8
Bump
THE YEAR 2003 was going to be a great year for Turner Sports for a couple reasons. In February, TNT would for the first time televise the NBA All-Star Game. We’d been a part of that weekend for ages, the highlight for us being All-Star Saturday Night with the slam dunk contest and the three-point shoot-out. But as much fun as those events were, there was always a kind of empty feeling because by the time the game itself was played, our coverage had already ended. I’d be on the first plane out on Sunday morning, later watching the game at home. But after the new television contracts were hammered out, two of the major changes had Turner now owning All-Star Weekend, including the game, and ESPN now broadcasting the NBA draft, which we had done for years. I loved the trade-off.
The other biggie was that in July we would now have a share of the British Open, or as they call it in the United Kingdom, the Open Championship. I’ve always loved the game of golf and was thrilled in 1995 when executive producer Mike Pearl called me into his office and told me I would have a role in Turner’s coverage of the PGA Championship at Riviera in Los Angeles. That was a new responsibility for me, and to say that I had questions about doing golf play-by-play, or hole-by-hole, as it’s called, would be a massive understatement. A few years earlier, Jim Nantz of CBS, whose expertise has had him at the microphone for just about every major event on the American sports landscape, was visiting Atlanta on a night when I was working the NBA studio. During a few free minutes before the crew prepared for a halftime show, Jim and I had a chance to chat, and as we were talking, he said out of the blue, “You’ve got a good voice for golf. You should consider that.” I thanked him for the compliment but never thought it would happen. Now it was about to.
As it turns out, the basic format of the coverage was pretty simple. Our partnership with CBS for the PGA Championship was already well established before I assumed my role in 1995, so I stepped into a system that was already well oiled. Turner would have the Thursday and Friday coverage, about six hours a day, and then three hours of early coverage on the weekend mornings before CBS took over for the rest of the day. The CBS announcing crew had their tower, and we at Turner had ours overlooking the eighteenth green. Analysts on the ground were walking with select groups, and basically, CBS had the odd-numbered holes and Turner had the evens. I just listened to the producer in my headset, in this case the legendary Frank Chirkinian or, when he stepped away for a break on those long days, Lance Barrow, who would eventually succeed Frank and remains in the CBS producer’s chair to this day. And on those weekend mornings, David Winner would take the controls. The producer would identify the hole we were going to and the golfer we’d see, and if it was an even-numbered hole, I would talk. But there were certain rules to follow, and I got a briefing on these from Verne Lundquist in the days leading up to round one.
Verne is as talented a broadcaster as has ever put on a headset, and he is as gracious a gentleman as you’ll find.
“What can you tell me about what I can expect this week?” I asked. Verne’s words have stuck with me to this day.
“Just remember you’re a caption writer. Less is often more. Folks are watching their televisions. You write the caption for what you just saw. If you are going to tell a story that adds to what viewers are seeing, make sure it’s quick, because we’ll be showing a lot of golf shots and moving from hole to hole quickly. Don’t get caught in the middle of a long story when you’re told to throw it to another hole. Don’t worry. You’ll get a feel for the rhythm.”
I was a six-foot-three sponge as we sat in a golf cart in the massive TV compound, Verne speaking and me listening.
“Oh, and there’s another thing you must remember. Frank hates it when an announcer speaks when a player is making contact, so let that moment live on its own. We want to hear the impact.”
On Thursday, as Verne took a thirty-minute break about three hours deep into our coverage of the first round, I put on the headset and waited for the first even-numbered hole cue from the production truck. Remember that advice I’d gotten from Verne? The first few times I did exactly what he’d told me, and he was right. I was getting a feel for the rhythm and was feeling so comfortable that in no time at all I was breaking all the rules—talking over tee shots just as club face was meeting golf ball and painting myself into a corner by starting a story about something I’d learned about Riviera while walking the course on Tuesday and Wednesday with no chance of finishing the story before I was told to send it to another hole. It certainly hadn’t escaped Frank Chirkinian, whose voice soon filled my headset with the not-so-gentle reminder that we never (translated never!) talk while the golf ball is being struck and that it would be a good idea for me to toss coverage to the next hole when I’m told and not when I want to.
