The Tour de France
It’s 1981, 11:00 p.m. WCBS news producer Andy Meppen yells across the newsroom, “Hey, Tesh, the president of CBS Sports is on the phone for you. Where do you want it?”
“Send it to the wall phone,” I say.
I had stumbled through reading a few sports scores on the Sunday evening local newscast. Did I get a score wrong? Why is this guy calling me?
“Hello?”
“Hello, John, it’s Van Gordon Sauter. I’m the new president of the CBS Sports Network. I’m here with our executive producer, Terry O’Neil. We’d like to talk to you about maybe coming over here with us.”
“I’m sorry. You mean sportscasting?”
“Something like that,” Sauter says somewhat coyly. “We are putting together a new team here, and we’d like to hire some folks with journalism credentials and really go after ABC’s Wide World of Sports with some bigger World Championship–type events. And besides, you’ve been at WCBS for almost six years and you’re looking a little bored on the air lately; maybe you’d like a fresh challenge.”
Excuse me? I don’t know what bothers me more, that he thinks my broadcasts are boring or that he can see something I cannot. Bored? Me? I am in New York City!
O’Neil clears his throat and immediately jumps in.
“Listen John, we love your work and we think you’d be great at doing some sideline reporting for CBS Sports and perhaps some of our event coverage.”
“Uh, thanks, Terry, but you should probably know that I know very little about sports reporting. I can’t name three NBA teams.”
O’Neil laughs at this. “I get it,” he says, “but the events we are talking about are usually very unfamiliar to TV audiences. We’ve watched quite a few tapes of your live interviews, and we think this could really work. What if we at least sit down and get to know each other. How is tomorrow? Tenth floor at Black Rock?”
Black Rock was the headquarters for most of the CBS network brass. While the production studios, where I was, were in a low-slung brick building on West Fifty-Seventh Street over in Hell’s Kitchen, Black Rock was a shiny tower down on Sixth Avenue in the heart of midtown.
“Uh. Okay,” I said.
Click.
Why doesn’t anybody in the business say goodbye?!
I didn’t know it at the time, but aside from owning the broadcast rights to a number of major sporting events—pro basketball, golf, US Open Tennis—much of CBS Sports’ other programming was an embarrassment for the network. While ABC, with Jim McKay as host, covered figure skating, skiing, and gymnastics, CBS was broadcasting World’s Strongest Man, Mr. Universe, and Major League Fishing (not that there’s anything wrong with fishing).
Terry O’Neil had been hired away from ABC Sports to revamp the programming and change the CBS reputation. Terry knew that I did not have experience doing live play-by-play sports announcing, but he felt he could add some gravitas to the sideline reporting and to the events themselves if he hired guys like me and Pat O’Brien out of the news reporter ranks. His vision for what I could add personally to the anthology events was far beyond anything I could have imagined for myself. Terry and CBS Sports president Sauter had obviously had a sidebar conversation with my superiors at WCBS before coming to me. It was all in the family.
In the middle of all of this, my dad was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer. Two weeks prior to the meeting with Terry, test results confirmed that the cancer had spread to his lymphatic system. I had been flying to North Carolina each weekend trying to help my mom, and now Terry was talking about a job that would send me all over the world. I remember a strange conversation with my dad when we were alone in his hospital room. I was crying pretty hard and he put a hand on my shoulder and said these words: “Don’t worry, Johnny, you won’t catch this.”
It’s not at all what I had been thinking. Nonetheless, what a strange (albeit false) prophecy.
In any case, during the next four months I was an emotional, unstable wreck. My dad succumbed to the cancer at the age of sixty-three and I began my new professional life, traveling to a new country every other week, and I rushed into a proposal and then marriage to my on-again, off-again girlfriend.
I had said yes to the job offer when I met with Terry that day at Black Rock for several reasons. First, I was taken by Terry’s experience, intelligence, and vision. Next, if you’re looking at a career ladder in the world of broadcasting, the CBS Network is right at the top. Terry also seemed interested in my background as a music composer and saw it as an asset in the assignments he had in mind for me. And finally, Sauter was right, sort of. I was getting bored—of reading the news, of racing to fires, of covering murders. These things had satisfied my performative streak, and they quenched my thirst for being in the center of things, live and in person, but fundamentally I wasn’t creating anything. I was just catastrophizing. And when that happens, two things are possible: either it gnaws a hole in your spirit, or you become numb to it. I was becoming numb, which from the outside looks very much like boredom.
But Terry O’Neil’s most masterful move was not his sales pitch. It was pairing me with incredibly talented producers for whom creativity was the rule, not the exception: John Faratzis, David Dinkins, Ed Goren, David Winner, and David Michaels. I found out later how much Terry fought for us, particularly Michaels and me, when the old-school producers and directors at CBS rolled their eyes at our documentary-style approach to sports broadcasting, but O’Neil was no fool. He somehow knew that the match of Michaels and me could produce groundbreaking television.
