7
Unforgettable Moments
WHILE BASKETBALL HAS BEEN AT THE CENTER of my workload at TNT, it is far from the only assignment I’ve been given in my twenty-eight years there. I’ve done play-by-play, worked the sidelines, and hosted the studio for Major League Baseball, the NFL, golf, Wimbledon tennis, track and field, boxing, rowing, Olympic speed skating, team handball, weight lifting, judo, modern pentathlon (horses and riders going through various disciplines), and even a motorcycle jump by Robbie Knievel on an aircraft carrier docked in New York. This job has allowed me to see the world—Cuba, France, Norway, England, Scotland, Russia, South Africa, and Australia. And with such vast opportunities, I’ve acquired a lifetime of memories when the unscripted became reality.
Dan Jansen’s Olympic odyssey certainly qualifies. He was arguably the world’s best speed skater in 1988 when the games were held in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Before skating in the 500-meter sprint, in which he was favored to win gold, he learned that his sister Jane had lost her battle with leukemia. That day he raced and fell in the first turn. Four days later in the 1,000 meters, on world-record pace, he fell again. This was unheard of. Ask anyone close to the sport and they will tell you these world-class athletes stay on skates as easily as you and I stay on our feet while walking around the mall. The tragic loss of his sister, combined with the crushing result on the ice, made Dan Jansen a sympathetic figure in America during those ’88 games.
He would have another chance four years later in Albertville, France. The heartbreak of 1988 replayed on TV screens around the world before he competed. But again he came away empty-handed, leaving France without a medal. The year 1994 would be the last chance for this national champion to finally show his best on the Olympic stage. I had called his 1992 races on TNT and now found myself in Hamar, Norway, at a spectacular venue known as the Viking Ship—it resembled the upside-down keel of a ship—and it was packed every day with perhaps the most knowledgeable speed-skating fans on the planet. Norwegians know the sport, study the split times, and can recite world records the way Americans can rattle off baseball stats and records.
Ten thousand people inside the Viking Ship all knew Dan Jansen’s story. And they could feel his disappointment when he finished out of the medals in the 500 meters. That just made his performance in the 1,000 meters even more special. In his last chance at Olympic glory, he came up golden, and he did it in world-record time. It was a breathtaking moment to be at the microphone. But it paled in comparison to what happened next. He skated a victory lap holding his daughter, named Jane, in his late sister’s honor, while a standing-room-only crowd cheered and waved and cried. Blackberries don’t come much sweeter than that.
Covering golf’s Open Championship, or the British Open, if you will, has taken me to the birthplace of the game—St. Andrews in Scotland. What I witnessed and described on TNT in 2005 will stick with me forever. Jack Nicklaus was putting the finishing touches on his legendary career. As the all-time leader with eighteen professional major championships, he was playing in his final major, and it was at this historic site. He was sixty-five years old, and while no one harbored the illusion he would win the Claret Jug for the fourth time, everybody was hoping he might summon all of his one-of-a-kind skills and championship pedigree to make the Friday cut and play the weekend. What a Sunday send-off he would get from the Scottish gallery.
In the late stages of round two on Friday, it became apparent that would not happen—too much ground to make up and not enough time. Everybody knew it. And so everybody, and I mean all of Scotland, started converging outside the eighteenth fairway and green as the Golden Bear made his way toward the finishing hole. Calling Jack’s final hole in major competition was easy. For 90 percent of the time, I just shut up. The pictures told the story. There was the tee shot down the middle; the long photo opportunity as he crossed the famed landmark, the Swilken Bridge, where he stood and savored the moment; the approach that ran past the hole; and the left-to-right perfectly paced putt that found the bottom of the cup for a birdie. The roars were deafening. The emotions were pure. The adulation was overwhelming. There was, as I said on the air that day, “not a dry eye in the country.” What an honor to be there.
The Jansen gold and the Golden Bear’s stirring farewell to the Old Course were two sporting moments that make me appreciate the opportunity to do this job for a living. They were both unforgettable. So was my flight home from Brisbane, Australia, after the Goodwill Games of 2001, but the circumstances were far different. It came on America’s darkest day. Our TNT crew had been in Australia for more than three weeks, and I was anchoring our daily coverage of that multisport, Olympic-style competition. Our set was located on a man-made beach just outside the city, and we had a blast. I worked barefoot most of the time; athletes would come on for interviews; I took a kangaroo for a walk on the beach, held a koala bear, which didn’t smell very good and had very sharp claws, and played a drum with some aboriginal musicians. We did that kind of stuff while at the same time showing two weeks of competition. As much fun as we all had, we couldn’t wait to get back to the States. We were scheduled to land in Los Angeles, then fly to Atlanta.
The date was September 11, 2001.
The wheels touched down at LAX around 10:30 a.m. As we taxied to the terminal, we heard the captain on his microphone. “Folks, we have landed in Los Angeles, and you might notice out your windows that there’s not much activity. Without getting into any detail, I can tell you that there has been a national emergency, and every airport in the country has been shut down. The only reason we were even allowed to land here is that we did not have enough fuel to reroute. When we get to the gate, please gather your belongings and make your way inside. Law enforcement officers will tell you what to do next.”
