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Show Page B4 Thursday, November 5, 1981 The Newspaper fir urn: Park Avenue Clothing & Collectibles The Best in Men's Apparel & Gifts Now you don 't have to go all the way to New York to shop Park A venue 513 Main St Park City 649-1385 10-5 Daily C THE IRISH CAMEL LTD. IRISH PUB rd MEXICAN GRUB ) 649 6645 Serving the finest Mexican food and Char Broiled Burgers NFL Football Monday Nights 1st Pitcher Vz Price Monday-Sunday 5:30-11:00 Take Out Available KPCW Presents With Joe Redburn 3:05 - 5:30 Sundays on the air live 649-8395 SKI INSTRUCTOR TRAINING PROGRAM For Good Skiers who want to become Instructors, and for Good Skiers who want to become Great Skiers! Conducted by Duane Vigos and the Supervisory Staff at the Park City Ski School. The Instructor Training Course is both for future Instructors and for better-than-average skiers who want the most exciting learning experience available anywhere. The Course includes four Seminars to be held at the Holiday Inn in Park City the first to be held on November 24th. And it also includes six On-the-Hill Training Sessions. Six Park City Lift Passes are included in the price. For Information Call 1-649-8111 Or Write: P.O. Box 39 Park City, UT 84060 la sKI SCHOOL 2 f i ' ,'$ ' - ' fj '""V -raws. , , ' I ' III 4 , ' , ' y r ; '-X - f4 V' J' ' X , "' f , t - i u. The members of the Park City High School volleyball team : Front row Kim Koch, Rumi Shirahama, Kelly Bolton, Alana Soares and Amy Irvine. Back row Assistant Coach Harold Buckner, Selena Gurski, Racquel Hughes, Teri Potts and Coach Gail McBride. Absent Amanda Smith and Anita Miles. Volleyball team qualifies for state The Park City High School Volleyball team is on its way to Green River today to compete in the state 1A tournament. tour-nament. The Miners won three of four games during the Region 11 tournament held at Dugway last Saturday to take fifth place and qualify for "state." They defeated Dugway, Rowland Hall and South Rich, losing only to Tintic. Finishing first in the Region 11 tournament were the South Summit Wildcats, who defeated St. Joseph in the championship match. Third place went to North Summit, which was followed by Tintic, Park City and South Rich. The top six teams all qualify for the state tournament. The opening round of the tournament will see Park City square off against South Sevier, which won the state by Jim Murray Networks eye cable TV .In the early 1920s when a new medium, radio, and a new monopoly, network broadcasting, burst on an unprepared public, the reigning satraps of the infant industry were locked in bitter ideological conflict. On one side were the forces headed by Gen. David Sarnoff, ruler of the resident conglomerate, Radio Corporation of America, Amer-ica, who held that the greatest good the new medium could perform was move goods. In other words, it should be a giant advertising agency whose entertainment specialties, like the old medicine shows, should be used principally to sell snake oil, to unclog the pipelines of America's manufactured goods. On the other side were the forces of free enterprise which thought the entertainment should be sold directly to the public at the marketplace, just as stage, screen, sports and penny arcades were. Put your nickel in the slot and see the show. Pay-radio, not advertising-subsidized radio. Gen. Sarnoff pervailed. He usually did. Pay radio never came into being. Instead, toothpaste companies controlled the medium. me-dium. It hired the comics, paid the orchestras, leased the wires. Razor blade companies brought you the World Series. Beer bottlers put on the Wednesday Night Fights. Pro-football became sales pitches for shaving lather. When television came in, the old argument re-opened. Executives like Gene McDonald, president of Zenith Radio and Television, argued for selling products direct to home owners. His reasoning was logical: why should a World Series, which could gross $40 million a day if everybody who watched it put in a dollar apiece, sell for $175,000 for radio rights and $65,000 TV receipts (as it did then in 1949)? McDonald and pay-TV advocates were blocked at every turn, largely by an agressive mob of 12,000 movie exhibitors whose business was doomed anyway. They collected signatures and stopped pay-TV in its tracks. It was like the buggy-whip manufacturers collecting signatures to prevent the manufacture of carburetors, as the courts later ruled, but, for awhile, the illusion of "f;-ee" TV prevailed. There is no such thing as "free" TV, actually. You paid for Jack Benny and the World Series, anyway. But all this is ancient history. Pay TV is alive and well and proliferating. It held a massive three-day convention this summer at which an' industry which once held its convention "in a clothers closet in Las Vegas" had over 12,000 conventioneers and 350 exhibitors on the convention floor, attesting to the growth and vitality of a business its enemies thought they had patted in the face with a shovel two decades ago. It's called "Cable TV" today but it's the same business. Gen. Sarnoff would be aghast. It managed to escape the political buzz saws of "free" TV in the nick of time because it happened to be needed. When there proved to be massive pockets of population in the U.S. unreachable by the ordinary TV signal because they were behind mountains or other interrupters, enterprising enterpris-ing entrepreneurs built community antennas and charged the subscribers for piping the TV pictures into their living room. Not even a Gen. Sarnoff could say "You can't do that!" Nobody could collect signatures to take away television altogether from your home screen. So, pay TV had its foot in the door. I had breakfast with a TV executive who has a foot in both doors. Chet Simons, when I first knew him, was in charge of sports programming for NBC in the days when competition for sports pre-eminence on the networks made the Dodger Giants look like two sisters dancing. It's well to remember the American Football League succeeded where earlier expansion leagues had failed simply because NBC needed it. No other single factor