"The Bronx Is Burning" premieres tonight

Oh, please, please, please, Dear God, don't let this thing suck.

In the pantheon of my sports-viewing life, four teams have stood out for me as the epitome of success, class, effort and teamwork: Larry Bird's Celtics, the Brady/Belichek Patriots, Pete Carroll and Matt Leinart's Trojans, and Joe Torre's Yankees, circa 1996-2001.

(Jake Plummer's ASU Sun Devils, by missing out on the prize by 19 seconds, are barely nosed off my personal Mount Rushmore. And the 1972 Boston Bruins, my first encounter with a champion always seemed a minor disappointment; this team, not Montreal, should have been to the seventies what the Islanders, and later the Oilers, were to the 1980s.)

The 1976-78 were, by any definition, a successful team: three pennants in a row, two World Series in a row--by all accounts, quite an impressive run against a field top-heavy with 90-plus-win teams: Los Angeles, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Milwaukee, Kansas City, and--most fatefully--the Boston Red Sox, the only team in Divisional Play history to win 198 games in consecutive seasons ('77 and '78) and have nothing to show for it.

However: what made the Yankees so compelling was not just their superb play on the field, but the ongoing off-the-field drama that existed, so openly and so luridly, day after day. What was clear, just by reading the Phoenix Gazette and Sports Illustrated, was a four-part melodrama featuring Thurman Munson, Billy Martin, Reggie Jackson and George Steinbrenner. What became clear, as the years passed, was that, in Roger Angell's account in the New Yorker, never a more joyless clubhouse existed. Whole factions of the teams despised other factions; Munson, Graig Nettles, Sparky Lyle and Lou Piniella barely bothered to hide their hostility toward Jackson; Jackson talked to third-string catcher Fran Healy and almost no one else; young Willie Randolph withdrew so much he earned the nickname "Corporal Moody" from Nettles; Mickey Rivers was forever piling up gambling debts and begging for advances on his salary; and Catfish Hunter, Chris Chambliss, Roy White, Ron Guidry did their best to stand clear of the whole mess.

Heading the team was bombastic George Steinbrenner--ranting to reporters during games, phoning the dugout to demands pitching changes--and manager Billy Martin, whose brilliance as a game tactician and judgment of talent was done in by his vast insecurity and his drinking.

The only really joyful part of the Yankees was between the lines--when, as has been repeated a thousand times, "they took their fight out of the clubhouse and onto the field."

In a proper world, the mini-series that starts tonight would capture at least some of that.

Maybe. But maybe not.