There was no panic on board, just quizzical looks, until one of our senior producers, Howard Zalkowitz, sitting two rows in front of me, placed a quick phone call and delivered the news. “Planes hit the twin towers in New York. They’re both down. Another plane crashed into the Pentagon.” I borrowed his phone and called home. My oldest daughter, Maggie, fourteen, had been in school when it had all happened. “Dad! Are you all right? I saw the planes on TV. It’s awful, and I knew you were on a plane. When are you coming home?” At that point, I really didn’t have an answer to that last question.
We were met by FBI agents at the gate and escorted to baggage claim, where we gathered our luggage and were told that buses would pick us up and take us to the nearby rental car area, where we would be taken to a hotel. We would stay there until airline travel was permitted again, and no one knew when that might be—hours? days? Nobody knew. But I knew this. I was going home. Now. That was a feeling shared by our director, Steve Fiorello, and one of our videotape operators, Mike Winslow. We had families who had circled this date—the end of that long Australia adventure—and we had talked to our loved ones and heard the anguish. So we rented a van, and at 1:00 LA time, about seven hours after this 9/11 nightmare had started, we set out on a cross-country drive to Atlanta.
The three of us drove in three-hour shifts, with the radio tuned to the nonstop coverage of what had gone on in New York, Washington, and Shanksville, Pennsylvania. When we weren’t in the driver’s seat, we tried to get a little sleep, called home to assure our wives we were doing okay, or rode shotgun with a road map, seeking the best way home.
When we stopped, it was quick. Fill up the gas tank, get some food to go, keep movin’. It was a twenty-two-hundred-mile trip. A couple things stood out as we drove late that September 11 night through New Mexico. It was such a crystal clear night that when I woke from a nap in the backseat, the first thing I saw were stars that seemed so close you could reach out and touch them. And at one point we got to a spot so remote that when we hit the search button on the radio to try to get a station, it cycled through the entire band without stopping. Silver City, New Mexico, will always have a special place in my heart. In danger of running out of gas, we were able to fill up there at 2:00 a.m.
The next morning we stopped for coffee and more gas and realized we weren’t the only ones traversing the country. Four sailors in uniform were driving from San Diego to the East Coast and were refilling their tank. Hitting Interstate 20 in Texas was our short-term goal. Once we got on that, we could ride it straight into downtown Atlanta, but that drive through Texas and Louisiana and Mississippi and Alabama seemed interminable. There was little talking, lots of snoring, and all kinds of time to think.
As I thought about the flight from Australia, I was struck by the timing of a request I had made to a flight attendant early that Tuesday morning. I had awoken to see the most amazing sunrise out my window. Layers upon layers of brilliant colors stacked on top of each other. Back then it wasn’t totally uncommon for a passenger to ask if maybe for just a minute the pilot would allow him a look from the cockpit. I had asked the flight attendant if that was possible, given how brilliant the sunrise was, and she had said, “Sure, let me check and see.” She had returned a few minutes later and said she was sorry, but they were pretty busy. I started doing the math in my head as I rode in the backseat. I realized I had made that request to go to the cockpit when all hell was breaking loose in the skies over the United States.
Thirty-five hours after leaving Los Angeles on Tuesday afternoon, 9/11, we pulled into the parking lot of Turner Broadcasting at 3:00 a.m. on Thursday. Steve, Mike, and I got into our own cars and drove to our own homes. I walked into the house at 4:00 a.m. and turned on the TV. I had not yet seen one second of what had happened on Tuesday. It didn’t take long for the images to be broadcast again. I had heard all the descriptions on the radio during our cross-country drive. Now I was seeing the footage, and the destruction, and the looks of sheer desperation on the faces of New Yorkers wondering if their loved ones had somehow survived. I walked into the bedroom and gave my sleeping wife a kiss on the cheek and told her not to get up. I was just going to stay up, sit in the den, and be the first thing my kids saw when they came downstairs that morning.
I wrote a poem about 9/11. You’d never know that unless you were a member of the Turner Sports staff or one of the handful of TV guys from the NBA who were gathered in a hotel conference room for the annual seminar previewing the upcoming 2001–2002 season.
A little background. For years now, I’ve written poetry for fun. Once I heard Pete Van Wieren, one of my dad’s old broadcast partners, deliver at a banquet a poem he had written. It was touching and funny, and I admired Pete’s ability to do that. Later I learned that the legendary coach John Wooden wrote poetry to keep his mind sharp. So around 1995, I decided I was going to try to write a poem and read it at our end of the NFL season wrap party. It told the story of our eight weeks of traveling from city to city, and I weaved in tales that involved our crew members, some of which they would prefer not to have repeated in public. Before I knew it, I had a couple pages, and while the rhymes were often pretty juvenile, it was a hit! People laughed. They applauded. They wanted copies. They wanted me to read it again. Amazing the effect bad poetry can have on people.
