Price Is Right, Only If Leonard-Hagler Is a Quality Show

If you’re asking television viewers to fork over $35 or $40 to watch a fight, as are Choice Channel and Prime Ticket for the pay-per-view telecast of Monday night’s Marvelous Marvin Hagler-Sugar Ray Leonard fight, you’d better deliver a good show.

Taking on the technical responsibility is Ross Greenburg, the producer of the telecast that will be shown throughout much of Southern California on cable television, and also at a number of closed-circuit locations.

“We’re treating this as the Super Bowl of boxing,” said Greenburg, who normally produces HBO’s excellent boxing telecasts. “We’ll have 12 cameras there, which is the equivalent to 21 or 22 for football.”

By comparison, HBO used 8 cameras to cover the recent heavyweight bout between Mike Tyson and James (Bonecrusher) Smith.

For Hagler-Leonard, five of the cameras will be isolated for instant replays, and one of those is the super slo-mo camera ABC introduced during the Olympics.

“It’s the first time it’s been used for boxing,” Greenburg said.

The announcers will be Tim Ryan and Gil Clancy of CBS. Channel 2’s Jim Hill will serve as the host.

The undercard will start at 6 p.m., with the main event scheduled for about 8:15 p.m. The preliminary fights are James Kinchen vs. Juan Roldan in a 10-rounder, and Duane Thomas vs. Lupe Aguino in a 12-rounder.

Add fight: Rick Kulis, president of Choice Channel, said that pay-per-view sales have already reached close to 60,000 homes.

“We expect a lot of people will wait until the day of the fight to order it,” Kulis said.

However, Kulis warned that those people may be frustrated in attempts to reach their cable company. “Although most companies have added phone operators to handle calls, there still figures to be a last-minute crunch,” he said.

Cable companies offering the fight are located in 43 communities in Los Angeles County, 14 in Orange County, 5 in Riverside Country, 4 in San Bernardino County, 4 in San Diego Country and 5 in Santa Barbara and Ventura counties. In all, those cable companies serve 779,000 homes, about one-eighth of the market.

The city of Los Angeles, which remains unwired for cable, is among the areas where the fight isn’t available.

Very few areas outside Southern California will get the fight on pay-per-view television. Most of the nation’s fight fans must rely on closed-circuit showings.

Southern California closed-circuit locations include the Universal Amphitheater, the Beverly Theaters in Beverly Hills and Redondo Beach, the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, the Long Beach Convention Center, the Anaheim Convention Center and the Country Club in Reseda.

The fight is not being sold to sports bars in areas where there is a closed-circuit showing.

Recommended viewing: If, like most sports fans, you enjoy upsets, you won’t want to miss HBO’s “Greatest Sports Upsets” show. The first airing is Sunday at 9:30 p.m.

The show, with host Tim McCarver, takes a look at 11 major upsets. There are obvious ones--the United States’ hockey victory over the Soviet Union in 1980, the New York Jets’ win over the Baltimore Colts in the 1969 Super Bowl and the New York Mets winning the 1969 World Series.

And there are others not so readily recalled--Columbia, an 18-point underdog, defeating Stanford in the 1934 Rose Bowl; Ethiopia’s barefoot Abebe Bikila winning the 1960 Olympic marathon and smashing the world record by eight minutes, and the Philadelphia Athletics beating the Boston Braves in the 1914 World Series.

“I think we have a good mixture,” said HBO’s Greenburg, the writer and producer of the show.

Greenburg said the idea for the show occurred while he was walking down a New York sidewalk one day. “I wrote down in a memo what I wanted to do,” he said.

The result is a fascinating, thoroughly enjoyable show.

Breaking tradition: Tennis purists may not like it, but a new high-stakes format, somewhat similar to golf’s Skins Game, will be tried during an unusual women’s doubles match on ABC Sunday at 1 p.m.

Billie Jean King and Martina Navratilova will be pitted against Chris Evert Lloyd and Pam Shriver at Norfolk, Va., in what’s being called the “Ocean Spray Challenge of the Champions.”

Bonus money will be awarded every time a team breaks serve in the three-set match. If a team holds its serve, the money will be carried over to the next game. The pot will continue to build until one team finally breaks serve.

