Our Fritz is on the TV

Sporting News, The, Jan 29, 2001 by John Rawlings

Fritz Quindt is a self-described "product of the Bugs Bunny generation.

"We got cable when I was 5, and that reinforced TV's role as the entertainer, baby sitter and head of household," he says. "Growing up in the land of milk and honey called Nebraska, we took THE SPORTING NEWS because the hometown paper didn't run boxscores. I'd always turn first to Jack Craig's SporTView. Sure, I got teased for that then. But look at me now."

What you will see is Frederick D. Quindt IV. (We're his friends, so we can call him Fritz.) He is the author of Remote Patrol, a column that starts in TSN this week.

With television gaining in importance every day as an industry and as a medium, Quindt will provide a view of the sports world that is perfect for TSN. Television--not a trip to the ballpark or even to the sporting goods store--is the common denominator among sports fans.

"My first taste of the thrill of victory/the agony of defeat was watching the `Heidi game,' and I got hooked on the unpredictability of sports on TV," Fritz says. "This was before they invented the WWF. Now I have four TVs, two DSS receivers, three VCRs, a DVD player, a yen for TiVO and 117, uh, make that 118 remote controls. I try to stay a well-rounded individual by helping at the kids' soccer practice and other altruistic pursuits, but invariably I'm channel surfing to ESPN, Fox and whatever sports are on."

Fritz will cover TV not from a business perspective or even a producer's perspective. He will cover it from your perspective.

Key words for Fritz: authoritative, opinionated, salsa. "My goal is to make the topics relevant in the larger context while being entertaining in the largest context," he says.

In his first column, Fritz delivers nicely. I am confident you'll enjoy his work, whether he discusses how the Super Bowl will be covered this year by CBS (his first topic, page 11) or how the medium and its voices shape opinions about sports. Fritz will tell you how and why, not what, based on 10 years of experience writing about sports on television for the San Diego Union-Tribune.

"What qualifies someone to be a television critic?" he asks. "Ideally, a journalist must recognize, and keep in context, the fact that almost every modem-day fan gets his minimum daily requirement of sports from his TV, and every league has an umbilical cord to the medium. Figuratively. I think the FCC still has a role on the books that you can't write a TV column if your VCR is flashing 12:00, and some editors do insist on a degree in reading TV Guide from Sally Struthers Technical College. But actually, all you need is a pair of eyes and ears. And a TV, which I have."

I would add that Fritz also has a nice way of seeing the games, which he'll pass along to you.

E-mail John Rawlings at jrawlings@sportingnews.com