After that thirty-minute baptism into the world of televised golf, even with the mistakes, I left the golf course with a feeling that wasn’t quite satisfaction but also with encouragement. I knew not only that I could do a better job the next day but also that I would. I had prepared, I had done my absolute best in what was a foreign broadcast setting, and I had learned valuable lessons from the very best in the business that would serve me well for the next twenty PGA Championships.
The British Open was still five months away as we prepared for our first NBA All-Star Game on TNT in February. It would be played in Atlanta, where I live, which was cool because for the first time I wouldn’t have to head out of town for All-Star Weekend. It would be Michael Jordan’s last All-Star Game as he played his final NBA season, so at Turner Sports we were all pretty jacked up about having it on our air. And then came one of those unscripted moments that turn into a life-changing episode.
I was shaving one morning a few days before the game and was trying to knock down a few stray whiskers above my left jawbone near my ear. Guys reading this know that when you shave, you screw up your face all different ways to make the skin taut, and when I did this, moving my mouth to the right, I noticed a bump under the skin became visible near my left ear. When I relaxed my face, it disappeared. So I repeated the move. There it was again. Trying to make sense of this and calm my nerves, I thought, “Maybe there’s something near my right ear similar to the left,” so I moved my mouth to the left to tighten the skin on the right side, hoping I’d see the same kind of bump. Nothing. So what now? My plan did not include going to the doctor, at least not now. It was All-Star Weekend, and we would be busy around the clock. “Besides,” I thought, “maybe it’s nothing to be concerned about and it’ll go away on its own.”
The All-Star Game of 2003 gave us all we could have hoped for in our inaugural TNT broadcast. Vince Carter gave up his starting spot to Michael Jordan in his last All-Star appearance, and when MJ hit a three-pointer in overtime to give the East a two-point lead, it looked like he might end the night holding the MVP trophy. I would be at center court for the ceremony as Commissioner David Stern handed out the hardware.
I always spend the last few minutes of an All-Star Game in a courtside seat preparing for the interview I will conduct with the MVP, and there are usually two or three guys who can get it depending on who wins, East or West. If the outcome isn’t much in doubt, I pretty much have an idea who the media members will choose as they’re handed slips of paper to jot down their choice. In this case, I had been preparing for the possibility of Allen Iverson, who had thirty-five points, or Tracy McGrady, who had twenty-nine. Now that Michael had hit the big three, my focus shifted to him.
But hold everything. Jermaine O’Neal was whistled for a foul as Kobe Bryant launched a three with one second left. Kobe hit two of his three free throws to tie the game, and we headed to a second overtime. Kevin Garnett scored the first seven points for the West in that second overtime period, finished with thirty-seven points, and claimed MVP honors. We did our quick two-minute interview at center court on TNT “feeding the house,” as it’s called when our interview is also piped through the arena’s PA system, and our very first NBA All-Star Game was in the books. It was every bit as much fun as we all hoped it would be.
As the NBA’s regular season resumed after the All-Star Game, so did what had now become a shaving ritual for me—always checking that “thing” by my left ear. When the NBA play-offs began in April, it was still there. It hadn’t gotten any bigger; it hadn’t gotten any smaller. It didn’t hurt, and if you looked at me on the air or face-to-face, you couldn’t see anything. But I knew it was there, and it was becoming one of those things that wouldn’t leave the back of my mind. I could be having a great day off, hanging with the family, but there was this gnawing feeling that something wasn’t right. And let’s be perfectly honest here. I was scared, and deep down inside I don’t think I wanted to know if there was a serious problem. So I continued to take the easy and stupid route. I did my best to ignore the bump and hope that one morning I would wake up and it would have mysteriously disappeared.
Every play-off season when the NBA reaches the conference finals, we take our studio show on the road. Dallas and San Antonio would play a best of seven series in the West in 2003, and we would do our shows from those arenas. When I looked at the play-off schedule, I saw a big-time conflict. If the Mavs and the Spurs went the distance, the seventh game in San Antonio would fall on Saturday, May 31. The high school graduation of my firstborn son, Eric, was scheduled for . . . wait for it . . . Saturday, May 31.
