14

Tinseltown Games

The next six months of 1984 went by fast, especially in the last week of June at the US Olympic Swimming Trials in Indianapolis.

I was already assured of a place in a play-by-play booth and in the late-night studio at the Summer Games in Los Angeles. In terms of collective audience and informational impact, they would constitute perhaps the largest sports event in American history.

If you had asked me at the beginning of the year what my dream assignment would be, I would have told you unequivocally I wanted to cover track and field (or as the Olympic structure now called it, “athletics”).

I had the background for it, the information base, and familiarity with the athletes. I had covered more track and field at ABC than Al Michaels, who was the other reasonable choice, but from an overall perspective he was the more experienced play-by-play person, especially considering his dossier as a Major League Baseball voice. So that was one good reason not to be disappointed that Al would be at the Los Angeles Coliseum describing foot races and jumps.

The other good reason not to bitch about it, Art Kaminsky pointed out, was the schedule.

Swimming trials took place early in the morning. The finals were in the afternoon. Swimming was the only play-by-play gig that could comfortably pair with a studio host assignment, and I was once again ticketed for the late-night chair. But this time, to show Kathleen Sullivan to the audience for many more hours, she was paired with Frank Gifford in daytime. My late-night co-host was Donna de Varona, an old and dear friend who was, by her own admission, somewhat intimidated by the nature of on-camera hosting. She was also the expert commentator for women’s swimming events, so we would be together from early morning to nine o’clock at night.

Everyone loved Donna, the two-time gold medalist as a 17-year-old at the 1964 Summer Games in Tokyo. There was no reason not to; she was by nature gracious, giving, unassuming, and generous. And we had known each other for 10 years so I knew she trusted me. That personality circumstance, along with the continuity I would enjoy with Mike Pearl and Dorrance Smith, made the late-night show in LA a breeze. The real bulk of my workload was swimming.

Because there were numerous preliminary heats for each event—men’s and women’s—in the morning, and then the finals at the end of the day as the sun was dramatically setting over the USC campus where the pool was located, the information demand was heavy. I had been calling swimming consistently on ABC since the week after the conclusion of the Montreal Olympics in 1976. My statistical brain was a swim-info fanatic named Bill Kunz, a Cal Berkeley grad on whom I relied for every plain fact and every somewhat hidden nuance.

Kunz had first earned his credibility with me when in 1976 at the US Swimming National Championships in Philadelphia, 10 days after the conclusion of the Olympics in Montreal, I had called my first live race on the air, taking over a chair that had belonged to Keith Jackson before me. I managed to call the men’s 100-meter freestyle, establish the winner and the order of finish, and button it all up without noticing that the South African–born first-place finisher, a University of Alabama student named Jonty Skinner, had broken the world record in the event. My failure to notice that was, within the envelope of what we were doing, cataclysmic.

The producer, a Wide World veteran named Ned Steckel, didn’t notice at first. We went to commercial time and began preparing for what would come next in the show. But at this point Bill Kunz spoke up and made clear we (meaning I) had just perpetrated an information disaster, and it needed to be fixed. And since the show was live, not taped, it would have to be fixed right away.

So Steckel quickly communicated to the US Swimming officials on the pool deck that we would need a slight delay before the arrival of the next race’s participants on the starting blocks. We came back from commercial time with what amounted to me saying, “Oh, by the way, a meaningful element of the men’s 100-meter freestyle you just saw . . .” and we replayed the swim, establishing that Skinner had set a record. From there it was on to whatever came next. It all happened so fast I didn’t even have time to be thrown for a loop by it, and Bill Kunz just smiled and said, “Stick with me here, there’s a lot of data to process.”

Parenthetically, and by way of establishing the sometimes-astonishing level of coincidence in my life, I point out now that when I stepped away after 45 years of broadcasting and returned to the University of North Carolina in 2019 to teach a course I created, I was assigned a teaching assistant, a Communications Department PhD candidate named Kevin Alexander Pabst. Early in our association I learned he was a former University of Alabama swimmer, a breaststroker. Later I learned that his father had been the roommate of Jonty Skinner in Tuscaloosa in the middle 1970s.

