24

The Lead Dog

Jack said “Longevity is lovability” (Courtesy of Jim Lampley)

As 1996 began, I was seeking to recover from a series of career disappointments, some of them the product of my own misjudgments and bad behaviors. I had lost the NBC Sports 18th hole golf tower and NFL studio in the preceding year and a half, and I suspected I had cost myself the host chair for Real Sports at HBO by taking easy money to do an infomercial. My high-profile marriage to news anchor Bree Walker was a rock pile, and she had lost her anchor chair at KCBS-TV. By the end of the summer, we were done with Hollywood and took our two kids off to year-round living in our ski house in Park City, Utah.

The fresh air felt like our only chance at redemption. We were now too jaded and wounded by Hollywood life to look at each other with a straight face. Park City was Hollywood only for one month a year, when the Sundance Film Festival took over the town. That one month shouldn’t be enough to kill us. But just to make sure we could maximize Sundance, I shelled out a monstrous sum of money to fulfill a foolish dream to have my own restaurant, a bar and bistro named Lakota in a can’t-miss location fewer than 20 feet from the Park City Mountain town lift.

I dreamed of becoming a great skier and dominating the restaurant scene. In the next two years I would have time only to slightly improve my sloppy skiing and launch Lakota well enough to become a fixture on the downtown circuit. And the tumult of Hollywood did not give way to greater serenity, so I sold Lakota. My frequent travel and continuing TV exposures made Bree increasingly agitated and eager to be back on camera.

No golf and no NFL studio meant a lower public profile, but amid reporting assignments from Real Sports and boxing matches and then Wimbledon, there was still no shortage of travel and work. As I made final preparations for the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, Brooke was coming from London, where her mother now lived, to join me. We met in New York, where on Thursday, July 11, former World Boxing Organization (WBO) world heavyweight champion Riddick Bowe was looking to set up another title shot against Poland’s undefeated Andrew Golota at Madison Square Garden.

Brooke’s original plan was to come to the fight alone, and through HBO I secured a ticket for her to sit in the front row right behind my ringside table. But I got a message from her that she wanted to bring an old school friend from upper New Jersey, Mike Kopech, to the fight. She would take potluck with the seat location, knowing that a second front-row seat would at that point be impossible. I wouldn’t know for sure where she and Mike were, but they were teenagers, so I wasn’t that worried.

The Garden was jammed, a cross-cultural battleground for Bowe and Golota’s distinctly different clienteles. The fight was flabbergasting; underdog Golota constantly beat Bowe to the punch and ripped power shots to his chin and rib cage. Through six mostly one-sided rounds, Golota had built a lead marred only by his own repeated low blows. He was warned in the second round and penalized a point in round three for hitting Bowe in the crotch. In the sixth and seventh rounds Golota landed two more flagrantly illegal below-the-belt shots, his fourth and fifth of the fight, and referee Wayne Kelly abruptly disqualified him, touching off a riot.

Golota’s fans were incensed that an official’s judgment had blocked their man from a chance to fight for the heavyweight crown. They were affronted that he was being ruthlessly mugged. A member of Bowe’s entourage leaped over the ring ropes and ran across to Golota’s corner to assault the Polish fighter with a 1996-size walkie-talkie. The butt of the heavy instrument repeatedly thudded into the top of Golota’s skull. And in a matter of seconds, there were fistfights all around the ring and a free-for-all inside it, seemingly every man for himself.

Larry Merchant, George Foreman, and I kept our seats at ringside. Then as the surrounding chaos built and we could see violence spreading in front of us, we stood up. With my headset microphone still on I was describing events in the ring, suddenly including the removal of Golota’s trainer, Lou Duva, looking severely stricken, on a gurney. At about that moment our announcer location with all its necessary audio engineering gear toppled over. And as I replaced my headset to continue covering the riot, I could hear Foreman, in a calm voice, urging a couple of would-be entrants to the rumble in the ring to reconsider their urge.

“You don’t want to climb up in there. You’re only going to get hurt. Turn around and go back to your seats,” Big George advised.

