Blow by Blow: How Jim Lampley Witnessed History

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1:34Hello, I'm Anthony Scaramucci, and this is Open Book, where I talk to some of the brightest minds about everything surrounding the written word. That's everything. That's from authors and historians to figures in entertainment, political activists, and of course, Wall Street. Before we dive in, make sure to follow or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget to leave a review, good or bad. I want to hear from you. I want to hear whether you're enjoying it or where we can improve. And I can take the hits. So let me know. If you don't like something, say it straight. Now let's get into it.

2:18Joining us now on Open Book is Jim Lampley. He's a Hall of Fame sportscaster, and he's now an author. The title of the book is It Happened a uniquely lucky life in sports television. But I have to say this from a distance, or I'm a huge fan, I'm a fan boy of yours because I love your broadcasting. I love your insights. And I learned so much in this book, not only about sports and things that I witnessed as a kid or witnessing even today, but I learned a lot about you. So you've been the voice behind some of the most unforgettable moments in sports. And you can hear that voice in the book. So before we get into it, tell us about Jim Lampley.

2:59Why did you go into this career of yours? Why go into sports television? Sports television was sort of my birthright from the beginning. My father died when I was five years old. My wife loves to say all of your stories begin with the same set of words. Those words are my father died when I was five years old. I was six when my mother sat me down very explicitly and concertedly. to watch a sports event on television. It just happened that the sports event she chose for initiating me was Sugar Ray Robinson versus Boba Olson on Gillette Friday Night Fights for the middleweight championship of the world.

3:42And so she kind of guided me and schooled me into becoming a boxing fan. And she pointed out that day, by the way, watch Sugar Ray Robinson carefully. Definitely, he's my favorite fighter because he dances while he fights. And he did. And and that was expressive to me. But I spent the bulk of my childhood either in my great grandmother's kitchen or my grandmother's kitchen, I should say, my grandmother's kitchen in Hendersonville, North Carolina, or in my mother's kitchen in Pompano Beach. and then later Miami, Florida, where she had gone to sell life insurance after my father died. And both my grandmother and my mother were nonstop inveterate storytellers, and they endowed me with all of their storytelling.

4:40And that was the guiding sort of narrative theme of my childhood. and they competed for my attention by telling me stories. So I can still hear them in my head. I know that I made that point in the book that they are talking to me all the time, even to this day, and both have been gone for quite some time, but they're not gone from me. They still speak to me every day. It's such a beautiful part of the book, but you also talk about belonging and you also talk about it because some of you look when I started my career I the blue collar kid I got to Wall Street I was very green I was somewhat insecure it took a while for me to gain my confidence you I mean you did everything college football Olympics Wimbledon the Ryder Cup boxing when did the light bulb go off to like you know I belong here when did you think that Well, you know, I began my network television sports career by winning a talent hunt.

5:43And my winning the talent hunt was completely counterintuitive and flew in the face of everything that ABC Sports had said they were looking for. The overall narrative is that in attempting to cover the captivity of 11 Israeli athletes at Munich in 1972 and attempting to satisfy the storytelling demands of two reporters, Howard Cosell and Peter Jennings, ABC had learned a great deal that they didn't know before about the capabilities of wireless cameras and microphones. And after Munich was over, they came back to New York and there was a meeting among the sports division, the news division and the engineering division.

6:32And the question was, now that we know that these signals will jump over concrete walls or that they'll go around metal barriers, what can we do with all that? And the thing that was first decided upon was we could put a reporter on the sideline of a football game. So that became the sideline of college football. That became a 432 candidate talent hunt for the first person to be named as a, quote, college age reporter. That began the process by which virtually every live sports event you now watch, especially in conventional sports like football and basketball and baseball, has an on the field or sideline reporter.

7:18All that began with me and a Stanford graduate named Don Tollefson in 1974. And I wound up staying on the sideline of college football for three years, bitching and moaning the whole time because I didn't want to be there. I wanted to be moving on in my career. I wanted to be doing Wide World of Sports segments and going to the Olympics and doing the other things that I thought would be my right at ABC Sports. And eventually that's what happened. Eventually, I did do all of those things, and I got the opportunities that I craved. And one thing led to another, and ultimately, I spent more than 40 years traveling the planet, going to sports events, covering them for various networks.

