Sunday's best on the tube

You can have your NFL games from noon until midnight. Take your NASCAR and your pro golf, and enjoy your nap.

I'll take a GEM Archives marathon over all of the above every Sunday without question. Why don't the good folks at WGEM publicize these shows? They're great. Who needs the writings of Carl Landrum when you've got video of Les Sachs breaking down corn prices from 1978?

This Sunday I happened to flip over to channel 18 (on Quincy cable) and caught "The Year in Sports: 1993" Another great episode.

It started out with (from what I believe was 1993, but it didn't say) a piece Steve Looten did where he miked up former QND boys hoops coach Lonnie Lemon and the late Paul Kreke, who was coaching at Hannibal at the time. Looten was way ahead of the curve on this one. How long have the major networks been miking people on the sidelines? Maybe five years. I love when Fox miked up Brandon Backe and Mark Mulder during the NLCS. Great stuff. Now here's Looten, 12 years ago mind you, doing the same thing on a local level. It helped that it was a great game. QND forced an OT down the stretch and won it OT. For an out-of-towner like myself, it was neat to see what The Pit looked like back then. I could have swore I even saw Mike Barton nearly get hit by a basketball. The more things change, the more things stay the same.

Then Looten went into what happened in sports that year. Surprisingly, the top story locally was the fact QU had its best football season ever. (OK, scratch that, the more things change, the more things stay the same deal.) The Hawks were tough (insert Mike Pasley voice, saying "Dah, the Hawks were tuff.")

Of course, they were beating up on the Eurekas of the college football world (Didn't President Reagan play football there?), but isn't that were QU football (and QU sports overall should be). How tough (go back to Pasley quote) would the Hawks be at the Division III level?

One of the other QU games shown during the clip package was QU-Culver in the Great River Bowl that year. C-SC was led by QB Jason Kaiser, who went on to play some NFL and XFL ball. He was tough. (Cue, Pasley. Too bad I'm not high-tech enough to get an MP3 of Paz saying the word "tough.) Kaiser was all over the place. He brought the Cats to within 21-20 of the mighty Hawks in the final minute. In his infinite wisdom, C-SC boss Al Tamberelli decided to go for two points and the win. This was before the days of the college overtime period, so I guess it made some sense. What would they have done? Split the bucket? Make like the NHL does today with its silly shootout and have a field goal kicking contest? Have the ADs at each school at the time - QU's Jim Naumovich and C-SC's Steve Hill - arm wrestle for it? (I've got Hill, by the way, in no contest.)

I tend to find myself glued to the tube whenever I see GEM Archives on, but especially love the sports ones. I've seen a Looten piece when he breaks it down with the Cubs and Cards at spring training to preview a Cubs-Cards game that was the NBC Game of the Week that week in 1986. Another classic was a 1982 Inside the Actors Studio-like show former WGEMer and current WB11 in St. Louis sports guru Rich Gould did on the QHS boys basketball team.

Not meaning to be a corporate shill, but I could watch this stuff all the time. If you don't think I'm not going to set the TiVo and set up a season pass of GEM Archives, you'd better recognize. And when will WGEM and the rest of the local channels finally get picked up by DirecTV anyway? Don't the DirecTV folks realize the public demands to see the SportsWriters Journal in its full glory. Talk about the shows to TiVo. Who better than the SportsWriters Journal?

Anyway, if you see the GEM Archives while channel surfing, give it a try. May not be as great to those of you who lived through this stuff. Somehow it's entertaining to watch former Ill. Governor Jim Thompson open the Bayview Bridge while wearing a bright orange University of Illinois football golf shirt, yielding the floor to a young representative named Laura Kent.