Janis's Substack; Made of Jade

THE MADNESS OF MARCH; PART II

Time really does go fast when you’re having fun, or very busy. We are now down to three remaining games in the 2025 NCAA Men’s Basketball tournament. So it seems appropriate to follow up on some of the anecdotes that I mentioned last week. If you recall I described covering the early rounds of the tournament was like making a gourmet omelet from scratch. Many things have to happen in the correct order, for the correct amount of time and in the correct environment. Other things in television (bowling qualifies) are like boiling an egg; it would be hard to screw up. The sweet sixteen and the elite eight rounds of the tournament are somewhere in between. Though the games are more meaningful, because there are less of them, it is easier. Thursday and Fridays were regionalized coverage for CBS a while back. Some fancy footwork went on these two evenings. There were always the games running long, overtimes, doing bonus coverage, doing a brief switch to another game and making sure all our commercials aired. You still had to pay close attention. And mistakes were prone to happen. Following the Thursday and Friday rounds of play the schedule had to be set for Saturday and Sunday. There were times it was cut and dry and other times that required some thought and research which caused conflict and more mayhem.

It’s important that I point out, that the commercial spots that we neglected to air in the first weekend were made good in the Sweet Sixteen round. Our very astute CEO and his counterpart at the NCAA quietly allowed for some extra timeouts so we could run those spots giving us a happy group of advertisers and sales executives. And to make sure we had one good snafu, the west coast got the wrong game for a few minutes due to a total lack of “good” communication skills by one or our lead producers. Somehow two Texas schools got mixed up in the lingo. Screams and hollers and the blame game took over. I must say it got ugly. One of these evenings, a producer at one of the sites, was unable to turn off the “talk” button on the headset that he was wearing (He had to have the headset and microphone on all the time). I had to listen to him for 5 to 6 hours. He was not a calm person nor did he speak the King’s English. He favored expletives in every sentence as well as name calling and he had some beauties. Everyone was a moron or an imbecile or an asshole, all preceded by an adjective that isn’t in any dictionary that I have read. My head felt like someone had inserted a bongo drum inside of it.

Of course no sports tv story would be complete without some mention of food. Yes more steaks and grilled cheese sandwiches were consumed and pasta was always on the menu for the non meat eaters. Being a March born baby, I had the good fortune of usually celebrating my birthday during the second weekend of the tournament. No one could let this pass unnoticed, so cake and candles were ordered. A huge cake, but not a very pretty one and not a tasty one. Betty Crocker packages made them better. The rather large eaters on the production team (Mr. Grilled Cheese and Ms. Steak) consumed more than half one year. So, the following year, someone decided to order two cakes. Now there was a lot left over. So, I took some down to my friends at CBS News. When one of the reporters tasted it, he looked at me and said “is that the best they can do?” The next day I received a beautiful cake from an upscale bakery with strawberries and a couple of roses from that CBS News reporter. Some people do have class. In addition, someone on the sports production team, asked me how old I was. Back then I wasn’t ashamed to admit my age, so I responded that I was 40. (this is Mr. Grilled Cheese again). He replied “I could trade you in for two 20 year olds”. Yes in the 1990’s some men said things like this and got away with it. He thought this was funny, but no one laughed.

When Sunday rolled around it always felt like coming to the end of a long tunnel when you can see daylight starting to stream in. It was a fairly easy day, unless the unexpected came to light. Of course, true to form, Mr. Don Hewitt, of “60 Minutes” fame began his usual phone calls requesting a promo blitz at around 6PM. Nothing on Sunday was more important than 60 Minutes. Sunday also meant we could start looking forward to the Final Four and being in a true basketball and youthful environment. Following the Final Four began a week of ecstasy, for that was Masters week, “a tradition unto itself” and a truly spectacular event.