An Opportunity To Share …
Every once in awhile, I look back on events in my career and take an opportunity to share it with my readers.
This is one of those occasions.
What has been well-chronicled in my life as a sports broadcaster are the familiar moments:
Carlton Fisk’s dramatic home run in the sixth game of the 1975 World Series.
The great battles between the Celtics and Lakers in the NBA Finals in the 80’s.
Michael Jordan’s playoff heroics including his spectacular 63-point performance early in his career as well as his euphoric game-winning basket against the Cavs.
Game-winning shots in the NCAA basketball tournament, including Tate George’s jumper for UConn after a length-of-the-court pass with :01 remaining.
Then, two days later, Duke’s Christian Laettner giving UConn a taste of their own medicine.
Dan Jansen’s last-chance Gold Medal and World Record effort in speed skating in the ’94 Olympics.
The stunning game-ending pass from Jake Delhomme to Steve Smith in the second overtime period to vault the Panthers past the favored Rams in St.Louis in the NFL division playoff round.
And, of course, the amazing throw and catch from Eli Manning to David Tyree in the Super Bowl against the unbeaten Patriots, setting up the game-winning TD to Plaxico Burress. I was working the world broadcast for the NFL at the time.
Many of you will remember some of these highlights.
But this is not about any of those.
This is about the nearly-two years I was the host of the CBS Sports Spectacular. That’s the primary reason they wanted my services.
The show was a staple for decades, and was hosted by many of the outstanding broadcasters in the CBS stable.
Yours Truly, The Host
People like Pat Summerall, Jack Whitaker, Don Criqui, Tim Ryan. Everybody took turns in doing the show.
But they finally decided they wanted a “permanent” host. So I left the Red Sox TV booth to work full-time for the network.
I was taking a big chance.
My background had purely been in the bread-and-butter sports: baseball, pro football, college and pro basketball.
Sports Spectacular was considered an anthology show. Like ABC’s phenomenal Wide World of Sports, it covered the so-called minor events such as gymnastics, figure skating, skiing, etc.
Wide World was the foundation of ABC. It showed the World Championship competition in sports I have mentioned, and threw in many entertaining segments, including Acapulco Cliff Diving, Wrist-Wrestling from Petaluma, California, and the extremely popular Harlem Globetrotters.
They made everything work.
To be honest, I rarely watched Wide World of Sports. If a sport didn’t have a boxscore of sorts I wasn’t interested.
So here I was, hosting a show I wouldn’t watch. That’s kind of dangerous.
Not only that, CBS had no championship events, so we had to create programming.
The man whose responsibility that was, was Eddie Einhorn, who had a vast experience in television sports and was truly a legend in the field.
Einhorn created college basketball on TV. He syndicated games that you now see on virtually every network.
Eddie Einhorn
Remember the UCLA-Houston battle in the Astrodome? Well, that was in 1968, so how can many of you recall that one?
At the time, it broke new ground in the sport. Millions saw John Wooden’s powerful Bruins, led by Lew Alcindor, now, of course Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, lose to Houston and their star, Elvin Hayes.
That telecast set the tone for NCAA hoops on TV that has made it bigger-than-life today.
Einhorn’s career took him to Chicago where he was second-in-command to Jerry Reinsdorf the owner of the Bulls and the White Sox.
But at CBS, Eddie Einhorn had to create programming to compete with the giants over at ABC.
Before I go into some detail, let me state unequivocally that the CBS Sports Spectacular was neither Sports, nor Spectacular.
And leading the show, was a guy whose specialty was play-by-play, not hosting.
And a guy who rarely watched what was now our competition. I use the term loosely.
It all started with our coverage of Mr. Olympia, the World Body-Building Championship.
Sounds good so far. But hold on.
The event was held in Acapulco, Mexico. Mr. Einhorn, our Executive Producer loved going to exotic locations to cover our events.
They were all taped, never live, so there was no urgency to get them on the air. They might, sometimes, appear weeks after they took place.
How’s that for excitement?
He wanted to employ “gimmicks” to “enhance” the “competition”.
Guess who was the front man for all of this? That’s right.
The show began with the sound of Mariachi music played by a band as I appeared on camera wearing a huge sombrero and a Mexican, shirt, welcoming viewers
to Acapulco and introducing what we were about to cover.
I walked over to the band, and lo and behold, there was Lou Ferrigno, smack in the middle of the group playing a tune.
Ferrigno, was the immensely popular lead actor in the CBS hit, The Incredible Hulk.
