Easter Egg Hunt

Happy Easter, everyone. How was your Easter egg hunt? Here are the results of mine.

The golden egg goes to all the volunteers who helped make SportsFest Week a success, especially Wolf Mojica who did a terrific job pulling it all together. Call him the Big Bunny for the way he hopped around getting everything done. The Xterra and Tagaman triathlons are a positive addition, now a tradition, to our sports calendar and I hope they are able to return next year as they showcase the best of Saipan: a world-class lagoon, rugged off-road terrain, beautiful scenery and friendly, dedicated people.

A silver egg goes to MCV for double-barreled coverage of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament on channels 41 and 42, which is more than the average viewer gets in the mainland with one CBS feed.

But MCV did drop one egg last Wednesday when it failed to show TNT’s live Celtics/Rockets game. The game was available on the satellite yet was inadvertently thru human oversight not put on the Ch. 42 schedule. As a result, we missed seeing the Celtics snap the Rockets historic 22-game winning streak.

If MCV dropped an egg last week, then Ch. 7 drops an egg every week by failing to show the NBA game of the week live on ABC. The Guam-based station shows the game live for their Guam viewers, but not for Saipan and Tinian. I was hoping to see the Lakers/Rockets last Monday while eating Spam, eggs and rice for breakfast, instead got a washed-out (what’s wrong with their color?), one week delayed Lakers/Spurs game that was ancient history. Why is that, when they could have been showing the live game if they really wanted to because it was available on the bird?

Let me explain for the uninitiated.

KPPI or Ch. 7 is carried by MCV but MCV has no control over their programming. Ch. 7 has the rights for ABC programming which means MCV cannot show ABC sports on Channel 42. But Ch. 7 has an exceedingly small staff on Saipan. If a game comes on at 5:30 in the morning, then usually they don’t bother to put it on because somebody has to get up early to switch to the satellite feed and insert breaks over AFN commercials.

While Ch. 7 made the extra effort to show all ABC college bowl games (thank you), they failed to show many college football games during the regular season that were available. And we are missing a lot of NBA games on ABC. I assume that is because they come on at 3 a.m. and/or 5:30 a.m. and it’s easier for Ch.7 not to show the games live than it is to show them.

The NBA finals are on ABC this year. Fortunately, they are on during primetime in the USA which is 11 a.m. here which is a more convenient time for Ch. 7. Hopefully, we will get them live.

If we don’t get NBA playoff games live, that will be the rotten egg.
[I] (Coldeen is a longtime sports journalist in the CNMI and is the news and sports director of the Flame Tree Network.)[/I]