What if they gave an Olympics and nobody watched?

The Olympics are looming -- as NBC won't stop reminding us -- but honestly, I can't work up much enthusiasm. And I remember when the Olympics actually mattered to a non-Olympic sports fan such as myself. Granted, I'm still a young man, I suppose, but it wasn't that long ago when Olympic coverage was, in fact, great television.

I watched the so-called Miracle on Ice at my grandparents house - aired tape-delayed, of course, because those American college kids didn't stand a chance against the Russkies, so ABC decided against showing a live hockey game. No matter; Al Michaels screaming, "Do you believe in miracles? YES!" probably resonates stronger now than it did then.

I remember the 1984 Summer Olympics; athletic excellence gone Hollywood, with all the flash and glitz and star-wattage of a dozen blockbuster movies. With the Eastern Bloc deciding to stay behind the Iron Curtain, there was no Red Menace to topple, so the American flag hung high at the end of event after event, and the Star Spangled Banner seemed to play non-stop -- it was practically a sixteen-day long ad for the United States.

Heck, I remember when ABC didn't just air the games; that network was the Olympics. They would broadcast nothing else for more than two weeks. No game shows, no soaps, no primetime series. Nothing but "the human drama of athletic competition," as the steadier-than-steady Jim McKay used to intone. Plus the entire on-air crew was stuck in those matching blazers with that patch the network designed, one that managed to marry their rounded-letter logo into the Olympic rings themselves. And of course, ABC introduced those shamelessly sentimental Up Close and Personal athlete profiles that could simultaneously break your heart and lift your spirit. The televised Olympics were something that people actually stopped to watch back in the days of three networks and precious few cable options. The other networks would take a couple weeks off, lapse into reruns and movies, and just stay out of the way.

The Olympics have been diluted since the growth of cable's power on the dial. Remember NBC's Triplecast? No? For the uninitiated, it was the network's pay-per-view experiment: if you had access and wanted to pay for it, you could see every event, live and direct. Only the major events would be seen on free TV, and most of them would have to be on tape because, since the Olympics were taking place in Seoul, South Korea, most medal events were to be held in the middle of the night in the U.S.

The Triplecast flopped with buyers, and rather loudly. People were used to getting their coverage for free, and weren't about to pay a nickel for it. Plus, nightly local sportscasts all across the country - perhaps to spite an NBC footage embargo -- would announce the results in the hours before the national network's coverage could start, effectively spoiling the night's programming for the broadcaster. The marketing concept's failure became a cornerstone of Johnny Carson's monologue for weeks after.

Now we'll get the Olympics on every channel NBC/Universal owns. CNBC, MSNBC, USA, Bravo, even the Spanish-language Telemundo -- they will all carry, at some point during the Beijing Olympics, several hours of programming a day, all live, or at least "plausibly" so. (No word on whether or not we'll see the sale of Olympic-related knick-knacks on ShopNBC, or live coverage of cloud formations on The Weather Channel, both also corporate-owned cable channels, but nothing's out of the realm of possibility.) Even ESPN, Disney's global sports network-slash-cash machine -- as part of the deal that allowed NBC to hire Al Michaels away from them (and ABC!) -- has exclusive access to Olympic footage for their SportsCenter franchise.

(The Internet's involved in the media saturation as well. YouTube will offer highlights and more to 77 territories worldwide, albeit not in North America, where NBC's website will stream 2,200 hours of live coverage. Indeed, more people worldwide will have access to more Olympic coverage this time through than ever before.)

Is it too much? Maybe that's the problem -- the sheer volume of sport at my fingertips has perhaps cooled my interest. Every second of every event is available at my fingertips, and if I don't see something I like, I can just flip the dial until I do. Problem is, maybe I'll just flip over to something that isn't the Olympics, and won't come back, which seems more likely than ever.

Besides, I kind of preferred the old way of covering the Olympics, when exactly one channel carried the events, and there was not a whit of supplemental coverage. There was no endless cavalcade of sport in front of me, but instead a representative sample, with smart, decisive programmers culling the day's action for the most interesting, most exciting stories.

And -- perhaps best of all -- there was no superfluous noise from the graphics department. (Folks, there's no need to give me a loud "whoosh" when the titles fly across the screen, no matter how cool the effect might seem to the techies in the truck.)

I suppose there's a chance I could get into the Olympics again this time around. There are some interesting stories brewing: name athletes battling drug allegations, young talent outshining better-known veterans, the host nation reaching a crossroads in its relationship to the world-at-large.

All of these could make for riveting television.

But I'm going to see what else is on first.