CBS comes not to bury the late Jim Valvano, but to praise him.
A day after the latest NCAA basketball champions were crowned, the network that aired the game flashes back to one of the more memorable moments in the tournament's history - North Carolina State's improbable victory over heavily favored Houston in the 1983 finals. Who can forget the last-second victory, or the image of an overjoyed Valvano, the N.C. State coach, bounding onto the court looking for someone to hug?It's a moment that's relived before the first commercial break of tonight's made-for-TV movie "Never Give Up: The Jimmy V Story" (8 p.m., Ch. 2).
Unfortunately for Valvano, the story didn't end there. Six years later, he was ousted in the midst of a huge scandal involving grade tampering and minor details like the fact that players were out committing felonies.
But, if we are to believe "Never Give Up," poor little Jimmy V was just a victim in all of this. And this inability to accept responsibility lingers even three years after Valvano died of cancer.
The TV movie has plenty of problems, including a dozen jumps in time period, some truly awful editing of footage of the fictional Valvano (Anthony LaPaglia) and his fictional team with actual videotape of the Wolfpack winning the title, and a tendency toward TV cliches.
And the movie is decidedly vague about the scandal, failing to really outline what it was that got Valvano fired.
But its greatest failing is the perpetuation of America's most fashionable current trend - blaming others and not ourselves when things go wrong.
"Never Give Up" doesn't shy away from making Valvano look like a crummy husband and father. Nor does it hide the fact that his outside business interests distracted him from what should have been his main focus - coaching.
But responsibility for the scandal at N.C. State? Well, it's the fault of the fans' expections. Or the school's administration. Or the press.
Just don't blame Jimmy.
The closest the fictional Jimmy comes to accepting any responsibility is when he admits he made some mistakes. "But I didn't deserve what happened to me," he says without refutation.
Well, gee, he was the man in charge of a program that got out of control. And if he didn't deserve to be punished for it, then who did?
The last third of the movie tries to turn into "Brian's Song" as Valvano's health deteriorates, with a bit of "The Pride of the Yankees" thrown in at the end. And Valvano's death was indeed a tragedy.
But while his life should be a cautionary tale of how priorities can get distorted and those mistakes can get made, putting the blame elsewhere - just as Valvano did before he died - does both the man and history a disservice.
Before N.C. State's title game triumph, the fictional Jimmy tells his team, "No matter what happened to us before, no matter what happens to us afterward, what we do out there tonight on that court will be the defining moment of our lives as players - and as men."
Unfortunately, Valvano's life was defined by two moments - his triumph on the court and his firing in the midst of scandal.
Extolling one while excusing the other is bad movie making.
BEST ADVICE OF THE WEEK: KTVX-Ch. 4 sportscaster Wesley Ruff to viewers who could identify the final four teams in the NIT: "Get a life! And stop watching so much basketball on cable TV."