A LITTLE CLOSER TO EQUALITY\Meyers, women's games get live TV.

Byline: Tom Hoffarth

Don't bother preaching March Madness to someone like Ann Meyers.

Three years ago, Meyers delivered her third child with husband Don Drysdale, daughter Drew, and a week later flew to Nashville, Tenn., to work as a CBS analyst for the first round of the NCAA men's tournament.

Let's see a tough monkey like Billy Packer do that.

Starting with tonight's Grambling-Stanford contest, Meyers helps ESPN make good on a delivery it promised to women's college basketball - give it post-season tournament exposure like it has never had before.

Count 'em: Twenty-five games, all live, on ESPN and ESPN2, ending with a Friday-evening Final Four and a Sunday East Coast prime-time title game.

Call it ESPN's labor of love.

"It's hard to compete with the men this time of year; March Madness is so fabulous," said Meyers, who admits she was disappointed CBS didn't ask her back to its men's tournament coverage this season but was equally elated to be in on ESPN's breakthrough women's coverage and the cable network's seven-year commitment to the sport.

"The media, both print and TV, finds it tough to divide its coverage of both tournaments. What most editors end up saying is, 'We've got to go with the men.'

"Five years ago, we (Los Angeles) had the women's Final Four, and a California team - Stanford - won the title, but there were no front-page (news section) stories on it."

Nor, as Meyers points out, are there many women's highlights on the tube.

"I admit women's basketball is still in a walking stage. I'd like to see 'SportsCenter' show women's scores and highlights. There's as much history behind it as the guys. In the first year of a seven-year package, there isn't as much women's basketball on TV as some would like to see, but ESPN will be more involved from here.

"This is a time just like when ESPN started doing the men's first-round tournament games. It'll grow."

In December, 1994, right after CBS handed a $1.725 billion check to the NCAA to lock up the men's tournament coverage through 2002, ESPN jumped in with its own deal for the women.

"Political correctness has nothing to do with it," Mike Aresco, ESPN's head of programming for college sports, said about the ESPN-NCAA deal. "This is emerging as a great sport and it fits into our commitment to college sports."

And it doesn't hurt that last year's champs, Connecticut, went 35-0 playing right out back of the satellite dish farm of ESPN's Bristol, Conn., studios.

CBS's previous commitment to women's hoops consisted of putting the semifinals and final on a back-to-back Saturday and Sunday sandwiched in between the men's Final Four and title game. Coaches and players complained, but couldn't forgo the exposure.

ESPN rectified that injustice, but there's a new tweak on the women: several late-night starts during the tournament now, fitted around the ESPN-ESPN2 schedule full of NHL, bass fishing and tractor pulls.

It's a price many are willing to accept.

"I'd play at 11 p.m. if ESPN told me to," said UConn coach Geno Auriemma.

Meyers, who helped bring women's hoops to a new level during her career at UCLA in the '70s - she even got an NBA tryout out of it - admits her loyalty is still to the women's game.

Ironically, what Meyers, Nancy Lieberman, Cheryl Miller or Sheryl Swoops couldn't quite do for the game - make it a big-time TV event - ESPN and Joan Jett might have.

Jett's '90s version of "Love Is All Around" - the theme from the "Mary Tyler Moore Show" - is ESPN's signature women's college promo, awakening some slumbering sofa surfers to the sport's existence on TV.

Now, the cynics suggest, we'll see if ESPN can take a nothing game and suddenly make it all seem worthwhile.

STATION BREAK

Tongue depressing the media, March 1996:

What smokes: Scott Ferrall's banishment from the XTRA-AM nighttime lineup following Monday's profane tirade against the UCLA basketball program (Ferrall wanted Jim Harrick on as a guest, Harrick couldn't make it, so Ferrall went ballistic against the station and the school); stronger rumors that UCLA will dump XTRA ASAP (the Bruins have complained all season long about the Valley-poor signal and could easily get $300,000-plus in rights fees from another station - heck, KNX offered USC about $500,000 before the Trojans jumped to KMPC in '95); Fox hiring Dave Winfield as a baseball studio analyst; Albert Belle's Q-and-A in the April issue of Inside Sports (we side with his version of the World Series dugout tete-a-tete with NBC's Hannah Storm); reaction by Belle's agent, Arn Tellem, in the March 12 USA Today Baseball Weekly to his client's $50,000 fine ("Bret Saberhagen shooting bleach at reporters, Deion Sanders dumping water over Tim McCarver, Dave Kingman sending a white rat to a reporter . . . the punishment they received was nothing close to what Albert got"); Sports Illustrated's baseball preview issue ranking Belle and San Francisco's Barry Bonds Nos. 1 and 2 as baseball's biggest undesirables; Belle doing a Fox promo for its baseball coverage (he wins a Cupie doll for some kids at a carnival - without running them down in his truck).

What chokes: CBS's Al Maguire (they're using him instead of Ann Meyers? Put us and him out of our misery); handing over $49.95 to Don King for the right to watch Saturday's Mike Tyson-Frank Bruno pay-per-view bout (not even Tommy Morrison added as the telecast's co-host with Jim Hill makes this worth it); NBC expanding its NFL show to an hour (as if competing with shows on Fox and ESPN means anything); Shaquille O'Neal's yes men in charge of commercial endorsements (Taco Bell turns Shaq into a human tiki torch to promote its four-alarm fast-food, Reebok uses him to clank-fu the Penny Hardaway puppet, Amway uses him to endorse a "ShaqBar" low-fat energy booster that doubles as an industrial floor wax . . . wouldn't Shaq's time be best spent working from the charity stripe?); KCAL-Channel 9 hiring Jerry Reuss as the Angels' analyst (while Prime Sports wants Sparky Anderson as its Angels TV analyst) instead of just retaining Ken Brett on both stations; Prime Sports beach volleyball analyst Tim Hovland (who has just been given a speech coach to help him with verbal sideouts); rumbling that the Clippers think they'll find another sucker to carry their TV games next season (their five-year deal with UPN-Channel 13 expires next month, and they think there are takers out there).

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