I could not make things like this up. It happened—back in 1976. And despite the near-disastrous beginning, my arc as a swimming stroke commentator kept growing, so eight years later Bill Kunz and I were still joined at the statistical and biographical hip covering the world’s most significant swim competition ever to that point in Los Angeles.

We benefited from the presence of producer Curt Gowdy Jr., who was the calmest, most precise and easy-to-work-with producer in the entire ABC Sports lineup.

And why not? The name said everything. He had grown up on the inside, his father was one of the biggest and most trusted names in the history of sports television and one of Roone’s oldest and dearest friends, and his confidence simply couldn’t be shaken.

Swimming was hectic, but Curt Gowdy Jr. was so calm he didn’t even acknowledge “hectic.” Donna, Mark Spitz, and I were lucky to have him, and we knew it.

The men’s 100-meter freestyle remained the sport’s most glamorous event, and the American story going into the LA Games was poignant. The most recognized and accomplished freestyler in America was Ambrose “Rowdy” Gaines of Winter Haven, Florida, and Auburn University. Poetically, he was the son of two professional Cypress Gardens water-skiers. He was now 25 years old and had represented the United States at two world championships and two Pan American Games. And he was the reigning world record holder in the event, but at 25 he was by the standards of his sport aging out.

We all knew Rowdy very well, probably better than we knew any other American swimmer at that point. He was universally popular, and for every good reason imaginable. I will never forget the unusually chilly late-summer night at the world championships in Berlin, Germany, in 1978, when from 80 yards away on the pool deck 19-year-old Rowdy Gaines had looked up to our outdoor announcer position and noticed that I was shivering. He had climbed the stairs to the top row of that swimming stadium and gently, unobtrusively draped his US team windbreaker over my shoulders. As a human being, he was incomparable in his world.

Now, six years later, he was finally at his first Olympics. Of all the American athletes who had been martyred by the US boycott of the 1980 Games in Moscow, none was more painfully penalized than Rowdy. He might have won five gold medals there, when he was 21 years old and at his self-described peak. Now in Los Angeles he was 25, borderline ancient for the sport, and not considered a medal favorite in his signature event.

In fact, earlier that summer at the Olympic Trials in Indianapolis, our production team had prepared for the prospect of telling the story of his heartbreaking disappointment. Bill Kunz recited in our production meeting all the statistical information that powerfully suggested he might not finish in the top two and therefore fail to make the team. There was a catch in my voice when he reached the wall second behind Mike Heath, a qualifying position, and Spitz was similarly moved. At that moment, it was thrilling that the story lived. But there remained an undercurrent of dread. Clearly Heath was the more likely medal winner in LA.

So all of us were excited and apprehensive at the Olympics as we prepared to call the men’s 100 free. But to be honest, more apprehensive than excited. There wasn’t much good reason to think Rowdy would win. Entering the pool in Lane 3, he would be shoulder to shoulder with the overwhelming favorite, Mark Stockwell of Australia, and in setting up the field I focused on all the statistical information that buttressed Stockwell’s status as the likely gold medalist. But I did mention that it was likely Rowdy Gaines’s last race at this level, and that it would be painful if his career ended without an Olympic gold medal.

And then magic happened. In swimming it is called a flying start, the convergence of circumstances in which a swimmer somehow times the starting gun so that his body is pronated, his weight is moving forward, his arms are fully extended, his entry is in motion, but at the moment the gun sounds his feet are still touching the block. At the biggest, most propitious moment of his swimming life, Rowdy Gaines caught a flying start. He entered the water already in the lead, and from there swam a clean 100 meters, the only swimmer in the field to break 50 seconds, and he gave all of us at the pool a moment never to forget. Even the defeated Stockwell seemed thrilled for Rowdy.

On the pool deck afterward Rowdy told our interviewer, the great Diana Nyad, that his grandmother had dreamed it that way, and his coach had advised him that the timer at those Olympics was quick with the gun trigger, so “be ready.” Beyond that, he was overwhelmed.

If you have the privilege of going to the Olympics with the host network, and I have 14 times, there are countless moments that stand out and will never be forgotten, but the most moving ones are based in a context of personal experience. Rowdy Gaines went on to win two more gold medals in Los Angeles, anchoring the freestyle and medley relays.

