Chicago ? The pressure was intense, the action heated, the fans raucous at a high school state championship basketball game recently in Lakeland. And then, suddenly, it all came to a skidding, screeching stop.

The game had to be halted for a TV timeout  a TV timeout even though the game wasn’t actually on TV. At least it wasn’t on live TV. This was a TV timeout for a game that would be shown on tape delay several days later, probably in some lonesome time slot in the middle of the night.

You hear it all the time: how the nation’s youth too often emulate college and pro athletes. Now, unfortunately, our youth sports organizers are starting to copy the big boys, too. Which is to say, they are selling their souls for the almighty TV dollar.

Last summer during the Apopka Little Leaguers’ magical march to the Little League World Series, there was a Southeast Regional game in St. Petersburg. I still recall a Little League official banning the press from the press box that day because, as she smirked haughtily, “ESPN needs the whole press box. They are paying us, and that means this is ESPN’s show.”

As we know now, that LLWS turned into one of the most fraudulent in history. Is there any question that Little League’s decision to prostitute itself for TV exposure contributed to the New York team trying to pass off 37-year-old insurance salesman Danny Almonte as a 12-year-old boy?

I’m no dummy. I realize this is a futile argument. I know that the reason we have 11 p.m. tipoffs for college basketball games and World Series games that start after the kids’ bedtime is because TV pays the bills.

Why do you think it is that the NFL is pushing a proposal that would allow ABC’s Monday Night Football to cherry-pick marquee late-season Sunday afternoon games and move them to prime time Monday night? If the networks give their approval, ABC would be allowed to move the games with just a few weeks’ notice.

Who cares about the actual ticket buyers who’ve made plans to attend these games for months? Who cares if fans have cleared their entire Sunday to attend a 1 p.m. game and then find out thatÂoh, by the wayÂthe game has been switched to Monday at 9 p.m.? What does it matter if you inconvenience thousands of fans when you have a chance to bump up your Nielsens by a percentage point or two?

Remember the old quote by FSU Coach Bobby Bowden when asked about college football’s shameless kowtowing to network TV executives? “When they ask me to kick off at 2 o’clock,” Bowden said, “I ask them, ‘a.m. or p.m.?’ “

This is why the Masters remains the best sporting event going. Because the stodgy, stubborn old fogies at Augusta National are so stuck in the past, they actually remember what life was like before the invention of TV.

Several years ago when CBS tried to get tournament officials to change the starting time to accommodate TV, Clifford Roberts, the late iron-fisted chairman of Augusta National, calmly but forcefully uttered these famous words:

“Gentlemen, we’ll inform you when our tee times are, and you’re more than welcome to have your cameras there.”

Amen for the Masters. It is the only sporting venue left where the actual patrons who attend the event are given more consideration than the TV networks televising it.