DATE: Thursday, July 3, 1997                TAG: 9707030832

SECTION: SPORTS                  PAGE: C1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: TOM ROBINSON

                                            LENGTH:   84 lines

NETWORK IS NIRVANA FOR NOSTALGIA NUTS

See if this rings a bell. Channel-surfing at night, between pitches or during commercials, you click over to the Classic Sports Network for a second, just to see what's on - and you completely lose your place.

Suddenly, you are gripped by black-and-white film of Jackie Robinson slashing, Muhammad Ali floating or Wilt Chamberlain dunking, and your time escapes on the wings of decades-old performances. Flights of athletic wonder that, more than anything, illustrate it's not who won the game - because in many cases you already know - but how the game was played.

Brian Bedol would be proud. Bedol, in fact, is proud, up there in his Manhattan office, an enterprising CEO watching over his popular brainchild that's more than two years old now.

``Fans have told me, `Wow, I never knew how much I needed this channel until I started watching it,' '' Bedol says.

Bedol's cable baby has lifted countless legends of sport from the confines of oral history, shining new, welcome light upon the finest athletes and sports moments the country has known.

Too, it has raised the same question in the minds of many of its devotees, namely, ``Why didn't I think of that?''

Actually, the idea came to Bedol, 39, not in a dream but - what else? - during an idle channel-surfing moment about five years ago.

In the wake of successful revivalist networks like Nickelodeon and American Movie Classics, it hit Bedol, then a Time-Warner executive and cable TV veteran, that an outlet for vintage sports was a natural. Not just snippets of film but whole performances, flavored with updated facts and interviews to lend perspective.

The critical part was that Bedol had the know-how to breathe life into his creation, a rare independent cable operation in a sea of corporate battleships.

And soon, in the presence of his business partner Steve Greenberg, baseball's former deputy commissioner under Fay Vincent, the network had the money and film-library contacts to launch in May of 1995.

In the beginning, seven cable systems were signed up, the largest being a 25,000-subscriber deal in Ada, Okla. Today, Classic Sports is up to about 500 systems and 10 million subscribers, about 40 million shy of his target, Bedol says. Included are 300,000 locally on Cox Cable, which picked up the network last December.

``I'll bet not a week goes by that I don't have somebody tell me how hooked they are on it,'' Cox marketing manager Larry Michel says.

What's not to love? Basically, Classic Sports has the broadcast rights - industry experts have estimated the network spent about $50 million to launch - to practically every sports event ever filmed.

``Chances are if it was played and filmed, or is on tape, we have it,'' Bedol says. ``The first step was to convince rights-holders (mostly sports leagues) that this was a legitimate way to showcase their history. Most of them had licensed their footage for 30 seconds here, 60 seconds there. No one had ever approached them about licensing in bulk.

``It doesn't matter how much we pay for library rights; when you look at the amount of money leagues get for live rights, we're never going to be more than a puddle. It wasn't a matter of going, `Here, we'll write you a check.' It was really a matter of convincing them of the strategic merit of what we were doing, then writing them a check.''

Until the day a mega-corporation inevitably buys Classic Sports, Bedol says the network - whose studio breaks and in-house commercials have an unpolished, almost local-access, charm to them - will continue to develop original programming, such as an all-star baseball game special due next week, to complement its archives.

Oh, and get this. Classic Sports takes requests. You say it, they just might play it.

``We love requests,'' Bedol says. ``I'd say that a good 10 percent of what we show comes from requests we get'' through the mail or over the Internet.

Nothing is for everybody. But for every hokey ``Home Run Derby'' and ``Sports Challenge'' quiz show it drags out, Classic Sports mixes in true gems like Borg-McEnroe, Wimbledon '80, Trevino-Nicklaus, U.S. Open '71, or Ali-Frazier, Manila, '75, one of its 18,000 fight films.

The greatness of Classic Sports is that it ensures the best of sports, and its performers, and even some of the worst, will never be lost to time. The better for us to lose ourselves in their spell. ILLUSTRATION: Graphic

THE NETWORK

ITS CREATOR

THE PROGRAMS

[For complete graphic, please see microfilm]

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