8:0414 Olympics, ABC, NBC, CBS, Turner, boxing eventually on HBO, although the first person to assign me to boxing was a new incoming division president at ABC Sports, the successor to Rune Arledge, who wanted to get rid of me and thought that I would be such a stylistic misfit in boxing that he could easily get rid of me by making me embarrassed by putting me on the sport. And also that the audience would see me as Cosell's successor on boxing. And that would that would also ruin me. But the bottom line is I survived the experience. And ultimately, he wrote me a ticket to HBO, the most prestigious television network in the world.

8:50And I wound up calling fights on HBO for 31 years. So some of some of my friends have pushed back against the inclusion of the word lucky in the title. But I say, you know, when you when you're the one person eventually chosen from a four hundred thirty two person talent hunt and you don't fit any of the credentials that they said they were looking for, you have to regard yourself as lucky. And I was, you know, there's a guy by the name of Rune Arlich. And I know you remember Rune Arlich. OK, he loved you, Jim. He loved you. And and you worked along some of these giants, McKay, Jim McKay, Howard Cosell.

9:31My first memory of Jim McKay was the 72 Munich Olympics where we had the Israeli-Palestinian issue. Do you remember this? Well, of course, and again, what they learned from engineering during that period of time led to my genesis on the network But yes, I watched the captivity coverage and everything up until McKay's most poignant moment in a career filled with unforgettable poignant lines and moments But they're all gone. They're all dead. Was the single most dramatic thing that Jim ever said on the air. And he delivered it with such matter of fact simplicity that it became iconic. and I deeply, deeply admired him.

10:25I admired him both from watching him on television and then from watching him at close range when we worked with each other. I don't think he deeply admired me. I don't think he liked the idea of my genesis at ABC Sports, but I couldn't blame him for that. I was ultimately going to be poaching on his territory. Well, you know, that's what, you know, it's very Shakespearean, you know this. The younger man coming in, the older guy doesn't want to move. This is why, you know, we have the older guys in Shakespeare eating the lunch of the younger people. But I know this because I was an English literature major in college, not a communications major, though I did ultimately go to graduate school in radio, television and motion pictures.

11:08But yes, I have an English literature background and the most influential professor I had in college was my Shakespeare professor, a guy named Peter McNamara. Well, I mean, we both know human nature, which is so evident in your book. Talk about Cosell. So Howard Cosell, to me, reading about him, I feel bad about saying this. I haven't really read the words Howard Cosell until Jim Lampley brings him back into my life, and it happened because Cosell was my upbringing. Cosell was Monday Night Football. Cosell was Saturday Fights. Cosell was rocking and rolling with Muhammad Ali, who, you know, if you ever come to my office, Jim, there's a huge painting of Muhammad Ali in my office that I made the champ sign because I used to go to his charity outing out in Arizona.

12:02I used to help raise money for Parkinson's research, and I loved the champ. But talk to us about Cosell. This is a Jewish lawyer from New York, awkward guy, incredible accent that is not your accent, by the way, or or not a Jim McKay accent. Yet he becomes one of the more famous sportscasters. I'll say a little bit about him. So. So Rune Arledge, before he moved to ABC and became president of ABC Sports and eventually president of ABC Sports and ABC News, before all of that, Rune Arledge's executive position in television was that he was head of children's programming at NBC. And when he was head of children's programming at NBC, Roon would take a limousine into Manhattan from Westchester County on Saturday mornings to go and stand in the studio and supervise the feeds of children's shows.

13:05And when he was taking that ride in the limousine on Saturday mornings, he became acquainted with a Little League baseball radio show that was being conducted on a, I think, a Scarsdale radio station by an attorney named Howard Cosell. and uh and Cosell literally had a little league baseball show in fact there was a a later on executive at HBO Steve Sheffer a big-time exec at HBO who was one of the ball players that Cosell covered and Sheffer would do a great invitation little Stevie Sheffer playing for Yeshiva uh etc etc but uh but that was where Arledge heard the voice and when he heard the voice and the unique delivery and the unique cadence of all that, somewhere he stashed in his mind, I can do something with that.