And every time we described him, I held in the back of my mind the memory of the teenage boy I had never met, who climbed to the top of a stadium in Berlin at a moment in the summer of 1978 when I was unexpectedly freezing cold. That’s personal. That’s special. That’s Rowdy Gaines.

In the years since, his work on NBC Sports Olympics broadcasts has made him the most well-known swimming commentator and biographer of, among others, the incomparable Michael Phelps.

The late-night show with Donna was largely uneventful. The fact we spent so much of every day in each other’s group made continuity and cooperation easy, and Donna had always been by nature a diplomat, even after first appearing on the cover of Sports Illustrated at age 14. In the world of sports politics and organization she had been a big and meaningful figure ever since her teenage years. She was the kind of person we wanted to send to meet with Peter Ueberroth, the LA Games organizer who later became commissioner of baseball. But live TV performance wasn’t an area where she felt overpoweringly strong, and she trusted me. I treasure that.

For the live closing on camera of our last show, the producers articulated a scenario in which I started us off and pointed toward summary comments, then Donna would thoughtfully respond, and I would again pick it up and take a countdown to the off-air moment. A safe scenario, and Donna was happy. Then when we did it on the air, she was holding a pen in one hand. And as I approached the finish, she inadvertently dropped the pen onto our desk and it began rolling forward. I was at first only vaguely aware of the rolling pen until Donna reached with one hand to try to corral it. In our ears the production booth was counting down, “seven, six, five, four . . .” As the count reached the area of “two,” Donna made one last stab with her now fully extended arm, and the pen fell off the front of the desk onto the floor. I turned to her and said “nice.” And then the two weeks of the Los Angeles Olympics were over. Nicely.

For the audience and the world of sports, it was crucial that the United States and its many supportive allies around the world had returned to the fold after boycotting the Moscow Summer Games in 1980 to protest the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. But the Olympic product of that boycott had been retaliation from the Eastern bloc and its allies.

The Soviet Union, East Germany, and Cuba were among the 14 nations that stayed away from Los Angeles. One of the sports most affected by that was boxing, and American boxers won nine gold medals, several more than would have been anticipated had Cubans, Russians, and East Germans been competing. I couldn’t possibly have known at that moment how such a bumper crop of American boxing gold medalists would soon be figuring into my career.

I did notice, though, as did keen observers from the sports division’s ranks, how angry Howard Cosell was at what he saw as underrepresentation of the boxing competition in the network’s LA programming menu. He delivered an epic summary on the last day of the competition that decried the editorial choices of the control room in favor of other sports options, and that foreshadowed near-future changes in the network’s approach to the ring.

It had been fun, and I was pretty sure we had done well. There is something about an Olympics set in an American time zone, where almost all the event programming can appear live, that makes it special. And I had no idea how important that LA time zone would eventually become in my life. But I knew my broad exposure at Los Angeles had again boosted my profile at ABC Sports, and I looked forward with some confidence to ongoing career progress there. I had a contract negotiation coming up, and Art Kaminsky was quite excited about it.

The fall of 1984 brought further solidification of the College Football Scoreboard as a division commitment, and after all the on-air hours in Los Angeles, I was more confident than ever in my studio hosting skills. I was also now traveling with the broadcast team of Monday Night Football, voicing the half-time highlights in place of Cosell, who had built that institution in his own image.

I realized from the beginning that was a thankless task, but at least I had someone to hang out with on the road. Director Chet Forte, Frank Gifford, and Don Meredith formed one social tier on that telecast. The younger tier was O.J. Simpson and me. On Sunday and Monday nights before and after the games, O.J. and I explored the bars and restaurants of America’s NFL cities. If being identified with college football in college towns had presented one taste of glamour earlier in my career, this was another level up the scale. Ten years after I had first marveled at being friendly with him at the ABC Superstars show, I was inwardly marveling again. I was cooler now, but he was O.J. Simpson and still more demonstrably famous and high profile than the rising all-star players we were covering. He was royalty.

The new year in 1985 brought more studio airtime on Wide World, along with expanding profiles for the Ironman Triathlon and the Race Across America. I was beginning to develop a considerable legacy, and the prominence of my on-camera time helped Kaminsky upgrade his phone list. New possibilities were again coming into sight.