8

Free Agency

Linda quickly found her first niche in the world of TV, working in public relations for a new concept network, a premium pay operation that had named itself Home Box Office. She was meeting interesting people and working hard while I was mostly out on the road.

It also didn’t take long to forget the stern advice Keith Jackson had given me early in my first college football season, when he had sized me up enough to grudgingly acknowledge I just might have a future in the admired culture of ABC Sports. “Stay off the 28th floor,” Jackson said. “Steer clear of the supercilious executives in their Paul Stuart suits and their Gucci shoes. Buy yourself a home on the sunset side of the mountains and stay as far away as you can from 1330 Sixth Avenue. Do all that and you will have a long and successful career.”

The model for that was Jim McKay, who lived a train ride away in Westport, Connecticut, but almost never showed his face in the office. Nor did the overwhelming bulk of the announcer staff. The only other on-air face who regularly appeared at 1330 was Howard Cosell. On that evidence alone I should have realized how utterly warped and self-obsessed I had become.

In 1977, I began calling college football games in the play-by-play booth, trying to do so well at calling the fourth-best regional game that I could at some point elevate to the third-best regional game. I had learned about personnel management from Jackson, so I put forth a meaningful effort to evaluate candidates and recruit the best spotter and statistician I could find. Eventually, I rose high enough in the play-by-play hierarchy to call the Liberty Bowl, which ranked behind only the Sugar and Gator bowls in prestige among our network’s college games. Former Olympic researcher and Monday Night Football statistician Terry O’Neil, who was now climbing in the ranks of producers, lobbied hard for me to get the gig, then in the aftermath told me I had been awful, talking incessantly and seeking to call attention to myself.

“Just WAY too much of you, guy!” Terry said, and when I listened back on tape I had to agree.

My mother liked it, but I knew not to put too much stock in that. As time went on, I learned that conventional sports play-by-play—football, basketball, and baseball—might not be my bread and butter.

But now I lived in New York. And like the offices, the studios were in New York. And in the ongoing style and content evolution of sports television, the studios were becoming more and more important. And in the studio, your face was always on camera. I realized my youth and vitality and quick mind might give me an edge, and I began to think more in terms of host roles.

There was a rudimentary host operation attached to Wide World, most used to deliver promos for future programming and break up the monotony of the event coverage. There was a bare-bones College Football Scoreboard, hosted by several secondary players in the division army, but it was as thin a formality as it could possibly have been, even at a time when the Sunday NFL shows were growing in prominence.

With a veteran Keith Jackson apparatchik named Jerry Klein as my lieutenant, I targeted the college football studio and worked to get Chuck Howard focused on what that could mean to us, amid rumors that CBS was going to buy into the college football rights scenario and compete with us in a sport long exclusively ruled by yellow blazers and ABC Sports patches. By 1979, I was all set up with a birdcage full of eager young information freaks, mostly college age, armed with phone lines to every college football press box in the country.

I needed a sidekick on the air. There was a former University of Pittsburgh sports information director named Carroll “Beano” Cook, a college football obsessive with a million stories, many that couldn’t be told on the air, but he was witty and irreverent and an effective self-promoter. Best of all, he had gotten a lot of attention in the Sporting News in the fall of 1974, the first year Don Tollefson and I were on the air, with a column that decried us as the death of the sport, the worst thing television had ever done to football, and took me to task for being too handsome not to be hopelessly shallow. He had compared me to Hitler and Attila the Hun. So I told Chuck we had to get Beano to come in and sit next to me, and we did.

There was no way he would have turned down the exposure and the money.

When the production manager asked Beano what he would need to feel comfortable on the set, he asked that every Saturday he be given a dozen cans of Tab, which was the late ’70s precursor to Diet Coke. A dozen, he made clear, no fewer.

By his own design, Beano came off grumpy. In the hour before we went on the air for pregame the first Saturday, one of our young, impressionable runners, Andy Baumgardner, decided to seek a conversation with him. As he dropped off some written material to him on the set, and knowing that Beano had flown in from Pittsburgh for the gig, Andy cheerfully said, “So, Mr. Cook, did you have a pleasant evening in New York last night?”

