The man known to many as "Channel 5's sportscaster " emerged from the door
marked NBC to give our party of four a warm
greeting. He led us into the
TV studios past the familiar 'Newsfive' set and into an office simply marked sports.
The TV set
in the corner was tuned to the CBS afternoon movie, "Dr.
Strangelove". Our host, VVMAQ sportscaster Greg Gumbel set down some papers
and started us on a grand tour of the studios--past the busy newsroom, into the
film editing and video tape rooms, through the studios where Kup's Show and
Sorting it Out are filmed, and finally back in the small sports office.
At 5:10
Gumbel sat at his desk to add a few words to his script for the 5:30 news. We sat
back and watched the ending of Dr. Stranglove. Gumbel 's sportscast was
scheduled for 5:40, so it was necessary to
collect the scripts and take off
for the studios just as the movie ended.
A red flashing
light outside the door meant that a live telecast was in process. Gumbel led us
into the director's booth where he waited for the cue that would
send him into
the studio.
The telecast
was important that night with the lead story being a press conference with Dick
Butkus. Gumbel read through his lines under the ·careful timing of the
in-studio director. After about four minutes Floyd Kalber , walked back into
place in front of the cameras. The director signaled for a commercial and
Gumbel 's part of the 5: 00 news was
over.
At the age
of 28, Greg Gumbel is the youngest sportscaster in Chicago and WMAQ is Gumbel's
first job in broadcasting. After majoring in English in College, he got
a job as Lyton's assistant advertising director. After a year he ventured over
to Time Inc. and became assistant purchasing director. His next job came 2 1/2
years later when he went to work for American Hospital Supply Corporation in
Evanston, and after about six months as
a salesman in Detroit, he was looking for a "way back to Chicago".
Greg heard
about an opening at WMAQ and immediately applied for it. It took only an
interview
and a tape
for NBC to realize that they had what they were looking for and by March 12,
1973 Greg Gumbel was part of NBC.
"I was
very lucky, lucky to learn about the opening and lucky to be there at the right
time." Of course the fact that Greg's brother was also a sportscaster in
Los Angeles helped him to get a shot at the job but Gumbel emphasized that, 'If
I wasn't good enough they would have said no, even with my brother." Being
28 has its advantages and its disadvantages:
I'm as knowledgeable as anyone on what's happening today. But because
I'm 28 someone else is 35 or 45 it would be evident that I'm not as knowledgeable on things that have happened in the past.
There are people that can draw a great deal on history and work it into
their sportscast, but my being younger and not being around when certain things
happened prevents me from using the past as a reference.
This past fall Greg was a part of the very successful high school Basketball Game of the Week. '' It was an area that hadn't been tried before on a regular basis, and an area that was difficult to keep up week after week. I'd like to get into play by play a regular basis," commented Gumbel. "I don't have what many people consider and ideal voice f or broadcasting. I don't have a Charlie Jones type of a voice, very deep, I mean I'd have to drink for three nights straight to get a voice like his! ''
But he liked
doing high school basketball, feeling that it was an "innovative"
idea "We found out what we could do with a few cameras, a
producer-director, and associate director, a man on the floor and a few technicians and it worked.''
He
emphasized, “There is this tremendous void of high school sports,
understandably. You’ve got the Chicago
Bears, the Chicago Bulls, the Blackhawks and the Cougars, the White Sox and the
Cubs and the Aces and you’ve got the college sports to follow. With that amount of activity going on its no
wonder high school sports get passed on.”
This is a
hot bed as far as high school sports go and this was a potential way to at
least solve part of it with the “high school basketball game of the week.” Looking out the window we saw an NBC crew
preparing to shoot a live shot from the roof of the 19th floor for
the weather forecast. “I don’t think
that has ever been done before”, laughed Greg.
Gumbel is a
busy man, working a Wednesday to Sunday week from 12:00 noon to about 10:30 and
presenting two shows daily. He has a
four minute fifteen second slot to fill in the afternoon and three minute
fifteen second slot to fill in the night time news. Gumbel spends much of his time watching what
is going on that night in a conference room with four TVs. “I spend Sundays in there with each TV tuned
to a different sport. This way I get to
watch all the channels at once and I don’t miss much of the action.”