My boss thought we could kill two birds by doing a sports show and promoting a CBS prime-time winner.
Lou Ferrigno as The Incredible Hulk
My job was act surprised to see the Hulk as a Mariachi, and ask him a question or two about an event he knew quite well.
He had trained with Arnold Schwarzenegger, and competed in all of the major body-building competitive events.
But Ferrigno had lost 75 to 80% of his hearing due to ear infections suffered soon after he was born, and it was evident when he spoke.
So here I was, amidst the uplifting music, my head terribly perspiring with the heavy crown on a large sobrero weighing me down, trying to understand our prime-time star, in what was, in effect, a travelogue, preceding a competition of men with a lot of muscles.
Well, that was our first show. It went downhill after that.
The next week we were in Hawaii, where, with the famed Diamond Head volcanic cone in the background, I opened the program wearing an Hawaiian shirt and Lei draped around my neck, appearing lost, in my attempt to locate the North Shore for our “coverage” of the World Team Surfing Championships. It was an Einhorn creation. It had never been held before, like many of our events. But I was bailed out, thanks to the arrival of the Richard Diamond, the actor playing the “Governor” in another CBS hit show, Hawaii Five-O.
How much fun!
It went on from there. Reciting lyrics from the King and I as I opened our “coverage” of Kick Boxing in Bangkok.
Welcoming our viewers to Altenau, Germany for the World Roller Skating championships.
One of the bigger challenges I had was opening a show from the Swiss Alps for a World Cup Ski event. In freezing temperatures and howling winds, I had to ad-lib for over a minute-and-a-half, previewing the prominent competitors in our Mixed Gymnastics event, featuring male and female stars of the sport, as well as the hard-to-pronounce names of
those battling it out in a Cruiserweight Boxing match in Yugoslavia.
When your lips are frozen, it’s not easy to get through all that without a hiccup.
It took many tries before I got it down. I felt for our producer, director, and cameraman, who had to endure the conditions as long as they did. It wasn’t a picnic for me, either.
It may sound as if I’m not appreciative of the fact I was able to travel around the world, and view the great landmarks and experience the culture.
But we would come back from somewhere in Africa, then have to leave in a matter of days, to Oslo, on our way to Japan.
Most of the time, I had no idea what time zone I was in, and that included coming back to the U.S.
We were in Oslo, doing our opening on camera for the 100th Holmenkollen Ski Jump, only to depart before the event began.
The tide of 100,000 fans arriving for the competition were storming against us as we left the site, going to the airport for a flight that would eventually get us to Tokyo.
We voiced-over the ski jump in a Tokyo studio during the next few days.
We were in Japan for a week. Mixed with an interview with the baseball great Sadaharu Oh in Osaka, explaining the nuances of Sumo Wresting in Tokyo, and showing what Kendo is all about (the Japanese version of fencing) I rhapsodized over the cherry blossoms in Kyoto.
Sadaharu Oh in Osaka, Japan
That same day I looked at the line score of the Red Sox opening game against the Brewers in the International Herald Tribune, and was close to tears.
What had I given up to do this?
Nearing the end of our excursion in Japan, Einhorn, from New York, called to say we were headed to China, for a week covering a touring American basketball team in Beijing and Shanghai.
That would have been great, except I was going back to Los Angeles for a segment on billiards. A film, The Baltimore Bullet, was being shot in Hollywood with James Coburn and Omar Sharif and I had to interview Sharif. Then back home to New York followed by an almost immediate turnaround to China.
Whew!
I am grateful there is no videotape or u-tube to be found for my time with the CBS Sports Spectacular.
I have said that my greatest accomplishment has been my mere survival doing that show.
It lasted two years. Replaced by a weekend program called CBS Sports Saturday and Sunday. It was hosted by Brent Musburger, truly brilliant in that role, who had returned to CBS Sports.
The two main reporters were Pat O’Brien and John Tesh. O’Brien has been a longtime host of entertaining programs and radio shows. Tesh is a famed pianist and composer of pop music.
Why did I leave the distinguished assignment of TV play-by-play announcer for the Boston Red Sox to do something totally new and different for me?
Probably the challenge of doing just that, and getting my foot in the door at a network, something I always relished.
I remained at CBS, of course, and shortly after the demise of the Sports Spectacular, I re-emerged as a play-by-play broadcaster for NFL and NBA games.
I guess it was what I was meant to do.
And, as they say, the rest is history.
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