14:05Maybe I can do something. That's really interesting that this guy is making it that way. And so when he became president of ABC Sports, he reached out and made Cosell a figure in his sports division so that you could have that voice, that very distinctive delivery and cadence and accent and voice that Cosell had. I hear the voice. I see my mother's shag rug, Lampley. I see the bell bottoms. You know, I see the walnut paneling of my youth. Carol Brady has called Jim Lampley and asked for the walnut paneling back when I hear Cosell's voice. You know, I was eventually chosen at ABC to be the cub reporter on his magazine show.

14:57And it was a Saturday afternoon magazine show called Sportsbeat. The fundamental content of Sportsbeat was that every week Howard would do an in-studio interview with Bowie Kuhn, Al Davis, a couple of other guys who were his close compadres in sports. And somebody had to go out and do a feature piece. Somebody had to travel for the show to have legs, as it were. And I was the person who did that. So we had offices very close to each other on the 12th floor. And I would go to the office two or three days a week and sit and wait and listen for the moment when Cosell would step out of his office to where the secretary sat and say, hired, promoted, paid a six-figure salary.

15:49It's insane. No talent whatsoever. This is a travesty. What is Rune thinking about? That was one version of Cosell's take on Jim Lampley. Then there was another version, which was, you know, the kid down the hall is the only one here who's capable of completing a coherent sentence. None of those other morons, not little Jimmy, our host only shorter, or Frank Gifford, the golden boy. None of those people can actually speak English, but Lampley can. So it depended on what day it was and what I was doing and what he was doing, which of those two versions would be delivered. but I heard them both on a pretty regular basis from down the hall.

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17:50I'm shoveling in the Apple Jacks and I'm watching you guys and loving you guys and living vicariously through these great athletes. Let's go to HBO boxing, by the way, which is another thing that my brother and I pestered my father, who was a crane operator. We had to get HBO in the house. Oh, my gosh. HBO on a paint-a-air to sell it. Yeah. That's too bad. Yeah. But, I mean, we were addicted to HBO boxing. So tell us a little bit about HBO Boxing and interacting with guys like Ali and Tyson and Foreman and Mayweather. Well, I was assigned to boxing at ABC Sports by Arledge's successor in the sports division when Arledge became president of news and eventually a new ownership.

18:45Capital City's Broadcasting decided it's crazy for somebody to be president of both sports and news. Rune, which one do you choose? Of course, he chose News. They took another guy from the stations division, Dennis Swanson, first person who had, by the way, given Oprah Winfrey a talk show at WLS in Chicago. That was his identity and cachet at the network. But they put him in charge of the sports division. And he arrived at the sports division with one basic predilection, which is who is Jim Lampley and how do I get rid of him? So he began setting about trying to assign me to the things that he thought would most make me uncomfortable.

19:28And that way he was going to get rid of me. And he assigned me to boxing right away. A, I would be seen as Cosell's successor. B, I was a kind of, you know, semi-preppy, spit and polished kid from University of North Carolina. of what in the world was I going to know about boxing. I certainly wasn't urban like Howard. And nobody understood or realized that my mother had assigned me to watch boxing and that the first event she had ever sat me down to watch was a boxing match. So I began to be schooled by a network executive named Alex Wallow, a Greenwich, Connecticut product who was, like you, in love with boxing.

20:12and he began to groom me to be a blow-by-blow announcer and I think he did a pretty good job of grooming me to be a blow-by-blow announcer because after a few months of that and Dennis Swanson was at wit's end because he was not succeeding in getting me to leave the network and in fact I was getting some good reviews as the boxing blow-by-blow guy. Then I finally did walk away from my ABC contract. I went to work for CBS owned and operated stations, KCBS TV in Los Angeles. And I had a window within the contract under which I could do boxing for somebody. And lo and behold, HBO came along. So I received an offer to call boxing matches on the most prestigious boxing television network, HBO, as an unexpected consolation prize for basically getting canned at ABC.