A game seven between the Mavs and the Spurs would be our biggest TNT game of the season, and because Turner had no role in the broadcast of the NBA Finals, it would be our last telecast of the season. So how was I to handle this? It was one of those situations that parents from coast to coast have had to meet head-on. You feel like you’re doing a pretty good job navigating that often tenuous highway called balancing family and work when you come to a fork in the road. Often you can determine your course without much thought, and without taking your foot off the gas, you choose your path, full speed ahead. But in this case, I had to pump the brakes, pull over to the shoulder, and stare at the signs in front of me. Game seven or graduation? Choose one.
One of the many valuable lessons I learned from my father was work ethic. Another was loyalty. Both were in play here. The only time I remember my dad missing a game as a Braves’ broadcaster was when my oldest sister, Dawn, got married. Otherwise, he was there night after night behind the microphone. I’m sure there were nights it hurt him deeply to miss various events in our lives, and certainly there were times when I wished he could have been sitting in the stands at my Little League baseball game, but there was also the understanding in our house that this was simply the nature of Dad’s job. It’s just the way it was. He had an unwavering loyalty to his job and the organization that had given him the opportunity, and he never took it for granted. If ever there was a “company man,” it was my father, and he passed that on to me. That’s what made my situation so tough. I didn’t want to let the company down. I didn’t want to let Eric down. (Please, a show of hands if you’ve been there so I don’t have to feel like the Lone Ranger? Good. Thank you.)
I didn’t immediately tell Cheryl about the what-ifs I was wrestling with, hoping that maybe the NBA would announce a change in the schedule before the series started, but that didn’t happen. “Maybe,” I thought, “the graduation will be in the morning, and I can fly from Dallas to Atlanta after game six, go to graduation, and fly to San Antonio in time for game seven.” Nope. Graduation was at night. So before I left for the conference finals, we sat down and talked it over, and I laid it all out. I made my decision, and she said she understood. The decision (drumroll, please) was that on Saturday, May 31, 2003, if there was a game seven in the Western Conference Finals, there was only one place I could be, and that was at the graduation ceremony for Collins Hill High School. The bottom line was this: I am a dad who happens to be a sportscaster. Not the other way around. Now would my bosses see it that way?
The first step was to tell my producer, Tim Kiely. He and his wife, Maureen, had become parents of twins a few years earlier, and so the fatherhood/work thing was not a foreign concept for him. Although a high school graduation scenario was still years away for him, he knew exactly where I was coming from, shook my hand, and said he’d get back to me as soon as he took the issue upstairs. And so I waited for the response from upper management. What if they said, “No way!” I was envisioning a high-noon standoff with the brass—an ultimatum given to me, a resignation given to them, all over a game that might not even be played. When TK returned to my office, he said it was all taken care of. He admitted there was not 100 percent approval from all parties, but from the parties that really mattered, I had the green light to attend graduation. Anxiety gave way to relief, but to be honest, I hoped it would all be a moot point in the long run. Not that there was any doubt in my mind I was doing the right thing, but I didn’t want to let down Charles and Kenny, or any of my colleagues on the crew, at the climax of our NBA run for that season.
The San Antonio Spurs appeared to be cooperating. After dropping the opener at home, they reeled off three straight wins, including two in Dallas, and Tim Duncan and company were sittin’ pretty. They had a 3–1 lead and were heading back to San Antonio with a chance to close things out in five. Shoot, I’d be back home in Atlanta with a few days to spare before Eric walked at graduation. When we hit the air with Inside the NBA after game five in San Antonio, I said something like this: “The Dallas Mavericks are still alive in the Western Conference Finals. The final here in San Antonio is Mavs 103, Spurs 91. There will be a game six in Dallas on Thursday night.” The Mavericks had played as gutsy a play-off game as you’ll see. Trailing going into the fourth quarter on the road, facing elimination, they had outscored the Spurs 29–10 in the fourth quarter to extend the series. Let me be clear on something here too. In this job, we don’t root for teams. If there’s anything we root for, it’s compelling basketball. A series sweep in any year is fun only for the team doing the sweeping. We want the kind of series that has viewers looking forward to the next pivotal game, planning to get home or go to the sports bar to watch the next chapter unfold. Certainly, we had that now after the clutch Dallas win in game five.
