Stupid sports stories make front page.

In the orgy of self-congratulations, civic praise and Chamber of Commerce-speak that followed the announcement by the National Collegiate Athletic Association that it would play its women's basketball championship game at Kiel Auditorium in 2001, a few items might have been left out of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch stories.

Of course the Post found the announcement - of an event four years away - a more newsworthy story than the handoff of Hong Kong to China, but that's what we can look forward to with greater frequency; that sort of news judgment exemplifies what public journalism is all about.

Elizabethe Holland and Tom Timmermann, in second-day analysis stories that continued the back-patting, quoted Mr. and Mrs. Frank Viverito at length - he's president of the St. Louis Sports Commission and she's senior associate commissioner of the Missouri Valley Conference, among other things.

The Viveritos were two of the seven St. Louisans, all highly paid civic boosters who traveled to Colorado Springs (how many do you think flew first class?) to make the pitch to the NCAA, which sells these events to the highest bidder.

Both Holland and Timmermann were faced with difficult tasks in their stories.

With the 2001 competitors scheduled to be only incoming college frosh next month, it's difficult to talk about athletes, and given the skills of almost all college women basketball players, it's hard to hype the games as examples of superb athleticism.

So they wrote about money, and about how the tournament games will bring money into St. Louis - five million dollars, according to Bob Bedell, who probably got the figure from the guy who used to count the crowds for the VP Fair.

There was not a line to mention how much this weekend will cost the city of St. Louis or its citizens or its corporations or the folks from Civic Regress, who will leer at the basketball players from their seats in the restricted splendor of the luxury boxes.

I don't have anything against sports, or about over-covered sports, but I think that reporters should ask questions like:

How many tickets will be given away to people from the NCAA hierarchy and that of various colleges and universities?

How many hotel rooms will the St. Louis public pay for, and how many parties will we host without receiving a single invitation?

How many party favors will we give to visiting media types and sports administrators?

How about courtesy cars and limousines for conference commissioners, college presidents, athletic directors and coaches? Holland cited MetroLink as a selling point, but you don't expect coaches to ride on it, do you?

How many tickets did our city promise to buy, and how many page one newspaper stories did we guarantee? How many tickets will be available to St. Louisans (some may be interested) and how much will they cost?

How much will this cost St. Louis, and where will the money come from?

The Chamber of Commerce types may become orgasmic at any praise offered by national television commentators, but as Shakespeare said, an event of this type is "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

Somewhere around the dawn of time - I think it was 1973 - I shared broadcast booth space with the late Dan Kelly for about a half-dozen football Cardinal games. Kelly was filling in for Bob Starr, who had taken ill. Starr, a name out of the distant past, was the best radio announcer to call Big Red games, although that may not be saying much when you consider such as J. C. Politz. I had left the Big Red in the summer of 1972 to join the Post, and also did color commentary for Bob Hyland and KMOX Radio.

You know color commentary - RED, green, YELLOW, orange, PURPLE and so on.

Kelly had cut some of his broadcast teeth doing high school football games in rural Canada, and he was, of course, outstanding. He also was a wonderful traveling companion, as was Starr, and we enjoyed good meals and good times together. Kelly told wonderful stories about broadcasting high school games in the wheat fields, and while he hadn't done football games in a long time, he worked diligently to make sure that the quality was there.

And, as everyone knows, he was one of the great hockey announcers, a legend here and around the National Hockey League.

All of which makes it that much tougher for his son, who moves into the major league broadcast booth this year, with a sword far bigger than the one Damocles carried hanging over his head. At the age of 23, Daniel Patrick Kelly (his dad was Patrick Daniel Kelly), is the voice of the Blues, and as if he had nothing else to do, he's also manager of amateur hockey and community programs.

Kelly works for the Blues, the way his non-related namesake, Mizzou announcer John Kelly, works for the university. I think that's a bad turn for sports announcers.

In the first place, it makes them real rooters for the home team, far greater homers than even Mike Shannon, who begs for rallies any time the Cardinals fall behind. More important, it gives the team total control over its broadcaster. John Kelly, for example, will not only be the Tigers' voice in both football and basketball, but he will be director of broadcast operations for the Mizzou athletic department. That means he will oversee the shows of Larry Smith and Norm Stewart, making sure that neither coach nor school is ever embarrassed; make public appearances for the university; represent the university in dealing with the Tiger Network; and do other tasks for the university in the radio-television area.

This stands objectivity, even non-partisanship, on its head.

If Kelly works for the university, how will he be able to criticize its sports policies, its athletes, its tactics without putting his job at risk. Hockey Kelly is in the same situation, and with all the other pressures of a kid with no experience whatsoever taking a major-league broadcast job, he doesn't need the added one of working as a public relations type.

So, thank goodness for Rick Hummel, the Post baseball writer who is one of the best in the nation.

A longtime friend, and a very good - almost great - softball manager, Hummel was interviewed by Buck before a Cardinal game recently, and stunned Buck when he said he really didn't care who won when the Cardinals played.

"All I want is a good game," he said, "one that will make a good story."

For years, young sportswriters and broadcasters were told not to be cheerleaders, not to be rooters. Chicago writer Jerome Holtzman even wrote a memoir, "No Cheering in the Press Box." This attitude of chilly professionalism is the only way to guarantee stories that are truthful, handed out praise for good work and swing the axe of criticism when necessary, letting the chips fall where they may, and I wish there were more Hummels, in all departments of sports journalism.

Joe Pollack is a former St. Louis Post-Dispatch columnist.