21:13And my first several fights at ABC were Tyson's first several television network appearances. That was why HBO wanted me. I now had an affiliation with Tyson on the air. I had been covering his fights. They could see that the relationship was positive and good. And so I moved to HBO at that point to call boxing matches in 1988 And of course, early 1990 is when Mike was knocked out by Buster Douglas in Tokyo And that was the first time when I was really stuck for an answer on the air What am I going to say about this? The second time was when George Foreman knocked out Michael Moore To become a 45-year-old heavyweight champion And that is the moment when I said it happened.

22:02It happened. And that was because Foreman had told me exactly how it was going to happen and what he did in the ring mimicked everything he had said. It's so many great, amazing stories in here. Fourteen Olympics had to be surreal. What's the Olympic memory that still gives you chills? um well two and they're they're both in the book the very first olympic event that i ever attended live was franz klammer's downhill in uh innsbruck austria in 1976 which i think is probably still the greatest and most charismatic alpine ski race one i watched that on a 13 inch sony trinitron in my bedroom and i was supposed to be in bed i was 12 years old and my brother and I shared a bedroom.

22:53We had a 13 in Sony Trinidad that I bought with the money from my paper route. And I watched Franz Klammer do that and the call on that. Well, let's tell your followers that they have to now buy my book to understand the graphic details of how that run looked the way it looked and the decision that Klammer made going into the starting shack as to how he could conceivably win the race. And one of the things I learned that day, which, you know, I still chuckle about this day is that you think you're going to watch a ski race on the mountain. You don't. You feel it. You hear it. You respond to all of the atmospherics, but you certainly don't see it other than maybe a moment when somebody goes racing by.

23:39And and that's, you know, something I learned that day watching Klammer win that downhill. But that was one. And then the other, of course, is the Miracle on Ice. I was not supposed to be at the Miracle on Ice. I had other responsibilities. I was in a tape room editing a story about all of the political and organizational upheavals that had gone on in Lake Placid. And the phone rang, what was called the Red Phone. The Red Phone was the Arledge phone. I'd been at ABC six years at that point. I had never seen a red phone ring. And the red phone rang and it was Arledge. And he said, what are you doing?

24:21And I told him and he said, drop that, leave that with the editor, get over to the arena. I think something unusual is going to go on in this hockey game between the United States and the Soviet Union. Now, millions of Americans think that they watched the hockey game live. They did not. They saw it on tape because it was scheduled for five o 'clock Eastern time. And it had been scheduled for five o 'clock Eastern time all along when it was when it was essentially a nameless game. Nobody knew which two teams would be appearing. It was a stepping stone toward the middle round. But eventually it came down to the United States versus the Soviet Union for what amounted to a semifinal, because the winner of this game was going to go into the final on Sunday morning.

25:17This was Friday evening. And when Arledge and the United States Olympic Committee went to the Hockey Federation to ask that the game be moved from five o 'clock to eight o 'clock so that the American audience could see it in prime time, the Russians exercise their right to say, oh, no way. Game has been on the schedule for five o 'clock ever since the beginning of the games. Game is going to be played at five o 'clock. So I'm in a tape room editing a piece. My associate director and I are working, et cetera. we've got a little monitor on top of the tape bay where we're watching the hockey game as it takes place.

26:06And at the end of the first period, Mark Johnson, who was the hottest goal scorer in the world for two weeks, got loose in the Russian goal or in the Russian end, I should say, and slipped the puck under Vladislav Tretyak's glove to make the score two to two, tie the game. unexpected tie at the end of the first period and at that moment victor tikhinoff the russian coach pulled tretiak yanking from goal the greatest goalie in the history of the sport arguably who had carried them to every world championship and gold medal for the preceding 10 or 12 years he yanked tretiak and put in the backup goalie anatoly mishkin uh and the game went on and and And the red phone rang.

