Coming out of Lake Placid, and all through the summer into the fall of 1980, there was gathering evidence of my career momentum at ABC, along with new reasons to be seriously focused on how that blended with my personal life.
Joanne Mallis Lampley had delivered our first child, Brooke, on the night of March 30, 1980, at Lenox Hill Hospital. She arrived more hurriedly than expected, and as the delivery loomed, I was at work in Cambridge, Massachusetts, hosting Wide World coverage of the NCAA Swimming and Diving Championships at Harvard’s Blodgett Pool. No one could have foreseen how appropriately auspicious those circumstances would be.
I was granted the liberty by the Wide World structure of recording several optional on-cameras with Mark Spitz and Donna de Varona, and since the event would be airing on a delayed schedule, we would be able to convene later in a studio to supply the as-though-live calls. That was all fairly common Wide World procedure, and just before midnight I held Brooke in my arms and rewarded her mother with a take-out cheeseburger from a diner on Lexington Avenue. Nine days before my 31st birthday I was a father. Like most everything else in my life at that point, it wasn’t planned. It just happened.
My work at ABC Sports was a whirlwind. Though NBC and CBS were constantly engaged in the process of building their own anthology programs, they faced an uphill fight in trying to catch up to the identity and internal machinery of Wide World, which had been on the air since 1961 and had captured enduring rights deals with many of the most logical events for a sports anthology series. Wide World had also benefited from Jim McKay’s voice and his signature opening narrative setup: “Spanning the globe to bring you the constant variety of sport: the thrill of victory, the agony of defeat, the human drama of athletic competition.”
Now as my career was progressing, it made sense for my growth and exposure, and to McKay’s desire for a more relaxed schedule, that I was the one who would “span the globe” via my travel schedule and try to fit in a personal life within the margins. Thus, my hasty marriage to Joanne, which had taken place on that April Sunday of 1979 when I was returning from London and the Rugby League Challenge Cup Final at Wembley Stadium.
That moment was a transitory marker of how rapidly my life was changing. Now, less than one year later, I was a father with a travel schedule that left most of the work of parenting on Joanne’s plate. And in my heart, I knew we hadn’t prepared for that and might not really be ready for it as a married couple. I had witnessed the copious divorce rate at ABC Sports; I already had one, and now, just turning 31, the beginning ingredients for a second. But our daughter was beautiful, so maybe she would provide the ballast necessary to grow our skimpy bond into a durable institution. It was worth hoping for.
I got a tacit but major vote of confidence going into the fall of 1980 when Roone Arledge reached out and hired Mike Pearl away from CBS to come into the studio and produce my College Football Scoreboard. Mike had overseen the development and execution of CBS’s enormously respected and successful Sunday pro football studio wraparound, NFL Today. He had blended the panache of Brent Musburger, Irv Cross, Phyllis George, and Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder into a show that combined score updates and game previews with personality interplay and provocative information to significantly reinvent the concept of updating scores. A function that was previously seen as little more than a perfunctory formality had now become, under Mike’s guidance, must-see sports TV. The suggestion that I would now be at the center of such an approach to college football was beyond thrilling for me.
We kept Beano Cook, who wasn’t terribly dissimilar to Jimmy the Greek, and added Boston College’s Heisman Trophy–winner Doug Flutie to the mix as the pregame, halftime, and postgame wraparound grew in significance and stature, and I grew with it.
By 1983 I had left behind forever the persona of the kid on the sidelines and the travel guide to obscure events and artsy adventures on Wide World. As Arledge and his lieutenants were making plans for the 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo, and an expansion of on-air hours from an exotic Eastern European time zone, my agent, Art Kaminsky, was targeting the anchor chair and the beginning of a campaign to ease me gradually toward what he and I agreed was my best possible long-term identity at that network: successor to Jim McKay.
It was an audacious plan, which made it a worthwhile undertaking.
There was no point in shooting for any lesser target. With each step I had taken, from the football sidelines and soft features to the regional play-by-play booth to the studio wraparound, from Olympic personality interviews to the hard news reporting at Lake Placid, from the funky folklore of Wide World to national and world championship events in swimming and track and field, I had been gaining upward mobility in content terms. Now it was time to pay all that off.
McKay could not realistically host every meaningful on-air hour in Sarajevo. It was time for someone with similar skills to begin building stature for the future. And to Art and me, along with various producers and directors I had worked with, it was clear that someone was me. The arrival of Mike Pearl, and the unusual amount of money Roone had spent to bring him into the college football studio, was defining evidence in my favor.
There was to be a late-night show in Sarajevo, a live-and-tape combination of event coverage to follow the local 11 o’clock news. We plotted to go after that. There would be plenty of Olympics ahead to try for prime time. We began envisioning whom we would want on our team. Pearl was a given. His calm, confident presence in the control room was a safeguard for my studio presence on the college football telecast, and I knew Roone and his lieutenants felt the same way. But Mike had not been to the Olympics before, so it made sense for him to work with another producer who had. And that person was Dorrance Smith, my original feature producer on the sideline.