As I turned away from the ring to look at them, I found George’s huge left arm jutting out across my body like a safety barrier, protecting me while I kept talking. It occurred to me we had performed our show opening on camera from a high platform about a third of the way back into the lower-deck seating area. There would be audio gear there, and I would be able to see more clearly what was going on. I knew Merchant would want to stay in the thick of things, and he would have Foreman for protection.

From high up on the camera platform, the heart of the problem became visible. The uniformed Madison Square Garden security guards were classic rent-a-cop types, unarmed and ill-equipped to deal with real violence. People were attacking each other with folding chairs. If there were any true New York City police in the area, they were not yet in evidence inside the arena.

The reports I heard later regarding the length of time it took for a police presence to materialize ranged from 7 minutes to more than 15 minutes. I wasn’t counting, I was reporting. Merchant lobbed in a ringside observation. Foreman kept playing peacemaker. After something like order had been restored, HBO Sports executive producer Ross Greenburg got on his internal microphone and urged me to begin summing the whole thing up, with a reminder to cover what had happened in the boxing match and get us to a “good night” conclusion. The last thing he said was, “And whatever personal comment you want to make about all this, feel free to let it rip.”

And that was the moment it first occurred to me Brooke was in the crowd somewhere. It shook me. I followed Ross’s instruction, and as I looked into the camera to say good night, I told the audience, “I’ve got a sixteen-year-old daughter in here somewhere. I’ve got to find her.”

A striking way to close a landmark show, all real, all natural. Brooke was fine, thank heavens, because the best tickets HBO could provide her at the last minute were up in the second deck. They watched the riot but were not in it.

The following day we flew to Atlanta for the Olympics. I was again co-hosting the late-night segments with Hannah Storm. Brooke would go to some events such as high-prestige track and field with some of my Hollywood entertainment friends, notably Jack Nicholson and film producer James L. Brooks. But most of the time she chose to be in the late-night office or the control room, watching me work at close range, enjoying her friendships with the large squadron of young staffers at NBC. She knew everyone from Dick Ebersol down to the rookie runners and had clear pictures of what most of them did.

Our daily journeys from the Renaissance Hotel to and from the broadcast center were on public transportation. Frequently in the first week following, total strangers turned to us and asked, “Is this the girl? This is your daughter?” And repeatedly she would recite her version of the story I had been telling the preceding Saturday night. She got her own first taste of being a public figure, and I was thinking she enjoyed it, but not too much. And by the beginning of the Olympic Games that weekend, massive news stories wiped the slate clean.

For the second time in four years, we went to the opening ceremony together. Like everyone in the crowd we watched the entry of the flame in rapt anticipation of the answer to a carefully kept secret: Who would light the torch on American soil? Brooke was a little ahead of me in nailing the answer: the man who had entertained her with magic and card tricks at the Boxing Writers Association of America dinner eight years before, Muhammad Ali. The sight of Ali in the spotlight above an epic staircase to the top rim of the stadium, trembling in the grip of his advancing Parkinson’s but proudly igniting the Olympic flame, was beyond breathtaking. It was deeply personal, and sure to be unforgettable, and eerily typical of all our father-and-daughter experiences. My boyhood hero, her poet laureate, and still as famous and meaningful as any human being alive. It was a refreshing and rejuvenating way for the Atlanta Games to begin, for Brooke and me, for NBC Sports chief Ebersol, who had helped to mastermind the plan behind the scenes, and ironically, for the sport of boxing, which eight days after the stain of Bowe-Golota saw its own living saint bathed in the global spotlight.

Eight days after that something happened that made the Bowe-Golota riot seem trivial. Hannah and I were seated on the late-night set just past 1 AM on July 27 when word came in that a bomb had gone off in a place named Centennial Park, near to the broadcast center. A crowd of thousands had assembled there for a free concert, and there were numerous reports of injuries.