contributed so much to its success. NBC could not tolerate putting on Sunday afternoon zoo shows while CBS was showing the real Lions and Rams and keeping score. Chet Simmons runs an operation called "The Total Sports Network," ESPN (for "Entertaining and Sports Programming Network") with headquarters in Bristol, Conn., of all places. It's an audacious enterprise bankrolled by Getty Oil. It welcomes advertising but it distributes its product by cable system, an idea which Gen. Sarnoff never thought of. "We are advertising-supported, we generate gen-erate revenue the same way the three networks do," explained Simmons. "We are in affiliate agreements with cable systems. But we are in one business and one business only, we are a program source for the cable industry, that's all we do." Where does a 24-hour all-sports network find product? Would you believe televising the NFL draft? Twenty guys sitting around a room for 8 v2 hours sorting out photographs of kids with 20-inch necks whose classes had graduated from A&M (usually without them.) That's entertainment?! "Believe it," says Chet Simmons convincingly. "To our viewers, it's news, it's entertainment, it's suspense." Lyrics by Irving Berlin. What do you do at 4 o'clock in the morning, Chet bar fights? Re-runs of the Cincinnati Bengals picking a linebacker? No. Chet reports that re-runs of an event first programmed live the evening before are as avidly watched by sports fans as Saturday afternoon cowboy movies by kids. They will watch the same film over and over again. Especially if the good guys win. Where otherwise do you get product? Well, Chet Simmons notes, the major networks leave an astonishing amount of prime sports footage just lying around. Not Notre Dame-Michigan, the World Series or the Super Bowl, perhaps. But they do leave the college World Series of Baseball, the NCAA golf tournaments, and even the famous Notre Dame-Brigham Young basketball playoff of last year was up for grabs. ESPN grabbed it. ESPN has the advantage, too, that it is all-sports. It does not have to go pettifogging off after comparative trivialities triviali-ties such as elections, assassinations, wars, revolutions, drownings, floods, and other dilemmatic happenings of the non-world out there. If it doesn't happen between the foul lines, so far as ESPN is concerned, it's a non-story. Network Sports news stations usually present a breathless announcer trying to cram 24 scores, a shouted interview with a third baseman on the way to a shower, and a look at a three-horse spill at Aqueduct, all sounding like Donald Duck interviewing Mel Tellis film at 11. Rush-hour train calling at Grand Central is more entertaining entertain-ing and informative. How fair is the box office? "In May of 1979, we had a million and a half subscribers," reports Simmons. "In May of 1981, we have 10 million." How close is Cable TV to bidding competitively against the networks for a World Series, Super Bowls, Olympic Games? "We are a long way from making money," Simons admits. "But, when it was estimated that it would take $400 million to wire the Borough of Queens for Pay-TV, 20 applicants bid for the privilege of spending $400 million. So you know what the return was they were looking at. The networks are now looking into cable TV themselves. What does this tell you?" It tells me it's a good thing Gen. Sarnoff isn't around to hear it. (c) 1981, Los Angeles Times title last year. Although she is less than excited about that prospect, Park City Coach Gail McBride believes the Miners will do well against the defending champs. cham-ps. against the defending champs. "We're capable of playing better than fifth in our region," she taid. "We might just be able to surprise sur-prise them." The tournament will be held Friday and S ; urday, with the champion j.p match mat-ch scheduled for ..i5 p.m. Saturday. - i rt-r- Marie Frigone New pro arrives in time for Locals Only tourney No, we don't have the photos mixed up. This is the new racquetball pro at the Prospector Athletic Athle-tic Club. Her name is Marie Frigone. Fri-gone. She's only 21, she doesn't look like a jock, but the chances are she could reduce just about anybody in Park City to a puddle of tears and sweat on the racquetball floor. Frigone, a native of Southern South-ern California, has been living in Park Cityv since August. She will be working full-time at the club, giving clinics and lessons, and helping to organize tournaments. tourna-ments. Speaking of tournaments, the deadline is Nov. 7 for those who wish to enter the Third Annual Locals Only Racquetball Tournament. The entry fee of $10 pays for court time, food and a T-shirt. Trophies will be awarded to first and second place in each division, and to the winners of the consolation consola-tion brackets. The tournament tourna-ment will be held Nov. 12-14. The Locals Only tournament tourna-ment attracted about 40 competitors a year ago. The club is hoping for 50 entries this time around. Frigone said she has invited Craig McCoy, the second-ranked touring pro in the United States, to give a clinic in Park City this winter. And she is starting to plan a Utah Racquetball Association tournament scheduled for next April. Tee Time Winning attitude By Bud Tonnesen As we come to the close of another season, I look back on all the victories, near misses and losses at our course and it once again hits me that what separates the. good from the great and the winners win-ners from the losers is attitude. The person who has a lust for life, the one who accepts defeat as a catalyst for victory, the one who never gives up, will finish on top most of the time. You have to play to win and dare to lose. The secret to golf, and for that matter life, is: "We become our expectations." Success is a habit, make no mistake about that. During the winter months, I hope you will seek out situations that will build success in your life. Stay in good shape, swing a golf club every now and then. No matter what you do, do the best job you can this will build a winning attitu Je. Believe me this will not only improve your golf game, it will also improve im-prove your life. |