GOOD SPORTS: HBO goes for gold

Sports are a matter of taste. I'm a hockey fan. You might be a basketball fan. Some folks like the serenity of golf. Others go for cagefighting thrills. But the more that TV channels make coverage deals with various leagues and promoters, the less they take a hard look at what's actually happening behind the scenes anywhere. Sports is yet another genre being overtaken by celebrity gloss and kid-gloves treatment.

Enter HBO Sports. The pay cabler has been in the game for awhile now, going great guns for boxing and Inside the NFL (until recently letting that show slip over to Showtime). They've long supported the topical monthly news magazine Real Sports With Bryant Gumbel. (Its next installment premieres Tuesday, June 23 at 10 p.m. ET.) And they continue to scatter sports documentary premieres throughout the year.

Now that library of sports docs gets a weekly summer showcase, Mondays at 7 p.m. ET on HBO, starting with June 8's :03 From Gold. It's a strong look back at the notorious 1972 Olympics men's basketball final, when suspicious control of the game clock allowed the Soviet Union to down the heavily favored United States team [photo above], stirring controversy that rages to this day. Upcoming sports doc encores include June 15's Back Nine at Cherry Hills: Legends from the 1960 U.S. Open (Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus, Ben Hogan); June 22's Brooklyn Dodgers: The Ghosts of Flatbush (evoking what the team meant to the New York City borough it would eventually abandon), and June 29's Battle for Tobacco Road: Duke vs. Carolina (chronicling the college basketball rivalry.)

(What, no hockey?)

HBO also adds a new weekly sports series -- Joe Buck Live (starting Monday, June 15 at 9 p.m. ET, HBO), a live hour mixing interviews, topical commentary and more from the second-generation sportscaster (Jack Buck's son) who calls major NFL and MLB games.

And HBO Sports will keep debuting new documentaries. July 15's The Kid: The Life and Death of Ted Williams chronicles not only the Boston Red Sox icon's on-field career and hard-knock personal life, but also the strange circumstances around his death -- when his body was famously preserved (for future use?) in a cryonics lab.