New York: This year’s Sports EmmyAwards will be televised for the first time in twelve years. “This is somethingthat is long over-due that finally reached critical mass to come together,” David Beld, director ofthe Sports Emmy Awards said. “I’ve alwaysthought that a televised ceremony was a good idea but we were never able to put the right package together.”

At the close of last year’s award show therewas some discussion about the possibilities ofbringing the event to television. “The SportsEmmys have only attracted a television partner once and that experience, long ago, was a fairlystraightforward telecast of the awards ceremony,” NTA President Peter Price said. “As someone who was circulation director of Sports Illustrated and the publisher of the National Sports Daily it was my belief that a quality Sport Emmy show was overdue.”

The idea and preliminary discussions inspired Price to organize a meeting with Beld, Steve Solomon, the new vice chair for sports of the Sports Emmys to Air on Fox by STEVE ROGERS National Awards Committee and a senior executive at one of the networks. “They endorsed my initiative to seek out a telecast partner for the Sports Emmys,” Price said. Price then arranged a meeting in Los Angeles with David Hill, president of Fox Sports Net and George Greenberg, executive vice president, and also the producer of The Best Damn Sports Show, Period.

“We agreed on the spot that a Sports Emmy telecast could and should be a highly charged event which Fox will, in fact, produce during our Sports Emmys,”Price said. The event will be held on April 21st at the Marriot Marquis in New York and portions of the awards show will appear the following Sunday, April 27th, on The Best Damn Sports Show, Period, a Fox Sports Net program that mixes daily sports news with distinctive points of view.

“The reason the Sports Emmys have never been ripe for broadcast before now,” David Beld theorized, “is because listening to twenty-five people walk up to a podium and make acceptance speeches doesn’t make for great television. But Fox has something different in mind. They will extract the best moments of the live show and weave them together with interviews with sports personalities and clips from the winning broadcasts to create a compelling telecast.”