His Sportscast
To me the
most important thing about my sportscast is to present a visual show. I don't
think I’m on there to have people look at me talk, because facts and figures
can be read from the newspaper. He feels that "people who tune in to watch
the sports are looking in to see something they couldn’t 't attend. "
TV has to be
visual. "It's a different thing to read a newspaper and say Phil Esposito,
or Wayne Kashman scored goals, it's a different thing to see how they
scored."
Probably a
question that rests on the minds of many Greg Gumbel fans who remember NBC's
sportscaster of old, Johnny Morris, is what happens to Greg when Johnny comes
back from Europe. "When Johnny Morris comes back I probably go back to
weekend shows and reporting Thursdays and Fridays. When I started here I signed a contract to do
that and I couldn’t possibly quarrel with going back to that because that is
what my contract says.”
WMAQ and
Newsfive has suffered some problems in the ratings department in the past year
dropping from first to second place in the polls. “I don’t know if it’s true that this number
of people will read, say that ABC now leads the ratings and on the basis of
that say that I must be watching the wrong channel and turn to their channel.”
“People will
call and say ‘hey I think the only thing good about your newscast is you’ and I’ll
say great but why? And they don’t have a
reason. I’d like to know why so many
people watch channel 2 on Saturday night.
Is it because they follow All in the Family and MASH and Mary Tyler
Moore, Bob Newhart and Carol Burnett? By
then people may be too drunk to get out of their chair and turn the channel!”
"I don't
think that a sportscaster will affect the ratings but there are people
who are really sports minded who will
say, well,
"Sportscasters don't effect
the ratings”
channel 5 carried
this today so maybe they'll have the
highlights or channel 2 carried this.
That’s like saying who has the best sports show in town. Does it depend on the number of videos you
can put into your time allotted? Or does
it depend on the number of live interviews you can put on the air? Or does it depend on how well you get along
with the newsman or your personal appearance?
But again I think it’s a visual thing.
I think people tune in not to see a sportscaster but to see the sports.”
“Floyd Kalber is Dangerous”
“Floyd
Kalber is dangerous to be with on live camera because he is extremely
knowledgeable in sports. He is liable to
ask any question on sports and it would be a good question. I could easily not know the answer and say ‘I
don’t know, but I’ll find out.’ It’s something
that can be a good thing if the newscaster knows what he is talking about or a
bad thing if the newscaster turns and says ‘How’d the Cougars do, anybody hit
any home runs?’ Fortunately we don’t
have that problem.”
The
conversation then turn to a lighter side of Gumbel as mistakes on live tv were brought
up. ·"My first time on the air was really amazingly smooth, I was really
nervous. But there have been times when I have started to talk about the Bulls,
and the Blackhawks film came on. I said Chet Walker drove the baseline and hey
that's not the Bulls! and of course everyone in the studio breaks up".
"A
couple of times I've gone on with the pages on my script out of order, that's
fun. I'll start reading something and
the director in the booth is looking and he doesn't see where I am. He starts
throwing papers around trying to find out where I am because maybe he's supposed
to roll a film and he hasn’t done it yet.
I cause a few heart failures once in a while_''
He continued
by stating that "I was searching around for the right way to read a
script on the air and I noticed that Floyd Kalber moves one page to his left and reads it on
his left then he moves to the page on this right, so I tried that. Well I used
to read one page and turn it over, and read the next and turn it over. So, I
moved the page to the left and the director said five seconds, so he snapped
his fingers and I completely ignored that page. I had skipped a whole page and
in the booth they didn't know what I was doing. I felt bad afterwards but they
said it's all part of learning. ''
Being only
28, Gumbel has a large part of his life ahead of him. Although there are no plans for the immediate
future he does plan to stay in broadcasting.
“I would never want to leave it now.
I find myself putting in more hours, more basic hard work and more time
in broadcasting, but it seems like less.
I love my work and I’d never want to leave.”
“The first
thing I’d like to do is become proficient at what I’m doing now and while I
think that I’m improving, I don’t think that I’m where I’d like to be. I still get nervous once in a while about
things that professionals like Charlie Jones don’t even care about. Hopefully, I’ll work for NBC.”
Greg Gumbel
is a youngster in the broadcasting world but he has some advantages in the
business. He’s a dedicated man, a
searcher of the facts and a perfectionist.
But most importantly he is a human being, very aware of the public and
the public’s image of the people in TV.
He does everything he can to make the public believe that TV
personalities are not superhuman. It’s
this understanding of the public that is going to make Greg Gumbel a top
sportscaster. Maybe once the public
notices him like he notices them they will realize he is already one of the
very best.
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