Over the next twenty years, I wrote poems for annual Turner meetings before the NBA or MLB seasons. I wrote them for individuals like Alonzo Mourning and Dominique Wilkins and John Wooden and Charles Barkley and read them at banquets where they were being honored. I still write and recite a new one every year for the NBA’s Legends Brunch during All-Star Weekend. I’ve been asked to write them for Turner employees who are retiring or moving on to other jobs. In 2014, as Turner Sports was negotiating with the NBA to remain a broadcast partner, my boss Lenny Daniels asked me to write a poem that I would deliver to fewer than twenty people. Six were NBA owners—the guys we had to convince that the league needed TNT. I have no idea if I helped our cause, but we got the contract. And weeks later, as the Sports Business Journal chronicled what is always a lengthy and tense negotiation process, I was stunned to read this:
In Atlanta the league’s media committees toured Turner’s NBA studios, meeting with top Turner executives. An unlikely effective moment came during a general session meeting when Turner NBA broadcaster Ernie Johnson came into the meeting and recited a 20-paragraph poem rhyming the network’s commitment to the NBA. The lighthearted verse was meant to entertain, but also show how much Turner valued its relationship with the league. The two have been partners for the better part of three decades. “It was goose-bump fantastic,” said Washington Wizards owner Ted Leonsis, who chaired the owners media committee. “It was one of those little things that showed the right touch, and reconfirmed that they were a great partner.”1
Well, that was just about the nicest thing anybody’s ever said about my poetry. I do it for fun, but I’ve found that for just a few minutes it brings a group together. We laugh at ourselves and each other, and that’s never a bad thing.
In 2001, I didn’t know if I wanted to write a poem for the preseason NBA seminar. It had been just a little over a month since the 9/11 attacks. If I did compose something, should I just keep it to basketball and what had gone on in the off-season? So yes, I did write one. And no, it wasn’t just about basketball.
On That September Tuesday
It happens every mid-July, the cycle starts anew.
Guys get signed or they get traded. Let’s highlight a few.
Patrick Ewing’s on the move. He’s found a brand-new home.
He’s in the Sunshine State, where lots of other seniors roam.
The Nets and Suns pulled off a trade with Stephon dealt for Kidd.
Tim Hardaway’s in Dallas now, just one thing Cuban did.
Avery Johnson went to Denver. LA is Richmond’s team.
The Hawks got better quickly with Shareef Abdur-Rahim.
Derek Anderson’s in Portland now. Steve Smith’s in San Antone.
Houston hopes Glen Rice’s “J” will bust up every zone.
And remember how Chris Webber looked when Sacramento lost?
The Kings resigned their heart and soul, no matter what it cost.
It hardly made the headlines, not even in Detroit.
Brian Cardinal’s not a star, though he is fairly adroit.
But check the league transaction list, some of you may remember.
He signed his Piston contract on the tenth day of September.
On that September Monday, we thought, “Hey, is this the week?”
Michael’s got his mind made up, so when’s he gonna speak?
And suddenly the prospect of his imminent return
Was jolted from our minds as we watched two cities burn.
On that September Tuesday, well, our view forever changed.
We paid no mind to matters like those schedules we’d arranged.
Our eyes transfixed on images that chilled our very souls
And shook us at the cornerstone of all our dreams and goals.
On that September Tuesday, we just watched in disbelief,
Security and innocence the targets of a thief
Who sees the loss of life from some altered state of mind.
Evil showed its face that day in horror undefined.
On that September Tuesday, it seems we made a pact.
We’ll send the world a message from this land that was attacked.
Stories of the people who responded at Ground Zero
Gave us all a brand-new way to recognize a hero.
On that September Tuesday, there was courage in those rows
Of passengers who took a stand. Yes, let’s remember those.
And all who reached a hand to help in any way they could,
From the streets of New York City to your own neighborhood.
On that September Tuesday, the Father heard our pleas.
And in the days to follow you could find us on our knees.
We seek his comfort, seek his face, seek his almighty power.
For Scripture tells us that the Lord above is our strong tower.
On that September Tuesday, we were jolted wide awake.
To the man or group responsible, you’ve made a big mistake.
This nation, it is resolute. It defends and yes it fights.
Look no farther than this park, for here Atlanta unites.
On that September Tuesday, we were moved so many ways.
Sad and angry, violated—it’s been that way for days.
But mixed in with the hurt and the tears that won’t run dry
Is the knowledge that Americans can hear this country cry.
So on this October Wednesday, with the season almost here,
We know that many folks out there can’t shake this haunting fear.
And now perhaps they look to us, much more than years before,
As simply a departure as this country wages war.
It’s a challenge we can’t sidestep, and in fact we should embrace it.
There’s not a better bunch to take this on, come on let’s face it.
And so we start a season that will be unlike the rest,
And under the conditions, let’s make sure we give our best.