26:51And I picked up the red phone because both the tape editor and the associate director pointed to me like, you know, that's got to be for you. And it was Arledge. And he said, what are you doing? And I told him, he said, let that wait. Put that to rest. Go to the hockey arena and get in because I have a hunch something strange is going to happen in this game tonight. And we need an interview to take us off the air. and the last thing I said to him was, Roon, I don't have the right credential to get into the hockey game. Now, this is only eight years after Munit. We were still in the situation where if you didn't have the right credential to get into an Olympics event, you weren't going to get in.

27:31And the last thing Roon said to me was, you'll get in, clump, hung up the phone. And I went over to the hockey arena and I found the high school hockey coach whose job it was to supervise the arena and I had met him a few days before because my agent was a hockey agent and he let me in. And I wound up watching the last two periods of the game there and then eventually doing an interview that night to take us off the air with Jim Craig and Mike Arruzzioni outside of a restaurant in Lake Placid after the biggest upset in the history of team sports. Never going to be reading it. I love rereading it in the book.

28:09And, you know, Mike Arruzzioni, to us Italian Americans out here on Long Island. He was, he was the man, you know, we, uh, we had, we were wearing his Jersey and, uh, uh, I remember having such anxiety watching that, you know, and, uh, of course, Al Michaels, famous Cade and Steve believe in miracles. So we're, you know, I could do a two hour podcast with you because that is just amazing. But we, unfortunately we a little time constraint. So I'm, I'm down to the five words. And so in my podcast, Jim, me and my producers, we pick out five words. We want our author to say a sentence about the word just to get their reaction.

28:47So if I say the word broadcasting, you say. Broad audience signals being sent out over electronic waves. And it first began with the transformation of Morse code signals into radio news in the 19-teens before 1919. Yeah, it's great. I hear broadcasting, I think, personalities. And I think of people like you. I think about an electronic process. Yeah, it's a great broadcaster. That was that was what I taught in Evolution of Storytelling and American Electronic News Media here at the University of North Carolina. I taught for five semesters after I came here to Chapel Hill. And whenever you say broadcasting, my mind goes back to day one and what I was teaching to those students.

29:45Yeah. I say the word sport. You say what? From the beginning of mankind, going back to the days of ancient Egypt and eventually Greece and Rome, there have been organized contests of physical prowess, physical skill, and ultimately they came to be known as sports. I don't know how they became known as sports, but I know that they weren't called that at the beginning because whatever they were called, it was in Roman or Greek or Phoenician or some other language that preceded the preeminence of English. But in English, it's sports. How about the word boxing? The purest sport. The most honest sport.

30:34as my great friend Tom Hauser has titled a recent book. The sport that tells us the most about who we are, what we can endure, what we can't endure, what we are like when confronted with danger and potential damage at the hands of another human being. All of that we learn from boxing, and it's my favorite sport. Legacy. Legacy. So. I don't think of that in terms of me, other than to say. My father died when I was five years old. My mother raised me. My grandmother taught me how to tell stories. I am their legacy. And I attempt through the things that I do to honor all three of them for everything they gave to me and taught to me when I was growing up.

31:42Last word. I'm going to give you the last word, sir. Jim Lampley. one of the luckiest people who has ever lived on this particular planet, a person who, because of the choices of others, not his own choice, was given all the opportunities he would most have dreamed of, up to and including calling boxing matches, up to and including going to 14 Olympics, up to and including that my then eight-year-old daughter was babysat for an entire day at the United States Boxing Writers Association dinner in New York by Muhammad Ali, that Muhammad Ali was my absolutely incomparable lifetime hero. He had been my hero when his name was Cassius Clay, that the very first live prize fight I ever attended was Cassius Clay versus Sonny Liston, February 25, 1964 in Miami Beach.

32:50My life reads like a fictional story. I wouldn't blame anybody for buying my book and reading the book and thinking to themselves at some point, oh my gosh, did he make this up? Or is this really true? It's really true. You know, when Stefan said to me that you want to come on my show, I was very flattered. So I consider myself lucky as well. But I lived it with you. So I was so excited to have you come on the show because I know that you have a lot. I mean, I know you feel blessed and you should. And God bless you. And you've been a great contributor to our zeitgeist and our culture. But I lived it with you.