Sport coverage

I am writing in response to the letter National football written by Frances B. Affandy (The Jakarta Post, June 12, 1996).

In his letter, he pleads with The Jakarta Post to provide more and better coverage of the Indonesian Dunhill League. Cool! Go for it. I got no problem with that. (Don't get me wrong though, I am no football fan, be it the English Premier League or the Indonesian League. I mean, take this European Cup deal for example, the first four games were 1-1 or 0-0 draws.)

My objection to Mr. Affandy's letter is not that he calls for more football coverage, but that he says "I am mystified to see often obscure European sporting events and American baseball results reported almost daily while our thrilling local teams go unmentioned."

I don't disagree with questioning The Jakarta Post about their coverage of very obscure sporting events. To put that together with the Post's microscopic coverage of American baseball is an outrage.

The entire space used to report a day's game is a maximum of 6 by 4 centimeters. That's smaller than even the headline appearing on the same page Breaking world records not a big deal to Pankratov, which draws our eyes and attention to the riveting story of a 21-year-old Russian whose claim to fame is the butterfly stroke. What The Jakarta Post fails to realize is that telling you who won the games from day to day is rather meaningless without the boxscores or at least the standings.

To over simplify, baseball follows a 162-game season, which runs from April to October. The point of it all is to see who has the talent and endurance to consistently win over that period of time and ultimately emerge as the champion. Baseball scores and the standings and more football coverage would still take up less space than a Russian's butterfly stroke.

You want even more football, okay. You got a beef about obscure stories, so do I. But, I don't want to hear about space being wasted on the nearly-nonexistent coverage of baseball which is undoubtedly the most interesting sport on the planet.

If Mr. Affandy really wants essential sport coverage, he should tune in to any television channel at 9 p.m. for TVRI's "Dunia Dalam Berita", where he can see the heart-stopping lead report on 500 cc motorcycle racing in Italy, followed by the heart-wrenching report on the hardships faced by North Korean weight lifters, which I assume, must be of ultimate importance to the Indonesian audience and much more interesting than the Dunhill League, The Stanley cup, The European cup, the NBA Finals, the French Open, the PGA Tour, Julio Cesar Chavez, Major League Baseball, or even Russian swimming.

MARSHALL LESESNE

Jakarta