Toe-ing zone: Emmitt & Mario take their last steps
11/14/06 08:33 PM
By ED BARK
It's all over but the ballot-stuffing. Emmitt Smith and Mario Lopez each fell one point shy of perfect Tuesday night, matching 89 scores on the high-voltage Dancing with the Stars performance finale.
That leaves Wednesday night's verdict up to viewers, with an audience in excess of 25 million expected to see whether the brawny lad or the dimpled Gumby dance off with the show's worthless yet priceless mirror ball trophy. Dancing schmancing. Who's got the bigger, more motivated fan base? Fingers don't fail them now.
Host Tom Bergeron downplayed the stakes at hand, telling viewers, "Forget what you thought about ballroom, because tonight it's all-out war!" Ok, he up-played it.
Then it was up to Emmitt and partner Cheryl Burke to safely but flashily navigate the samba, the mambo and a climactic freestyle. Said he: "Mario, you've set the bar very high, and I'm comin' after you."
But Mario and partner Karina Smirnoff scored the bigger finish. He can do what Emmitt can't -- break dance and flit. Emmitt in turn did some heavier lifting after promising to also do some "rockin' and shockin.' " But hyper judge Bruno Tonioli marked him down a point for allegedly shaking a bit during Lift 2. That left the ex-Cowboys great with a closing 29 while Mario rang up a 30 for what judge Carrie Ann Inaba called "the best dance that I have seen this whole season."
Finicky elder statesman Len Goodman gushed, too: "If that dance was a film, you'd win an Oscar."
Still, as predicted here three weeks ago, Emmitt will win. His great equalizer is something else that Inaba said after his first go-around Tuesday night: "You are the everyday man who became a dancer before our very eyes."
People respond to that, even if Emmitt also is an everyday millionaire. Tonioli had a reliably more colorful way of putting it: "You drive people crazy, just with the twinkles in your eyes," he told Emmitt. "And you've got the twinkles in your toes to go with it."
Then it got a little out of hand when co-host Samantha Harris gazed upon his bright green samba shoes and said, "Emmitt looks so magically delicious."
Two of his three young daughters were in the audience for the first time. But none of Emmitt's ex-Cowboys teammates or owner Jerry Jones could be seen cheering him on. Sorry, Jerry, the seating scheme doesn't include an owner's box. But you really should be there for a Cowboy who's had the balls to jump out of his comfort zone and onto a hardwood dance floor in an array of tuxedos, vests and glitter shirts.
"Now people see me as a ballroom dancer, which is --- strange," he said before mambo-ing. "But I'll always be a football player."
Wednesday will tell whether he'll be stopped just short of the goal line in dancing's version of the Super Bowl.