Uninterested in the kid but choosing not to blow him off, Beano looked up and asked, “What do you mean?”

“Well, did you go out to dinner or do anything social?”

“I did the same thing I always do. Checked into the room, ate a room service hamburger, masturbated, and went to sleep. Any other questions?”

And on that note Beano’s tenure on the College Football Scoreboard began. He was a perfect sidekick for me, supportive, highly complimentary of my work, always full of utterly non-essential trivia that only the most similarly compulsive college football lovers would know. He drank a dozen full cans of Tab on the set every Saturday, and we worked together for several years. I never asked if in this role he saw me as Hitler or Attila the Hun. That was ancient history, which only helped me to realize that when someone in parallel media attacks you in public, he or she only makes you bigger. I was one of the biggest media voices in college football at that time, and Beano Cook was helpful in making me that way.

By the first half of 1978, a year and a half after Linda and I had moved from Chapel Hill to New York, my travel schedule had exploded.

Central to that was the Wide World syndrome, within which I was off week after week to remote locations for the exotic events that had over the years become on-air institutions. Those excursions were in addition to regional football games in the fall now that I had graduated from the sidelines to play-by-play. But I was still doing videotaped features and interviews for air on the A-game football telecast, so it wasn’t unusual for me to arrive back in New York on Sunday (or if I was lucky, late Saturday night), and then be off on another plane Tuesday morning for college football or Wide World. Or both.

I was a low-cost, high-intensity asset for the network, and for both sides it made good sense to exploit that. Linda was the most loyal and devoted wife I could ever have imagined, so if there was a threat to my marriage at that point, it would emerge from my too-frequent flirtations away from home.

But at the same time Linda and I had migrated north in 1976, my closest male friend from Chapel Hill had finished law school and was stepping into an entry-level deal with a Manhattan law firm. And for the next year and a half our lives were liberally intermingled as Linda helped him set up and furnish his West Side apartment, helped him select dating prospects to fill his social calendar, went in companionship with him to UNC-based social events that were frequent and made sense for them when I was out of town. I never gave a moment’s thought to the notion that might be the source of a coming breakup.

I was the one who was going to bars hundreds of miles away from New York and entertaining the advances of women who knew my face from TV. Linda’s willpower was bound to be sturdier than mine. I was sure of that.

So it came as a surprise when I returned from motorcycle speed week in Daytona Beach in 1978 and Linda casually asked, “Do you have any idea how many nights you have been home in the past month?”

Shocked, I fished for the logical number in my mind. “I don’t know. Maybe five?”

“It’s three.”

“Okay, makes sense. But who’s counting?”

“I’m counting, and that shouldn’t really surprise you, should it?”

“Maybe not, but why are you counting?”

The answer was my best friend’s name, Stan Davis. I learned that night they were pretty far along. We stayed up collaborating on a farewell audio tape containing every Jackson Browne ballad that had ever brought us to tears. The following day Linda took the bulk of her stuff and moved to his place on the West Side. I deeply loved them both, and I was sincerely happy for them. I was happy for all of us that there were no children involved. I was happy for me that I would no longer feel guilty about my misbehavior on the road.

I am still best friends with Linda, who is now another marriage beyond the one she shared for decades with my buddy the lawyer, and we compare our lives via text.

Many times, I have tried to take the blame for the dissolution of that marriage, but Linda firmly rejects that assertion. She has led a happy life despite various real-world challenges, and her friendship is a priceless treasure, just as it was when she was the only really cool person at Southwest Miami High School who would give me the time of day.

I went forward on a path of working life success and personal life chaos. Few who have as much wreckage on their resumes as I do can live without any regret, and I have plenty.

I was nowhere near displacing Keith Jackson on college football, and Keith was still young enough for me to expect to never get there. That was fine once the studio scoreboard operation became a strong presence. When Al Michaels came over from CBS to do the A-game on the baseball telecasts, I knew for sure the backup/rain-delay game would be the height of my ambitions there, and that was fine, too. I did not have the refined baseball knowledge and instincts to function as the central play-by-play figure there. But basketball? I mean . . . I had done the DEAN SMITH show. How could I fall short there?

