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Today's Daily Hotties
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Sports Junkies WASHINGTON TIMES -- Dick Heller - Monday, March 25 Four longtime buddies talking up a storm on uninhibited cable-access show These four guys had been talking sports since they were kids, see, and they thought it would be cool to do it on TV. So they got this show on a cable-access station -- sort of like Wayne and Garth -- and now they're knocking 'em dead all across Bowie. It wasn't quite that simple, but almost. And guess what? Their show, "The Sports Junkies," is good -- very good, in fact. Original programs and reruns are show on Bowie Community Television on Tuesdays at 4 p.m., Wednesdays at 6:30 p.m. and Fridays at 9 p.m. The four "Junkies," all twenty-somethings, are John-Paul Flaim, Eric Bickel, Jason Bishop and John Auville. Flaim and Bickel attended Maryland and now are in graduate school. Bishop (Salisbury State) and Auville (Towson State) work for a living. When they get together to yak about fun and games these days, it's at a TV studio in Bowie City Hall rather than at home or a neighborhood saloon. They don't get paid, but so what? "The idea of doing it was suggested last August by Alicia Chin, my fiancée’s mother," Bickel says. "We were watching a pretty bad sports show on Bowie cable, and she said, 'This is a joke -- you guys can do better.'" Flaim, known to his millions of fans as J.P., picks up the story: "All we did was go to City Hall and tell them we wanted to try a show. There was no audition or anything. We had one session of training, mostly on how to use the remote cameras, and two weeks later we were on the air." So far the Junkies have done 19 shows, with and without guests, and a few taped remotes. Their discussions are intelligent, lively and sometimes argumentative. Most important, they're fun. "I don't think we could have done this well if three of us hadn't grown up in the same neighborhood and we hadn't all been friends for a long time," Flaim says. "Before the show started, we were thinking, 'How in the world can we talk for a half-hour?' So we took a camcorder over to Eric's house to practice, and after 30 seconds it was just like any conversation we'd had." Friends and family members run the cameras and perform other chores on the set, with some help from Maryland Cable TV technicians Sean Benedict and Scot Randol. Flaim usually acts as unofficial moderator, introducing topics and taking the show into and out of station breaks. Two regular features are "Give it Up," and "Under my Skin," in which the "Junkies" offer praise and gripes, respectively. "When we started, we scripted a lot more of the show," Flaim says, "but that didn't come off as real natural, so now we just talk." Flaim, Bishop and Bickel are what Eric calls "very opinionated," while Auville "has a little quieter personality -- he provides a good blend with the rest of us." And all four are capable of tossing out zingers. On one recent show, the "Junkies" solemnly thanked the Portland Trailblazers for "these free ties we're all wearing -- they a class NBA organization." On another, they tossed a football, as well as arguments, back and forth. Loose and looser is the theme here. Former Bullets general manager Bob Ferry, guesting on one show, gagged it up right along with the principals. When asked if he kept up with the Bullets, Ferry replied deadpan, "Hardly." What should the injury-prone Bullets do during the offseason? "Go to [hospital] wards." How hard was it to get Bullets owner Abe Pollin to shell out for rookies and free agents? "It was like asking your father for money." Sometimes, of course, the Junkies get a little overenthusiastic. Describing the moves of freshman Maryland basketball player Laron Profit, Bickel called them "Jordan-like," which seems a bit of a reach. But Eric redeemed himself with a punchy commentary on the parking-ticket problems of Terps point guard Duane Simpkins. "Look, I'm a Maryland grad, but what Duane did was dead wrong. Parking in handicapped spaces is wrong. Parking wherever you want is wrong ... And the NCAA was wrong in telling everybody that it was $8,000 [the amount of Simpkins' fines]. That should have been a private matter among Duane, the university and the NCAA." So it goes with the "Junkies," sports talk with intelligence. They deserve a wider audience than a relative handful of channel surfers in Bowie. The trick is, how do they get one? "What we plan to do is go around to other cable systems with our tapes and say, 'Here's what we can offer you'," Flaim says. "Our goal is to keep improving, to gain legitimacy and someday maybe to get a show on HTS." Well, why not. Eventually, these guys could turn all of us into "Sports Junkies." In the meantime, they're doing just fine.
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