March Madness Confidential

I’m a sucker for high-concept production pieces in sports. These behind the scenes moments that were captured by the CBS/Turner crews during the tournament are priceless stuff.

At least to me. I was lucky enough to live this live – on a very small scale, and a long time ago – when I was the “Voice of the Gauchos” back in 1991-1994.

Watching players lumber off a bus into an arena is hardly must-see TV. But production pieces like this, help bring the fan down to the granular level of what it’s like being part of a team.

For every 40 minutes of screaming madness inside a bright arena, there’s more than 40 hours of getting ready to play that game. The game itself, is just the tip of the iceberg.

If you ever wanted to see skinny “vintage” Czabe – head full of hair, a gleam in my eye! – then here’s a few videos I dug out of my archives. The “Jerry Pimm Show” was a 30 minute a week show on cable access that was part of a marketing agreement the University had made with Cox Cable.

In addition to the awkward segments talking about the team with the coach on directors chairs, they allowed me to bring in my camcorder footage from road trips. It was truly horrible standard definition, of course, with awful color saturation, sharpness, and everything else.

And yet I remember several of the employees at the Cox Cable offices patiently work with me to edit these pieces for a crummy little 30 minute coaches show that I am sure nobody watched.

We used a very sizeable production suite to do it, with a huge mixing board, multiple monitors, and all of the other “state of the art” video equipment for the time.

It was 1993. I was 25 years old. I was having more nerdy fun than I could ever imagine.

Looking back at these old tapes, it dawned on me that CBS STOLE MY IDEA! Either that, or great creative minds think alike. And I was just 25 years ahead of my time.