Reality in the middle ’70s was no basketball presence at ABC Sports.

Years before, and for a significant period of time, the network had covered the NBA, and there was a famous in-house story of how Roone Arledge’s partiality to star power had prompted him to hire Bob Cousy as an expert commentator without acknowledging and accounting for Cousy’s speech affectations that caused him to mispronounce words, one of which was in this instance the boss’s name. That emerged when Arledge first met Cousy at courtside before a game, and the NBA all-time great stuck out his hand and said, “Hi Woone, Bob Cousy.” Shortly, other arrangements were made.

And by the time I arrived, the NBA package had moved to another network, leaving former Columbia University All-America distance-shooting legend Chet Forte to focus on sports other than his own, including Monday Night Football.

But then a one-off happened, giving me the chance to appear on a basketball telecast. Somehow the network acquired the rights to the championship game of the 1978 Atlantic Coast Conference tournament. Since Chuck Howard (Duke) and I (UNC) were habitually talking basketball and jousting with each other over ACC results, it only made sense that he assigned me to the game that became the Wide World of Sports feature on Saturday afternoon, March 4, from the Greensboro Coliseum.

It was a national telecast, and I wasn’t yet to be trusted with that kind of play-by-play assignment, so the role was as a sideline/bench reporter in my yellow ABC blazer. There was an ancillary thrill, because in casting about for an expert commentator, the network had made a deal with the great Bill Russell, and as a lifetime Celtics fan who worshipped his championship record and his outspoken commitment to civil rights, I admired him and couldn’t have described in words my excitement when Forte invited me to his room the night before the semifinal games—Wake Forest vs. UNC, Duke vs. Maryland—to meet Russell.

I went in while Russell and Chet were playing gin rummy with a couple of other people. The great No. 6 barely noticed me, but at some point it was mentioned to him that I was a Carolina alum and knew Dean Smith. For a few seconds, I felt great pride. Then Russell looked right at me.

“Well, I hope you’re going to be okay with losing tomorrow. Dean Smith is an awful coach. That four corners offense thing is an atrocity. He’s wasted more good talent than any other coach I know. And tomorrow night he’s going to lose to Wake Forest. So don’t be all brokenhearted when it happens.”

Laughter filled the room. I didn’t know for sure whether it was all a big joke or whether Russell meant every word he said, but it was clearly no time and place for me to push that issue. Heartbroken—Coach Smith was at that time my No. 1 most irreproachable idol—I hung around long enough to finish one beer and then slink off back to my room.

The following night, as Russell had predicted, Wake Forest upset the Tar Heels in what would be the great Phil Ford’s last ACC game in a Carolina uniform, and I was in a double gloomy funk. Russell was entitled to his opinion, and sometimes your most revered idols can be dead wrong about something. Unless he was doing it at Chet’s behest just to pull my leg, which might or might not have been even worse.

To make matters more cruel, the championship game we were calling turned out to be between Wake Forest and Duke, the Tar Heels’ bitter basketball rival. The Blue Devils not only won their first ACC title in 12 years, but they also went on to reach the Final Four in St. Louis and defeat Notre Dame and Digger Phelps in the semifinals before losing to Kentucky on Monday night due mostly to a 41-point performance by Jack “Goose” Givens.

By the time ABC acquired an ongoing involvement in college basketball, it was 1987, Roone had been displaced as the division chieftain, and his successor was in the process of forcing me and Chuck Howard out of our jobs. Later, I called one college basketball game on CBS and one NBA game (Spurs vs. Clippers) on NBC. In both instances the boss was looking for me to succeed, which probably would have led to a regular assignment, and I got no real feedback after the telecast and was never assigned to courtside again. So Dean Smith or no Dean Smith, I can only surmise that I wasn’t any good at calling basketball.

You can’t always get what you want, period.