the 11-year-old cable channel can call its own. Olbermann chose a room looking directly into the street-front studios of MSNBC's rival, Fox News. If you're walking up Sixth Avenue, look for the huge cardboard cutout of Bill O'Reilly's head gazing out of a third-floor window in the world headquarters of NBC. Rare is the night when Countdown with Keith Olbermann, MSNBC's highest-rated program, doesn't take aim at something said on "Fox Noise" or "Fixed News," Olbermann's pet names for the channel.

SECAUCUS, N.J. -- The Democrats may have wrested back control of power in Congress, but that hasn't quieted the ire of Keith Olbermann. Recently, he delivered one of his trademark blistering critiques of the country's leadership - this time charging that President Bush failed to learn the lessons of Vietnam by perpetuating the "monumental lie that is our presence in Iraq." And don't think the victors of the midterm election are going to escape his sharp tongue. "If the Democrats don't undo a lot of the things that have been done, like the Military Commissions Act and many of the other infringements on freedom, as I see it, there will be a special comment with their name on it," Olbermann vowed on a recent afternoon, wearing a crisp, striped shirt and suspenders, his large frame hunched over his desk at MSNBC's Secaucus headquarters.

Olbermann rises from ashes So here's what I want to know: Where did Keith Olbermann get the asbestos boots? With Monday's announcement that Olbermann will be a daily regular on Dan Patrick's ESPN Radio talk show, it appears Olbermann has crossed over what seemed to be burned bridges with ESPN. Maybe the harsh words and reportedly bruised feelings from the Olbermann-ESPN relationship are so far in the past now that it doesn't matter. Or maybe those bridges were just a little singed. In any case, for any sports fan with ears and a brain, this is wonderful news.

ADMIT IT. You're jealous of them. They're out there walking the country's finest fairways, all color-coordinated, tastefully-logoed, bronzed-forearmed and caringly caddied. So if pro golf's elite have a bit of a time dealing with the USGA-tricked-out No. 2 course at Pinehurst for this weekend's U.S. Open, you should enjoy seeing those guys sweat through their sponsor-issued caps. Just ask NBC's Roger Maltbie. "The people I've talked to over the course of the year, they don't mind seeing the pros getting a little bloodied up once a year, watching them struggle and watching them go through what golf feels like for them on a weekly basis," Maltbie said in a conference call Wednesday.

SECAUCUS, N.J. - MSNBC is coming up on its seventh birthday, but the network that promised to give viewers the best of the merged resources of NBC News and Microsoft is still casting about for an identity. As any news junkie knows, CNN's relatively stable lineup and brand-name hosts have made it the esteemed (if stodgy) graybeard of the genre. And Fox News, with its testosterone-fueled rants and its right-of-center polemics, has become the channel of choice for many conservative viewers.

Looking for a bona fide shocker to start the day? Here's one: Keith Olbermann is in favor of some sort of video replay system to get the calls right in baseball.This isn't blabber coming from some hack on a talk show, but a serious idea from a noted baseball historian and a guy who fancies himself as a purist of the game.But, after bearing witness to two horrendous umpiring calls in the first four games of the American League Championship Series, Olbermann, who is host of Fox's playoff coverage, thinks it's time to give the umpires a hand.

To be Keith Olbermann these days is to live your life as one giant plot point out of an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel.In sports arenas and on billboards across the country looms the disembodied head of Olbermann, the wise-cracking anchor of Fox Sports News' nightly broadcast. Accompanied by some Olbermann bon mot or another, it floats there to draw fan attention to Fox and away from ESPN, Olbermann's former employer.For the bespectacled Olbermann, it calls to mind a major metaphor out of Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby": a pair of eyes with glasses on a billboard in Long Island in the 1920s used as ad for an optician.

Final call: Keith Jackson, shown with Fiesta Bowl partner Bob Griese, put down the mike for good last night after 32 years with ABC.The good news for tomorrow night is that Dan Patrick and Keith Olbermann will be doing sports highlights at 11 p.m. again.The bad news is that they'll be opposite each other, as Olbermann's new venture on Fox Sports Net's "Fox Sports News" (seen locally on Home Team Sports) begins this evening, while Patrick remains on ESPN's "SportsCenter."In the short term, Olbermann, who reportedly signed a deal with Fox worth $1 million a year, will play David to ESPN's Goliath, what with the latter's huge advantage in name recognition and availability in homes.

If you lived in Seattle in the early 1990s, there's a decent chance that Kenny Mayne tried to sell you long distance phone service, picked up your garbage or assembled your garbage cans.Starting a week from Sunday, Mayne will be delivering your sports news and highlights when he joins Dan Patrick as co-anchor of the 11 p.m. "SportsCenter," ESPN announced yesterday.Mayne, whose sense of humor is as offbeat as they come, inherits the chair left vacant when Keith Olbermann left for MSNBC and a good deal of pressure to keep the ratings high on one of the most popular and critically acclaimed shows in all of television.