FOR LOVE OF (PRODUCTION) GAME.

Byline: TOM HOFFARTH

This is the latest in a series about the coolest jobs in sports media. Today: Sports TV game producers.

Jack Graham went to USC's School of Business to major in marketing. Bob Borgen was lured to UCLA's film school but was more a fan of radio.

Both ended up producing sporting-event telecasts for TV, one on the network level, the other with a local team. Which might prove again that you should be careful what you wish for - you could miss out on something pretty neat when you're not looking.

``When people ask me about getting in this part of the business, I've always said the biggest thing is to be a sports fan,'' said Graham, a golf enthusiast who's been the ABC's lead producer on golf since 1997. He spoke from Scotland as he's working at the British Open this weekend.

``You can learn the TV part of it as you go, but if you didn't grow up knowing golf or football or whatever, it won't happen. You have to be immersed in sports.''

Added Borgen, who has produced Kings games at Fox Sports Net since 1990 (when it was Prime Ticket) and has been a hockey fan since the team arrived in L.A. in the late '60s: ``If you pursue what you like instead of saying, 'I want to produce golf or ``Monday Night Football,'' ' that's how it works.''

There's a great distinction between what a producer does in the movie business vs. television. Rather than fund a project and watch it happen, a sports TV producer is far more hands-on with a game broadcast.

He or she is hired by the network to work in the control room during the telecast to make the decisions about which direction everything goes, how commercials, promos and graphics are inserted and ultimately what replays are used.

Directors, meanwhile, take the producer's lead and have to figure out which camera shot to use. It's rare, as in the case of KCAL Channel 9's Susan Stratton, but a producer and director can be the same person.

In a sport like golf, in which decisions are made every few seconds trying to go hole to hole and player to player, producers have to be ``not exceptionally smart but able to fly by the seat of your pants,'' said Graham.

``You always have to think ahead,'' said Borgen. ``What do we do when play stops? How do we tell the story for three hours and fill in all the holes? When the game is on live, it's really a director's medium. I just have to make sure all the traffic and business gets in.''

Graham and Borgen agree that experience in all facets of the TV production business isn't necessarily vital. But experience gained while working up through the ranks to this pinnacle position is essential.

For the 47-year old Graham, born in Vancouver and reared in New York, it started when he was a junior at USC. His roommate helped him get a job at ABC working on the network's coverage of the L.A. Open at Riviera Country Club. Graham's job was to drive announcers Frank Gifford, Keith Jackson, Chris Schenkel, Jim Lampley and Byron Nelson to their hotels and also act as a forecaddy on the broadcast.

ABC ultimately hired him to do the same work at other tournaments around the country it covered - for $25 a shot.

``I loved it,'' said Graham. ``I figured I'd have my business degree to fall back on because by the middle of my senior year, I was working on graphics, flying around the country on golf, 'Monday Night Baseball' and 'Monday Night Football.' I had to do a baseball game at Yankee Stadium the day before my last final exam.''

Hired as a production assistant in New York, Graham's course eventually led to an associate director's job for 11 years - mostly doing events for ``Wide World of Sports'' - before he was promoted to producer in 1990.

Graham, a golfer since age 14, has parlayed this job into a dream experience: He plays most of the biggest-name courses in the country. He met his future wife, a director of women's competition for the USGA, while covering the sport at the Walker Cup in Atlanta in 1989.

``Golf is my favorite sport and I just sort of happened to fall into it at ABC,'' said Graham, on the road about half the year concentrating on both golf and college football assignments.

``He definitely has a passion for what he does and it's great to see him meld it all together into a perfect role for him doing pre-eminent events,'' said ABC's Al Michaels.

For Borgen, it was pretty much hockey or nothing.

SOUND BYTES

WHAT SMOKES

--HBO's next edition of ``Real Sports'' (Tuesday, 10 p.m.) includes a piece on Michael Franzese, the former Colombo family wise guy known as the ``Hamlet of Organized Crime'' who left that behind and now coaches Little League baseball (for several years in Encino, now with a traveling team in Santa Monica). The show also has a piece by Frank Deford on retiring Hall of Fame baseball broadcaster Ernie Harwell. When cameras followed Harwell around Comerica Park in Detroit recently, the 84-year-old told some curious onlookers: ``These folks are from HBO. We're doing a little segment on 'Sex And The City.' ''

WHAT CHOKES

--New ``Monday Night Football'' analyst John Madden came up with a simple answer to the problem ABC faces each year with less-than-appealing matchups at the tail end of its schedule. ``Don't give 'em out so you can't take 'em back,'' he told a group of TV reporters at the Ritz Carlton in Pasadena, where the network was parading out its new prime-time lineup. Madden's proposal was to set the TV schedule through the first eight weeks, then leave the last four weeks of spots open to dispense to ABC, CBS, Fox and ESPN - likely giving ABC the first choice for its Monday platform. ``That's the whole secret, the way to get around it,'' he said. Except that Fox and CBS have already paid millions for the rights to the NFC and AFC games, so for at least the next two seasons, that's probably what we're stuck with.

--ESPN decided to suspend Tony Kornheiser from both his daily radio show and ``Pardon the Interruption'' TV stint because of disparaging remarks about management over the firing of the producer of his radio show. Further, the Hartford Courant reports that about a dozen ESPN employees, including talk-show host Jason Jackson and general manager Eric Schoenfeld, have been fired or disciplined for violations of company policy that range from the ongoing sexual-harassment problem to using profanity in company e-mail. ESPN spokespeople won't comment on personnel matters, only to say Kornheiser will be back from vacation on Aug. 5.

CAPTION(S):

photo, box

Photo:

AL MICHAELS, LEFT, AND JOHN MADDEN OF ``MONDAY NIGHT FOOTBALL''

Box:

SOUND BYTES (see text)