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Still Real after all these years
Sporting News, The, April 15, 2005 by Tricia Garner
On April 2, 1995, a little show called Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel debuted on HBO. Originally intended to air four times per year, Real Sports eventually expanded to monthly shows. Its honest, revelatory look at the sports world has won the program 13 Sports Emmys.
Real Sports' 10th anniversary episode (April 10, 8 p.m. ET on HBO) revisits the show's most memorable stories and personalities: Lance Butterfield, a high school football star who shot and killed his authoritarian father; Esera Tuaolo, the NFL lineman who came out of the closet; Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf, a former NBA player whose home was defaced with graffiti and later burned down because of his unpopular political beliefs.
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"We came on the air with what we felt was a fresh idea: to look at sports from a news perspective, one that eschewed the softball, sycophantic approach so common in sports television coverage," Gumbel says at the opening of the program.
That much is evident in many of the clips and is the very thing that makes Real Sports unique. In one excerpt, correspondent Armen Keteyian is interviewing Redskins owner Daniel Snyder. "Not to start things off on a bad foot," Keteyian says, "but a lot of people think you're a prick. Why is that?" The look on Snyder's face: priceless.
Even if sound bites such as that make Real Sports appear sensational, it's not. Rather, the show simply asks the questions viewers wish they could ask--or would if they knew enough to ask in the first place. As Keteyian says, "It's Real Sports, and these are real questions."
COPYRIGHT 2005 Sporting News Publishing Co.
COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale Group
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