TV sports star faces sex case

The latest wave of American sexual prurience is threatening the reputations and careers of two of the country's longest-serving and best-known sports commentators.

Marv Albert, 53, who presents professional basketball for NBC and ice hockey for a local television station, was charged yesterday in Arlington, Virginia, with forcible sodomy and assault and battery on the basis of claims by a woman who herself faces a charge for threatening to kill a former boyfriend.

Mr Albert, who has denied all the charges, applied successfully for bail and a jury trial which is scheduled for on 22 September.

Meanwhile in New York, Frank Gifford, presenter of ABC television's Monday night American football programme for more than 20 years, has had video stills of a compromising hotel-room encounter splashed all over the Globe, a supermarket tabloid. Representatives of Mr Gifford, 66, whose 11-year marriage to television talk-show host, Kathie Lee Gifford, has been marketed as a model of family values, say that he is the victim of entrapment.