There was never a time during my five to six years at CBS Sports when I wasn’t challenged, when I wasn’t stretched beyond my abilities. One weekend I’d be covering downhill skiing in Wengen, Switzerland, the next I’d be broadcasting the World Speed Skating Championships in Karl-Marx-Stadt, East Germany. There was the Ironman Triathlon, World Figure Skating, World Gymnastics Championships, and the US Open Tennis Championships. I put in hundreds of hours of research, not only learning about the athletes, but also trying to make sense of the rules. I felt like I was studying for the SAT each weekend. But no event was more challenging than the legendary Tour de France bike race. It was where Terry O’Neil’s belief in me as a writer, announcer, and especially, later on, as a composer was put to the ultimate test, and where it began to mightily reshape my life anew, once again—this time back toward music.
It’s 2:00 a.m. We’re in Bordeaux, France. In the corner of my eye I can see four giant reel-to-reel, one-inch videotape machines spinning wildly back and forth. They are searching for in-cues and out-cues of cycling footage sent to them by the CMX video-editing console. The smells of coffee and stale French cigarettes are punctuated by the body odor of a half-dozen men who haven’t slept in days. This is the CBS editing truck. A truck like this is normally parked outside an NFL football stadium or a golf match. Today the truck is perched in the center of a centuries-old cobblestone square in Bordeaux. We are at the halfway mark of the 1982 Tour de France bike race, and it is the job of the men inside this truck to produce what amounts to a two-hour documentary about the previous week’s racing.
Our makeshift broadcast compound here in Bordeaux is ringed by handcrafted shoemakers, elegant boutiques, tea cafés, and countless bars and restaurants. The quiet of the town is presently being shattered by the persistent chugging of our power generator. Our white truck, with the giant CBS Sports logo, presents as an alien spacecraft that has crash-landed in an unsuspecting French village. From my position inside, in the far-left recording booth, if I stretch my neck I can see a small piece of the cobblestone street outside that we are blighting. It’s much easier to see the video output of the master recording machine that is showing me a video recording of hundreds of miles of French countryside with cyclists snaking through it. On this monitor I can view the edits and hear sound effects and the music score I composed on my synthesizers to accompany these riders’ arduous journey.
My eyes are bleary, but I can still see that this week’s coverage has begun to take shape. When the program is fully realized, it will be transmitted from our truck in Bordeaux to a satellite. That signal will then be relayed to another satellite, which will send it to a giant dish on the roof of the CBS Broadcast Center on Fifty-Seventh Street in New York City. In seven and a half hours, Master Control in New York will lock on to our signal and ultimately turn over the entire network of CBS local stations to this smelly van full of ragtag, exhausted humans.
As I scan the men and the equipment to my right, I feel like someone should call New York and tell them to have a movie rerun ready to go. I’m certain that we have little chance of having even one hour of Tour de France programming completed by 3:30 p.m. eastern standard time. The stress is showing on producer David Michaels’s face. It would be awfully simple to use the French video coverage of the race, dub over their footage to our machines each week, and then have me and fellow announcer Phil Liggett do some cursory play-by-play announcing. We would just tell the audience who was in the lead and who the key athletes were, and call it a day. Boom. Done. Simple. Red wine for everyone.
That was not something Michaels was going to do. He was a documentary filmmaker at heart and the crew he had assembled for this event, including me, revered him as one of the best storytellers in the sports world. And Le Tour, as it is called by the French, is a heck of a story. For years, it has been described by American journalists as “the Super Bowl of Cycling,” but that’s just a cute little euphemism that disguises this monster of a race. In actual fact, the Tour de France in 1982 was twenty-three Super Bowls contested over twenty-four days. It included seventeen six-hour races with seventeen different finish lines, interspersed with six separate twenty- to sixty-minute sprint races at breakneck speeds. It was 2,200 miles of racing, all of it staged during the month of July, in the French summer heat. The only thing that’s been able to stop the Tour de France since its founding in 1903? Two world wars.
When CBS vice president Peter Tortorici and executive producer Terry O’Neil purchased the US broadcast rights to the Tour, they had a vision for how CBS could bring that story to life and elevate the sport of cycling to something Americans would be interested in watching—and not just for the whizzing bicycles and crashes involving athletes no one in the US had ever heard of. The challenge for those of us in the trenches wasn’t so much finding the story that Tortorici and O’Neil (and Michaels, to his credit) knew would change Americans’ perceptions; it was turning six days and more than eighty hours of weekly race footage into a two-hour movie each week for four straight weeks. It was a daunting task.