John McGuinness instantly became a news producer, and Hannah and I converted to news-anchor mode. And we held our own, because no broadcasters are as experienced in dealing with extemporaneously developing stories and live adjustments as sportscasters are. We did what we knew how to do. Eventually we bore the sadness of reporting that a 44-year-old woman from Albany, Georgia, had been killed by a nail that penetrated her skull, and a 40-year-old Turkish cameraman had died of a heart attack. Eleven other people were hospitalized, among 111 wounded. Sometime past 3 AM Tom Brokaw, the central face of NBC News, hurried onto the set to replace us.

For the second time in three weekends, I had instantaneously put my news anchor background into play in the coverage of something more serious than sports competition. For the second time it was widely noticed, and Hannah and I fielded congratulations from everyone around us in the broadcast center. Maybe too many congratulations. Maybe there in the bosom of NBC, where I had suffered embarrassing losses in the two preceding years, I was too eager to bask in the limelight.

On Monday I answered questions for USA Today about what had happened on the set Sunday night. In a conscience-free burst of self-approval, I unleashed a barrage of damaging quotes suggesting that Hannah had recognized my news anchor–based primacy in that situation and had in effect deferred to me on the set. Even I knew that wasn’t really true. The most stupidly salacious quote was partially reproduced in the headline: “To make that situation work, one or the other of us has to be the lead dog.”

At the broadcast center was a message calling me into Dick Ebersol’s office. There was no available defense to be mounted, I had stupidly dishonored Hannah, the sports anchor I respected beyond all others, and my apologies to her, though she gracefully purported to accept them, were empty. I felt a brand of shame I had never before experienced in my career or my personal life. I limped through the rest of the Atlanta Games, but the whole time I felt enclosed by my self-constructed black cloud.

Two moments distracted me enough to lift some of the gloom. The first occurred later that week when I approached the men’s room in the hallway outside the late-night office and noticed a gaggle of large men in blue suits standing outside the entrance door. I walked past them, strode to the urinal, and as I began my business there, glanced to my right to encounter a famous acquaintance.

Shortly after I had been fired from my KCBS-TV news anchoring job in 1992 I was contacted by Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign to anchor with him a live fundraiser that was televised in five California cities. We had spent several hours together in the greenroom and on the set, two Southern boys raised on Southern politics with a great deal in common. Now we greeted each other shoulder to shoulder at the urinal, he on the way to his second term in the White House, me wondering what the next misadventure in my seemingly foundering career would be. Under the circumstances, there was no handshake.

The second redemptive moment sprang spontaneously from my eldest daughter. A swimming star of the Atlanta Games was freestyle sprinter Gary Hall Jr. He was a second-generation Olympian, and I had interviewed his father on the field at the closing ceremony in Montreal 20 years before on the night when he was chosen to carry the United States flag. Now his son was a second-week hero in Atlanta, having anchored two relay gold medals and winning two individual silvers. He attracted attention with his pool deck theatrics, arriving in robe and boxing trunks, shadowboxing and performing calisthenics before he swam. With piercing blue eyes and chlorine-blond hair, he was movie-star handsome, a condition not unknown to him.

It was a standard reflex for the late-night show to reel in and debrief all the American stars who stayed for the closing ceremony. And at the moment when Gary Hall Jr. was brought into the broadcast center, word spread among the college-age and close-to-college-age women on the NBC staff. Dozens packed the narrow hallway outside our telecast studio in the hope of getting a word or a photo with Hall. But there was a back entrance to the studio, and the center of attention was sneaked onto the set without contacting his assembled admirers. He sat alone on a sofa and waited for Hannah and me to get made up and brought in. And that process hadn’t even yet begun.

In the control room, producer McGuinness urgently looked around, announcing to the team, “Hey, we need someone to keep this guy engaged. Who can go in there and talk with him while he awaits Hannah and Jim?” And as a half dozen other female voices immediately rose to the task, McGuinness’s eyes lit on the one silent female in the room.

“Brooke, go onto the set and keep him entertained.”

It was the last thing the older women, most all of them actually employed by NBC, wanted to hear, and there was a group groan as the only 16-year-old girl among them obediently rose from her back-row chair and slipped into the studio. She sat down facing the matinee idol of the Atlanta Olympics and began to make small talk.

