Sunday, July 01, 2001
Sports on TV-Radio
Fox Sports scores with Boomer
By John Fay
The Cincinnati Enquirer
The announcement that Boomer Esiason and Deacon Jones are joining Fox Sports Net's NFL This Morning puts that show over the top. It already was the wackiest pregame show on television. (This is the same show Chris Speilman left last year because it wasn't serious enough.)
Jones, a Hall of Fame defensive tackle, is an NFL version of Charles Barkley — he says whatever is on his mind.
Boomer will be the tame one on this show.
BYE BYE, BILL: Bill Meredith decided that after 20 years, he wanted Saturdays off.
Meredith has given up his weekly talk show on WCIN-AM (1480).
Ken Griffey Sr. and James Hill will take over the 8-10 a.m. Saturday show. Griffey has done shows with Meredith in the past. He calls in when the Reds are on the road.
“I'll miss talking to the local VIPs,” Meredith said. “But, by the time I got home and got a sandwich or something, it was 10:30, 11. If my wife and I wanted to visit our children, who live out of town, we couldn't get on the road 'til noon.”
Meredith, the courtly gentleman of local sports radio, has been on the air locally, mostly with WCIN, for more than 30 years. He started while he was working as an administrator for Cincinnati Public Schools. He worked for WSAI-AM (1530) when it was all-sports, and returned to WCIN when WSAI changed formats.
Meredith isn't ready to give it up completely. He'll continue to do drive-time sports updates on WCIN during the week.
NEW GADGET: ESPN will debut “ESPN K ZONE” on Sunday Night Baseball at 8 p.m. today.
The computer-generated, shaded yellow area will give an accurate boundary of the strike zone. The technology is the latest from Sportvision — the same company that came up with “1st & 10,” the computer-generated yellow line that marks the first-down line in football.
ESPN touts the “K ZONE” as a perspective never seen before. It will be used only for replays during the New York Mets-Atlanta game tonight.
E-mail John Fay at jfay@enquirer.com.
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Fox Sports scores with Boomer