Fortunately, I had David’s unique formula for covering the Tour de France to follow. His approach, while straightforward and later emulated by broadcasters at all of the sports networks, was incredibly difficult to execute. David’s process opened up numerous creative possibilities for me on the music composition side. Instead of merely “following the leader” during the race, Michaels wanted to find the Rocky vs. Apollo Creed story each week. He wanted to find the tortoise vs. the hare, the Cain and Abel within a given team, the man vs. the mountain, the little engine that could, the dark horse.
“Who is the underdog?” David would ask. Why did we want him to win? What were the stories in the grupetto, the back of the pack? Each of these stories had a different tone, a different pace, a different feel. The music required to convey the appropriate emotion to the audience, to make them understand, was wildly different from story to story, rider to rider. It was heaven for a composer. David Michaels’s approach—up close and personal—was originally made popular by Jim McKay and ABC’s Wide World of Sports. It was a boon for my creative side, but it was a nightmare for my practical side. Applying this storytelling technique to the Olympic coverage is one thing—you literally have years to shoot those personal background pieces—but in a race that unfolds before you each day in France, you have only hours to create biographies for the key figures. The enormity of it all, jammed into such a tiny temporal space, made your head spin.
Before David Michaels edits each of the twelve- to fifteen-minute television segments of the Tour de France, he writes out an outline. Then, without music or narration, he edits the video segments, going through in his mind what the story, narration, and music (tempo specifically) will be. With associate director Victor Frank and his tape operators listening intently, Michaels calls out the shots he needs to tell the story, and the team frantically scans their notes to see which cameraman or helicopter pilot has recorded those shots during the race coverage. On most days, Michaels is on the back of a motorcycle, shooting with a video camera so he knows what has transpired during the day’s competition. In a perfect world, armed with that firsthand knowledge, David and his team would complete the video edits for the weekly show twelve hours before broadcast. Then he and I could sit and watch the rough cut (“spot it”) while he offered copywriting suggestions and I took notes.
During this time he would also switch “creative languages” and go on to describe the styles of music he wanted. David was an orchestral bass player in high school and had great facility speaking musical language:
“I hear a big orchestra hit here!” he would say.
“I hear a haunting cello line just as Greg LeMond comes out of the Pyrenees fog during the uphill climb.”
“Make it a ‘devilish symphony.’”
“Can we just do some ostinato piano notes that match Bernard Hinault’s pedaling tempo when he is chasing down Greg?”
This is moviemaking, and although most writers and composers get more time for production than a rapid-fire conversation over a rough cut, David would say, “It is what it is. We’re making movies here.”
I certainly would’ve loved to have twelve hours to do my work—what a gift that would’ve been—but that was not going to happen that day. We were far behind schedule. I knew full well that if I waited for the video team’s rough cut, I’d be dead in the water. I knew that if I didn’t somehow outthink David, the fate of the entire broadcast would, at the eleventh hour, fall squarely on me. Of the four essential production elements that go into a documentary approach to filmmaking—pictures, writing, narration, music score—three of them were my responsibility.
This challenge was overwhelming at times, but David’s faith in me was a powerful elixir.
Right now I am writing this chapter on a souped-up MacBook Pro laptop computer. On this computer I have the Logic Pro X music application loaded with seven hundred gigabytes of sound samples from three different orchestras, including a massive orchestral percussion library. I can import video directly into this laptop and in fifteen minutes I can create a realistic symphonic score, perfectly synchronized to picture. I can even email it to you, if you’d like. Then I can plug my Sennheiser 416 dialog microphone into this computer and add narration to that picture and score. While I’m watching and mixing in Logic, I can use Google Docs to write the narration. As I type, that narration will simultaneously appear on my iPhone, which I can then read from while I’m using the laptop to record and mix. In 1982 none of these futuristic tools existed.
Before me in the truck in Bordeaux are two giant E-MU systems keyboards known as emulators. They are the very first generation of sampling music keyboards that can emulate acoustic instruments. I have emulations of orchestral brass and stringed instruments as well as drum kits, basses, and guitars. The challenge, however, is that the emulator can load only one sound at a time from a floppy disk, and each one takes two to three minutes to load. That waiting time adds up quickly.
To my left is a four-track reel-to-reel recorder. I load it up and start composing with the emulators. After I lay down tracks to each piece of music, I mix the music down in one pass and transfer the audio to the video team.
Then I grab a chair next to Michaels in the control room and start writing my narration for the first three completed segments while keeping an eye on the other segments he is currently working on. The control room is now an ear-shattering cacophony of spinning tape machines, shouts of time cues, and music cues in rewind. It is 7:30 a.m. in France, but the clock above the video switcher is set to eastern time in the US. It’s 2:30 p.m. The feed from our truck is “Live!” in exactly one hour, and we are nowhere near close to finishing the program.