But the microphones on the set were shut down at that moment, so the control room was getting a silent movie for a minute or so. A cacophony of voices loudly urged the audio engineer, “Pot them up! We want to hear this.” Audio looked at McGuinness, and he nodded.

It was truly small talk. But pretty soon, Hall got to the obvious question, who was this teenager and why did she have access to a studio at the Olympics? And when Brooke had filled in that blank, he asked the most logical question imaginable.

“So, do you want to work in sports television like your dad?”

Instantly, reflexively, with no necessary consideration: “Oh, no, never. I’ve seen the dark side of this business.”

The crew in the control room was dumbfounded. “Oh, my God, did she really just say that? Where did she come up with that thought?”

Brooke was already something of a curiosity in the NBC Olympics culture due to her omnipresence in Barcelona and Atlanta. Now, at least for the small group in that control room, she was a legend. And though some who heard her manifesto might have doubted it, she knew whereof she spoke. In nearly 30 years since Atlanta, she has never come anywhere close to working in my world, and now as senior director for the Gagosian galleries in New York City, she clearly never will.

Two weeks after the closing ceremony, I saw my penalty for the incredibly stupid “lead dog” comments. Ebersol issued a production schedule that showed I was headed to Daytona Beach to cover the US cheerleading championships. CHEERLEADING? It wasn’t a misprint. If I had harbored any doubt that my career in commercial network television sports was now thoroughly on the rocks, there it was in black and white.

“Lead dog”? I felt like a dead dog. Beyond cheerleading I knew I could look forward to a dreary fall schedule of tail-end NFL games, and my chances of working at the Sydney Olympics in 2000 were dead. Just dead. The contract would expire before then.

I agonized. I lost sleep. I ruminated about how to lift myself up out of the funk I had created. I knew one person who had faced such emptiness in his life and somehow conquered it. I needed some more Nicholson knowledge. Most of the world could never have known his story, but I did. So I picked up my cell phone and called Jack.

I had met him in an art gallery years before and we struck up a conversation about boxing. Now we shared a financial manager, had many friendships in common, and played countless hours of golf together. In golf cart after golf cart I interviewed him and marveled at his wisdom, his recognition of the degree to which we are all subject to inexplicable fate. He knew the counterintuitive narrative of how, after waiting for a decade for the match to be struck in his acting career, he had given up in favor of becoming a full-time producer, only for that path to reverse when another actor had a fight with Dennis Hopper and gave up his role in Easy Rider. More than anyone else I knew, Jack Nicholson was in touch with the reality that what is meant to be is meant to be, and we accept it or live in disappointment.

I had spent many hours in Jack’s Mulholland Drive living room talking about art, about golf, about him, but never before with a total focus on me. We sat down and he listened as I spelled out the desolation I felt and the dreariness I saw in the emerging photo of my career. I asked him how actors, uninsured in their ambitions, lacking guaranteed contracts and continuing assignments, held on to their personal security when things went bad. And in a matter of a few minutes, Jack rescued me emotionally and saved my career.

“The first part of this, Lamp, is the oldest lesson in what I do: There are no lesser parts, only lesser actors. Whatever assignment they want to give you, even if it is the cheerleading championships, your job is to approach it proudly and perform the task as the greatest in the world ever to do it. There’s no other choice. Muscle up; something else will come your way.”

I thought about it and tried to digest it. There was no point in disputing it. I already had a plane ticket to Daytona Beach. He added a bit more.

“You still have boxing, and you are the best in the world at that. You work for the most prestigious network in television, at HBO where they aren’t selling soap. Focus on what you do best and trust it to take care of you.”

That felt better. And then the clincher.

“The second part is something you probably haven’t even thought of yet. You’re only 47. But take this to heart and never forget it: In any public platform, longevity is lovability. Hang in and do your best. If you can stay around long enough, they’ve got no fucking choice other than to love you.”

So almost 30 years later I can unequivocally say Jack was right; 30 years later and still with an enviable niche in the business of describing sports events and personalities on television, I thank him every day; 30 years later Jack’s words of wisdom ring in my ears, a code for staying sane in a business that can drive you to do crazy, self-destructive things, as I know all too well.