Also, each game will be worth $2,500 in the first set, $5,000 in the second and $7,500 in the third. On top of that, teams will get $10,000 for each set they win. A total of $225,000 is at stake.

Proceeds go to the Women’s Sports Foundation’s “Aspire Higher” campaign.

“We think the format should be very exciting,” said Deborah Anderson, executive director of the Women’s Sports Foundation. “We know ratings for tennis have been down, so we thought we’d try something different.”

Cliff Drysdale, ABC’s new tennis commentator, calls it “a great breakthrough for the sport.”

TV-Radio Notes

ABC is offering an attractive horse racing doubleheader on “Wide World of Sports” Saturday--the Florida Derby and the Santa Anita Derby. Because of ABC’s coverage, post time at Santa Anita Saturday will be 12:10 p.m. and the Derby will be the fifth race, with a post time of 2:43 p.m. The races will be televised live in the East but delayed in the West. Channel 7 will show “Wide World” at 4:30 p.m., a delay of three hours, and San Diego’s Channel 10 will show it at 3:30 p.m. Snow Chief trainer Mel Stute will work with Al Michaels on the Santa Anita Derby coverage, and Santa Anita’s Trevor Denman will call the race. . . A reminder: Sunday’s Dodger-Angel Freeway Series game at Dodger Stadium is being offered free by Dodgervision to all subscribers of cable companies that carry the service. Also, next Friday’s home game against San Francisco at 7 p.m. will be televised by Channel 11, and NBC will televise the Dodgers-Giants game the following day. . . . Channel 11’s pregame show at 6:30 p.m. next Friday will have Peter O’Malley and Vin Scully recalling Dodger Stadium history. . . . Channel 11’s new half-hour sports wrap-up show, with newcomer Rick Garcia, will make its debut Sunday night at 10:30.

According to Rudy Martzke of USA Today, ABC is close to hiring Dan Dierdorf away from CBS. Dierdorf would become a third member of the “Monday Night Football” announcing team. Another source said the deal is done, but Neal Pilson, president of CBS Sports, said Dierdorf is still under contract to CBS. Pilson said a decision probably will be made next week on whether to let Dierdorf out of his contract. . . . “Countdown to the Showdown,” a GGP Sports production taped in Las Vegas that previews the Marvin Hagler-Ray Leonard fight, will be televised by Channel 2 Sunday at 3 p.m. Jim Hill and Gil Clancy are the hosts of the nationally syndicated show. Jimmy (the Greek) Snyder and Thomas Hearns will also appear on the one-hour show. . . . Donald Curry fights Carlos Santos at Caesars Palace Saturday, and CBS will televise it on its “Sports Saturday” show, which runs from 3 to 5 p.m.

Prime Ticket will carry all of the Kings’ playoff games live, beginning next Wednesday. . . . Mel Allen is the host of “Baseball 1987: A Look Ahead,” a special to be televised by Channel 4 Saturday at 3 p.m. . . . Allen’s “This Week in Baseball” will make its season debut Sunday at 8 a.m. on Channel 4. . . . Bob Trumpy’s “Sports Pros and Cons” will make its debut on Channel 4 Saturday at 4 p.m. . . . ESPN Top Rank boxing celebrates its seventh anniversary tonight at 6 with a card headlined by cruiserweights Bert Cooper and Boone Pultz at Las Vegas. After working the fights, ESPN boxing commentator Al Bernstein will make his Las Vegas singing debut at Caesars Palace’s Olympic Lounge.

Sunday’s Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach will be televised on a one-week tape delay by NBC. The April 12 telecast will mark the NBC debut of commentator Jackie Stewart, who will work the race with Paul Page. About the Long Beach race, Stewart said: “It’s a good opening event. It’s a track where the driver can exercise superior skill to overcome a car’s shortcomings.” . . . The American Motorcyclist Assn. Grand National Championship at Ascot Park April 11 will be televised on “Wide World of Sports” that day, live in the East and delayed in the West. Because of television, the main event has been rescheduled for 2:40 p.m., with the Ascot half-mile set for noon.