The Gophers men’s golf team, led by sophomore Martin LeMesurier’s 36-hole even par score of 144, is tied for sixth place at the 15-team Puerto Rico Golf Classic.
Minnesota has a two-round score of 595, 19 shots behind leader North Carolina State.
Teams will play another 18 holes today. After this tournament, the Gophers are idle until competing in Georgia on March 23-24.
No Wheaties for five athletes
NAGANO, Japan (AP)– Wheaties may be the “breakfast of champions,” but five women on the Olympic champion hockey team, including a future Gopher, won’t get to see their faces on the box.
That’s because five of the gold medalists have college eligibility left, and under NCAA rules they cannot accept commercial sponsorships if they want to continue their college hockey careers.
Fifteen other members of the U.S. women’s hockey team will be on the box, but those excluded by the NCAA rules are Tara Mounsey, Sara DeCosta, A.J. Mleczko, Angela Ruggiero and Jenny Schmidgall.
Schmidgall was the first-ever player to sign a national letter of intent to play for the Minnesota women’s hockey team. She didn’t play for the Gophers this year because of her Olympic commitment, but is expected to play next season.
“It’s a rule, and we were aware of it coming into this. But it’s a bummer. It would be kind of a cool thing,” Mounsey told her hometown newspaper, the Concord Monitor, as she watched 15 of her teammates step on stage for the Wheaties announcement.
Even though the members of the team won’t necessarily make money from being on the Wheaties box, NCAA rules prohibit college athletes from allowing their photos or names to be used for financial gain by someone else.
“It’s hard on these five players,” U.S. coach Ben Smith said. “This truly has been a team in every sense of the word and it’s hard for them not to be with their teammates at this moment. But it gives you a tip on their age and their future.”
General Mills, which sells Wheaties, doesn’t feature amateur athletes often, but the eligibility issue came up when the U.S. women’s gymnastics team was on the Wheaties box after the 1996 summer Olympics, spokesman Greg Zimprich said. Gymnast Kerri Strug, who still had college eligibility, ended up on the box because she turned professional.
“Every time we do a box we have to be aware of eligibility issues,” Zimprich said. “I think we felt it was unfortunate that we couldn’t picture the whole team … but I think the box honored the achievement of the entire team,” he said.
In addition to Schmidgall, Ruggiero, the youngest member of the team and a senior in high school, could get a full college scholarship through hockey, depending on which school she chooses.
Mounsey and DeCosta both have three more years of college, Mounsey at Brown and DeCosta at Providence, while Mleczko has her senior year left at Harvard.
Nagano ratings not good
NEW YORK (AP) — Too much snow, not enough compelling stories and a less than stellar broadcast gave CBS the lowest-rated Winter Olympics in 30 years.
According to the preliminary final numbers released by CBS on Monday, the network got a 16.2/26 share for its prime-time coverage, 42 percent behind the 27.8/42 from Lillehammer and 13 percent off the 18.7/29 from Albertville.
Nagano finished as the lowest-rated Olympics since 1968, when ABC got a 13.5 rating from Grenoble, France. The previous low also came in Japan, when NBC got a 17.2 from Sapporo in 1972.
More importantly, CBS’ rating was 17 percent below the 19.5 that it guaranteed advertisers. The network was forced to run extra spots during the second week of the games, but still may need to provide further “make goods” to appease advertisers, who paid about $450,000 for a 30-second ad.
But in an increasingly fragmented TV landscape, the Olympics did provide a boost for CBS.
The Nagano Games were watched by an estimated 184 million viewers, tying it with Albertville for the third most-watched sports event in U.S. history. The 1996 Summer Games were watched by about 209 million people and the 1994 Winter Games by 204 million.
CBS also won 16 of the 17 nights in the crucial February “sweeps period,” when local ad rates are set. It also provided a boost for local news and David Letterman’s “Late Show,” which beat Jay Leno for the first time since August 1995.
CBS’ rating for the final two nights of coverage dipped to a Nagano-low of 11.9. Saturday night’s coverage of the gold-medal hockey game between Russia and the Czech Republic got a 3.2/10 rating, considerably lower than the 4.9 from the U.S.-Canada game.
The final rating for the late-night show was a 3.0/12. But because CBS had eight hockey games that pushed the show to about 2 a.m., it is difficult to compare to the 5.0/20 from Lillehammer and was on the air until past 2 a.m. on the 6.2/17 from Albertville.
Sports Roundup: Men’s golf team is tied for sixth place at Puerto Rico tournament
Published February 24, 1998
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