‘If you work really, really hard, and you’re kind… Amazing things will happen to you.’ — Conan O’Brien

With grace and dignity, Conan O’Brien left The Tonight Show after just 7 months on the air. Short enough and memorable enough to be re-tweeted, the quote at the top of the post became a trending topic on Twitter. Between speeches like this and his remarkable public statement about not accepting a later time slot, O’Brien won the hearts of many who probably wished they had watched his show more and given him the kind of ratings that could have kept him on the air. Regardless, despite being handed a bitter pill by executives at NBC, Conan either is genuinely that nice or that smart or has really good PR folks giving him advice that he actually follows.

Now, NBC on the other hand, apparently could have used more PR advice or more willingness to listen to any good advice that was given. Facing revolt from affiliates who were losing money hand over fist during their late local newscasts deprived of a good lead-in from the experimental Jay Leno show at 10:00PM, involved in a merger with Comcast, and watching The Tonight Show lose to Late Night with David Letterman, NBC had a crisis on its hands.  Wrap all this up with the new media landscape — advertising rates plummeting, profit margins dwindling and the internet further fracturing the viewership that cable cracked in the 80s — and you can see why NBC panicked. But panic never makes for a clear head or the best method to handle a tricky situation.

What happened to Conan O’Brien has been happening to local newscasters for years, and precipitously so in the last few years as media conglomerates own more and more stations. I have known some fine anchors and reporters who worked hard, did a good job and were loved by audiences. But they may have had too much longevity, too high a salary or were taken for granted by a hastily-convened focus group whose answers apparently represented the feelings of everyone in the market. Some of these fine broadcasters are still working in the biz, while others have left for greener pastures and more sane hours.

Regardless, onward come the Olympics — a few weeks of amazing accomplishments, highly-packaged athlete backstories, plus all the glitter and sequins the ice skaters and ice dancers can fit on a few yards of spandex. (Confession: I love ice skating. It’s probably a side effect of growing up in the iceless South.) I cry at least once during the Olympics. I’m just sentimental that way. But what I don’t know is if America’s heartstrings will be played so adeptly that we will forget the underdog we rooted for in Conan O’Brien, the soundbites from NBC execs who called names during the fracas or how we remembered that this wasn’t the first time Jay Leno found himself in a fight over The Tonight Show.

Does time really heal all wounds? Will watching the Olympics take over late night make you less likely to hold a grudge? Or are you just tired of the whole thing and OVER IT already?

But the judging seems all wacky. Disclaimer: aside from cartwheels, backbends, and the occasional handspring (front only, I was never able to do a back handspring) I know nothing personally about gymnastics. I’m the armchair gymnast (like an armchair quarterback, you know) who relies on the commentators for information. But I have been watching gymnastics since about 1973. It’s like art. I know what I like. I know when there are mistakes even before the commentators say, “Ooooo, slight bobble there. That’s a one-tenth deduction.”

So when a Chinese gymnast went down On. Her. Knees. during NBC’s not quite live gymnastics coverage of the individual vault competition, you’d think she would score less than a U.S. gymnast who had done a perfect vault with a very similar start value. (Start value. See, I could be a color commentator!)

Yeah. No. She actually scored better than the U.S. gymnast (Alicia Sacramone in this case.) who got bumped down to 4th. No medal.

In all fairness, it wasn’t that gymnast who bumped her to fourth. It was 33-year-old Oksana Chusovitina who bumped her to third. Then a Romanian gymnast bumped Oksana to silver.

While I feel bad for Alicia, I’m totally psyched for all the thirty and forty-somethings who are medaling. Can you believe a 33 year old woman just medaled in gymnastics? This is a sport where 19 year old women are considered almost too old, and there are many rumors about the underage Chinese gymnastics team. If they are true, Oksana is almost two decades older than some of her competition. And Oksana’s story — a Ukranian competing for Germany — just melts my Mommy heart.

My husband isn’t as interested in gymnastics as I am. He feels the same way about ice skating because both sports are judged, which is really subjective. Kind of like trying to get hired or evaluated in TV news … but I digress. He’s been totally into the swimming.

He’s even been DVR-ing some of Phelp’s races so he can see just how close the finishes are. I missed the one he won by one one-hundreth of a second, and he played it back for me. And again.

The PR pro in me just ate up all of Michael Phelp’s interviews. Both him and his mom. I know they have been in the spotlight for a while, and they are used to all the media attention. But boy, they handle it like pros. If they got media training — it was really GOOD media training. But I think, deep down, that they have the right personalities for these interviews. That kind of sincerity is really hard to fake. And during the Olympics, fake isn’t fun.