Because of my twelve years as a local news anchor and reporter, I am familiar with breaking news in a live situation. There were many times on WCBS when I’d be reading a news story on live television. The producer would hand me a piece of news copy just off camera while the other anchor was delivering a story. Typically, I’d have sixty seconds to read the story “cold,” trying to look far enough ahead so that I wouldn’t be tripped up by a typo or say something that could be libelous.
After three or four of these per broadcast, I learned how to go into a kind of trance, slow down my delivery, and use an economy of words. It’s clear that I will be calling upon all of my guerrilla TV training to provide the live narration and music cues (along with the live audio mix) to the satellite.
Right now I’m trying hard not to fully embrace the enormity of what’s expected of us all in this TV production truck, thirty-six hundred miles from the CBS Broadcast Center in New York. When CBS throws the switch in New York, connecting our truck to its network of two hundred local stations, we will control all of the network’s programming for a full two hours. In theory, we should finish all of our taped segments, transmit them to the broadcast center, and then they can simply be played back like a normal, two-hour television program. But because we are still editing the last two segments, it’s apparent that those won’t be ready until it’s time to play them live-to-air from our truck.
This is not an ideal scenario for a sports television network, and there was a good amount of screaming on the other end of our phone by the producers in New York who are being stressed out mightily because we are cutting it so close.
Anything could happen from a remote location like this. We could have a power failure, the satellite feed could fail, or I could faint from exhaustion. As the World Clock ticks down toward the 3:30 p.m. eastern debut of our program, Victor Frank counts down our tape operators: “Five, four, three . . . ,” then shouts, “Roll video machine one! . . . two, one!” Segment one is now transmitting from our truck to the network. I glance out the tiny window in my booth and see two security guards standing at attention on either side of our power generator. There is a small crowd of locals gathered around a TV monitor that our guys placed outside for them so they could see the coverage. They are holding wine glasses and gesturing wildly as they watch.
As the French revelers look on outside, inside we still have thirty minutes of new program time to complete before 5:00 p.m. eastern. Michaels is giving out more time cues for the final two segments. As he makes each edit, I scribble down ideas for my narration. I’ve left three long pieces of music cued up in my recording booth. I’ve tested the microphone signal and I have labeled the audio mixing console.
Michaels is now a ship’s captain in a storm, stitching the storylines together for the final segments.
It’s almost time. Michaels has completed the video edits for the last two segments. He now transitions from producer to live-TV director. I have my production headset on. In my right ear I will hear my voice as I read and ad-lib the narration while at the same time mixing the music score underneath. In my left ear will be Michaels, counting me in and out of each transition as the shots change. He will also be whispering ideas into my headset as he leads me through the storyline. With a stopwatch in my left hand and a pen in my right, I’m rehearsing with my notes: adding a word here, placing two Xs where I need to remember to stop talking and bring up the volume of the music track.
Michaels is speaking into my left ear now: “Thirty seconds until we’re live to air, Teshman. Deep breath. I’ll be with you all the way. If you get stuck, just pause and I’ll lead you through it. Fifteen seconds. I’ll cue you, first to roll music and then to start your narration with the opening helicopter shot. Ten seconds!”
One more reflexive glance out my window. The crowd on the cobblestones, sipping wine and watching our coverage, has doubled in size. They look so calm and relaxed. I want to be there. I want to feel like that.
“Five seconds, Tesh. Good luck, everyone. Four, three, two, one. Cue music. Go John!”
I roll the reel-to-reel tape with my music, lift the volume fader on the mixing console, and lean into the microphone.
Me: Still eighteen hundred miles until they reach Paris. This is the race that will tease and torture its world-class competitors until it finds a champion. I’m John Tesh. Welcome back to the Super Bowl of Cycling. This is the Tour de France!
Today, when you attend one of my live concerts, you’ll see and hear evidence of all of this trial-by-fire training in the orchestrations and arrangements I use on stage and the video we project on the giant screen behind me. They are skills I developed while working under David Michaels’s direction during not just the Tour de France but the Ironman Triathlons and the Barcelona and Atlanta Olympic Games. I’ve often said in interviews and speeches that I will forever carry these skills I learned from David wherever I go, whatever I do. Ours was a classic creative partnership.
We had vastly different skill sets, but when combined, they worked together to create unique programming. It was guerrilla television. No job descriptions, just a mission, a common purpose. Here was yet another mentor who had developed a process. Years later this partnership that worked on sports television, that earned numerous Emmy Awards, would work to even greater effect with Michaels beside me at the Red Rocks Amphitheater, ultimately launching my music career and generating millions of dollars for local public television stations.