DVDs teach ABCs the sporting way
The idea of Team Baby DVDs is indoctrination.
“Our goal is really to raise the next generation of sports fans,” says Greg Scheinman, chief executive and founder of Houston-based Team Baby Entertainment. The company, bought in June by former Disney chief Michael Eisner, makes $20 instructional videos aimed for toddlers using sports.
“In the baby ‘edutainment’ category, you hear about parents who can’t stand the songs,” Scheinman says. “Here, parents hear their school fight song. You’re really preparing your infants to go to their first game with you.”
In the DVDs, player jerseys are used to teach numbers. Stadium fields teach shapes. Little ones learn about animals from seeing mascots.
Having sold the DVDs for a year in college bookstores — big surprise, Notre Dame is the top seller — Scheinman says he “wants to go mainstream, like maternity stores. And that’s where the famous names come in.”
Those names, on upcoming DVDs, include George Steinbrenner, Pat Riley, Mark Cuban, Jay Leno, Regis Philbin and NBC’s Bob Costas and Al Michaels.
Scheinman says signing the sportscasters was about more than assuming they have voices that can stop diapered dandies from falling asleep: “This is a dream come true. Michaels and Costas are my idols!”
HBO isn’t in this corner
Usually, HBO’s boxing coverage includes warm-up fights before the featured bout. But HBO won’t show the fight preceding the main event Saturday night of featured heavyweights Wladimir Klitschko (46-3) and Calvin Brock (29-0) at Madison Square Garden. Instead, it will replay the Nov. 4 Floyd Mayweather-Carlos Baldomir welterweight bout.
The problem for HBO: Saturday’s top undercard will have the wrong chromosomes. Laila Ali (22-0), daughter of Muhammad, will face Shelley Burton (8-2). Ali says HBO, which hasn’t shown women’s bouts, is missing the big picture. “I am kind of like the headline,” she said on ESPN2’s Quite Frankly. “I’m selling the tickets.”
HBO might air her highlights and report on her dad, who is expected at the fight. But women’s boxing, says HBO Sports President Ross Greenburg, isn’t ready for live coverage: “It’s a very young sport and the athletes need to develop.”
NBA great turned analyst works on different set
Chad Lowe, in directing his first movie, recalls shooting in a Brooklyn, N.Y., park when kids walking by did a double take. “I thought perhaps that they recognized me,” says Lowe, who acted on Melrose Place and ER and says he’ll play “a savvy politico” in the cast of Fox’s 24 next year. “But I should have known better.”
Instead, those kids were looking at the executive producer hunched over a film monitor alongside Lowe —Reggie Miller. The ex-NBA star and current TNT analyst’s Boom Baby Productions — named for ex-NBA guard Slick Leonard’s phrase for hitting three-pointers — oversaw Beautiful Ohio. The film debuts today at the AFI Film Festival in Los Angeles.
Lowe, 38, knew all about Miller — “I followed his career from his days at UCLA” — and was grateful Miller “took a chance” on letting him direct. “I was very surprised how hands-on he was. He was involved with the script early on and was on the set every day.”
Today’s premiere is meant to attract distributors to the coming-of-age film, which is set in the 1970s and stars William Hurt and Rita Wilson. Miller has joked how much better it was to be on a movie set barking to be brought a Caramel Macchiato rather than running NBA courts. But Lowe says Miller’s game plan hasn’t changed completely: “He still wants the ball; that’s how he is in filmmaking.”
Maguire, ABC’s man in motion, to call game from truck
Eventually, Paul Maguire should call a football game from a blimp. Saturday, he’ll call one from a truck.
Maguire called two Super Bowls on NBC and worked ESPN’s Sunday night NFL games for eight seasons until he was reassigned this year to call college football on ABC. He works a three-man booth with Brad Nessler and Bob Griese.
For Ohio State-Northwestern on Saturday, that will be a virtual three-man booth. With his partners in their usual perch upstairs, Maguire will weigh in from an ESPN production truck.
“All I do is look at replays anyway,” says Maguire, in his 36th year as a football TV analyst. “It will almost be like I’m watching the game at home, but I’ll have a bank of TV monitors to pick replays that show the best angle.”
Looking at monitors and picking the replays is done by those who always work in the truck, such as producer Bob Goodrich, whom Maguire says will sit next to him and wants to “do something a little different.”
At a Georgia Tech-Virginia Tech game this season, Goodrich stationed Maguire in the grandstands — “the one guy who recognized me had had a couple of beers and asked me what I was doing.” At the Miami-Georgia Tech game, Maguire was atop a cart pulling a TV camera on the sidelines.
“It was the best seat I’ve ever had in my life,” Maguire says. “But I had to duck when the camera swung around. And when the homecoming queen was looking down at her flowers, we (nearly) ran her down.”
Posted 11/10/2006 12:23 AM ET