While Roone remained president of just the news division, it only made sense that some sports personnel would find their identities changing, and Dorrance was high on that list. He eventually became the producer of Sam Donaldson’s Sunday show, and the combination of his linkage with me and his origin as a studio producer made him a no-brainer for the Sarajevo late-night team. I approached him, and he said he had already spoken to Roone about it.
So once the time arrived for Art Kaminsky to make our preference known, the correct control room team was on board. The next step was the selection of a co-host to collaborate with me. And that produced a highly ironic result.
The original expressed plan for the college-age reporter position was for a new talent hunt every year. By the end of the first season, Chuck Howard had developed enough of a comfort level with me to tell Roone that ABC should bring me back in the fall of 1975. By that time, I was already blended into the Wide World mix, and then in 1976 I was given Olympics feature-reporter assignments at the Winter Games in Innsbruck and the Summer Games in Montreal. The whole organization was way too busy for anyone to go out on the road looking for a new college-age reporter, so the easy response in the fall of 1976 was to send me back out onto the sidelines. But with Dorrance Smith moving up, I needed a newly assigned producer from the younger troops to supervise my feature story shoots and be the liaison to Chuck in the truck during the games. And a new rising star was emerging within the organization.
Back in the Watergate summer of 1974, during the period when I was called to New York from Chapel Hill to interview for various jobs other than college-age reporter, I was included among a field of four for the chief 1976 Olympic research position. It was a job that bore an illustrious history.
The 1968 Grenoble and Mexico City research chief had been Dick Ebersol, who went on to be Roone’s administrative assistant and then head of late-night programming at NBC, developing and overseeing Saturday Night Live. By 1983 I had every reason to think I would never be directly connected to Dick again, but I was wrong.
By the fall of ’76, I was in my third year on the sideline. Dorrance had higher level production assignments, Jeff Ruhe was succeeding Ebersol as Roone’s administrative assistant, and production assistant Ric LaCivita went to Howard to ask if he could become the Lampley caddie/supervisor that fall. I was delighted when Chuck said yes.
Ric and I became blood-brother-like best friends. After I moved to New York that fall we dined together, traveled together, watched sports events together, and Linda became the central adviser in his love life. She listened to his discourse on the women he was dating and offered feedback on how to do it right, ultimately providing critical assistance in his campaign to succeed a football star named Bob Baumhower as the love life focus for a graduating Alabama homecoming queen named Sela Ward, who went on to become a popular TV actress.
So it was fitting that when I reached the end of my comfort zone with the sideline reporter gig and wanted to make clear to Chuck and Roone that I was ready to leave that behind in favor of play-by-play for regional games, a way to encourage that was to suggest the team conduct another national search. And the team was Ric, Jeff, and me.
We cast a net with sports information directors and communications and journalism departments and went on the road. The three of us settled comfortably on only two candidates to recommend to Chuck and Roone. Both were undergraduate students at the University of Southern California. One was a ranking student political leader, a startlingly handsome senior named Alex Cappello. The other, equally impressive but in a different way, was a striking blue-eyed brunette named Kathleen Sullivan.
I thought either of the two could be at least as good as I had been. When Roone and Chuck either disagreed or couldn’t decide, I was obliged, more or less, to go out for a third season of patrolling the sidelines, trying to make it clear I would be done with that gig after that. And I succeeded.
Now seven years later, as Jeff Ruhe, Mike Pearl, Dorrance Smith, and I were all planning for the late-night show in Sarajevo, Kathleen Sullivan showed up on the ABC radar again. She had already developed quite a career.
Shortly after graduating from USC, Kathleen had been hired as an anchor at CNN. I felt good that a visionary executive like Ted Turner saw in her what I had seen in our sideline search interview. Then, not too long after that, she signed a contract with ABC News. So when Dorrance and Mike asked me with whom I’d like to share the late-night studio at Sarajevo, I was ready with the answer that was conveniently in-house. Roone went for it right away.
I had entered the Olympics picture as a fledgling feature reporter at Innsbruck and Montreal in 1976, then a much more significant news-based reporter at Lake Placid in 1980. And now, at my fourth Olympics, I would sit in a host chair for the hour-and-a-half segment that aired after the late local news. The time span was nearly 10 years from my first screening interview with Ebersol and Terry Jastrow to the planning sessions with Dorrance and Mike Pearl, but in some ways it felt like a few months. I was 34 years old, but anyone who knew me would have said I was a young 34, still boisterously immature and naïve to the ways of the corporate world in which I lived. But I was not so naïve that I didn’t now focus on what was coming next.
The Summer Olympics in Los Angeles later that year promised to be one of the biggest shows in the history of ABC, and if things went well at Sarajevo, I would play a major role. It was astonishing. I was desolate about dropping out of college with a dead-end transcript at age 19. I could still see Eugene Terkoski’s face as he urged me not to leave a menial paperwork job at First National Bank of Miami. I could still see my mother’s tears as she told me all my father’s air force pension money was gone, and if I was going to go back to Chapel Hill, I would have to pay for it on my own. I could still see my former father-in-law Jimmie Lee telling Linda at their dinner table she was out of her mind to be hooking up with a loser like me. And now I was going to help host the Winter Olympics on network television and had no doubt I was ready to be great at it.