The Week In Tv Sports

DON'T MISS

Monday 4/5
Diamondbacks at Dodgers
ESPN 4 PM
According to this month's Harper's Index, the Pentagon will spend more than $4 billion this year on its Star Wars program, which is only a few hundred million less than the rest of us have spent on licensed Star Wars merchandise since 1977. In contrast, Kevin Brown (right) and Randy Johnson, the new weapons—and toys—acquired by Los Angeles and Arizona, respectively, will cost a mere $28 million in '99. As the scheduled starters in this Opening Day matchup, Johnson and Brown will deploy more of the heat-seeping missiles that last season accounted for 586 strikeouts. At 10:30 p.m. on ESPN, the Yankees plan to launch their own secondhand Rocket ( Roger Clemens), who recently took off from Toronto.

HIGHLIGHTS

Saturday 4/3
Golf: Links in Time
THE HISTORY CHANNEL 8 PM
If you're one of those dyed-in-the-shell golf nuts who have a treasured videotape in your archives of the opening round of the 1993 Greater Fort Linda Open, you'll want to program your VCR for thus extravaganza, which is narrated by the cue card-challenged Ken Venturi and does not—as the first word of the title assures us—chronicle the history of sausage making. The Scots cited expounded lyrically on the game; the daguerreotypes displayed are exquisite. This is an ideal warmup for the Masters coverage, which begins on USA on April 8 at 4 p.m.

Sunday 4/4
Family Circle Magazine Cup Final
FOX 1 PM
A couple has run an ad in Ivy League student newspapers offering $50,000 for the egg of a lofty (5'10" or taller), athletic female with no family history of serious illness and with SAT scores of at least 1,400. Just two of the top 10 seeds (unfortunate word, that) in this million-dollar Hilton Head tennis tournament meet the height requirement—defending champ Amanda Coetzer is a mere 5'2"—and the father of 5'10�" Monica Seles recently died of cancer. Which leaves 6'2�" Lindsay Davenport, the 1998 U.S. Open champion. Odds are she'll be playing at center court and not prepping at a Princeton Review center.

Tuesday 4/6
Iditarod Trail Dog Sled Race Highlights
USA 9 PM
There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the mashers who race for glory;
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
And they're more apt than not to be gory.
The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
But the queerest they ever did see
Was the night on the drifts of the Yukon
When a sled dog found a film crew to puke on.

W.C. Fields: Straight Up
AMC 10 PM
W.C. Fields was the Carl Hubbell of screwball comedy. In Million Dollar Legs—a track and field farce set at the 1932 Olympics in Los Angeles—he played the weightlifter president of Klopstokia, where every citizen has outstanding athletic abilities. This tribute doesn't have Legs, but it does feature a classic billiards bit from Six of a Kind (as Sheriff "Honest John" Hoxley, Fields turns his pool cue into a slap stick) and tee-shot surrealism from the '30 short, The Golf Specialist in which Fields, as club pro J. Effingham Bell-weather, snaps at his caddie, "Don't stand there! Don't you know I'll smite you in the sconce with this truncheon?"

ALI TIMES EASTERN. SCHEDULES ARE SUBJECT TO CHANGE. SOURCE: NIELSEN SPORTS MARKETING SERVICE