As we do on every game day on the road, we had a morning production meeting before game six in Dallas that night. It’s an hour of eating bacon and eggs and laying out our plans for the pregame, halftime, and postgame shows. What story lines we want to explore, what video of the Dallas win in game five we want to break down on the air, that sort of thing. As things wrapped up, I felt it was appropriate to address our production crew, the men and women who cut the highlights, create the graphics, and do the research and the stats throughout the season. I simply wanted to say thanks for all the hard work and the endless hours they’d put in. If the series ended that night, there would be no other opportunity for me to do it.
And then I added the “but if” part of the equation. If the series did not end and there was a game seven, I wouldn’t be in San Antonio but at my son’s high school graduation. Having already received the blessing of management for my decision, I was still curious to see how the members of this core unit, the men and women who were there every night doing their various production jobs, would take it. I scanned the faces around the table to see understanding nods and heard a few, “Well, we’ll miss ya in San Antonio.” It was gratifying. A number of them came up afterward to say they understood the situation and were cool with my decision. Then a member of our public relations staff took me aside and said that while he understood, others in the media might not.
“Will you be available to talk to TV writers if you skip game seven? They’ll want to know why you’re not there for a game that big.”
My response was immediate.
“You can give them my number, and I’ll tell them that I never want my son to think he came in second to a basketball game.”
In my Dallas hotel room about five hours before game time, I had a lot of things bouncing around in my brain. I was putting the finishing touches on my notes for the show and reassuring myself that missing game seven, if there was one, was the right thing to do. Of course, that bump near my left ear was still there, and I had thought about it every day for four months now. I needed to call home and talk to Cheryl. She couldn’t help with my pregame prep, and I still hadn’t told her about the bump, but she could certainly reassure me about game seven versus Eric’s graduation.
We had talked about it at the outset and never really revisited it, because I had made my decision. But there was one phrase I wanted to hear from her before our phone call was over. I was not going to request it or coax her into saying it, but man, did I want to hear it. I told her about the morning production meeting and about PR telling me I might have to defend myself with writers. As we wrapped up the call, I said, “Well, no matter what happens tonight, I’ll see you tomorrow.”
And then she said it. “Hey . . . you’re a good dad.”
You see, in the course of being a parent, there have been times I’ve felt overmatched or simply not qualified for the job. You think you’re doing the right thing when you’re trying to handle a problem, and you completely botch it and make it worse. You don’t say the right words in a given situation, or you remain silent when you should speak up, and instead of putting out a fire, you pour gasoline on it. Cheryl’s always had a knack for knowing exactly when to reassure me that I’m not a lost cause. And when she says, “You’re a good dad,” it is good for my soul.
American Airlines Center was rockin’ late in the third quarter of game six. The Mavs had a fifteen-point lead and were one quarter and change from forcing game seven in San Antonio with a trip to the NBA Finals on the line. Honestly, at that point, I knew I’d be missing it for Eric’s graduation, and I was good with that. Cheryl’s words that afternoon had given me peace.
Then Steve Kerr happened.
Steve played in more than nine hundred NBA games but started only thirty times. He was a valuable drop-dead shooter off the bench in his eleven seasons in the league. He had four championship rings, three of them from his time on the Michael Jordan–led Bulls team, though it was Kerr himself who had hit the championship-winning jumper for Chicago in 1997. It was my good fortune to later work with him, as he joined Turner Sports after his retirement. He is simply a down-to-earth, genuine, good guy . . . who can really shoot. He was looking for ring number five and his second with the Spurs in 2003, and the clock on his career was winding down.
He had seen three minutes of action through five games of this Western Conference Final. But late in the third quarter, Spurs coach Gregg Popovich, looking for some kind of spark with his team down by double digits, summoned Kerr. He took his first shot of the series, a three-pointer with 1:40 to go in the third, and it went down, cutting Dallas’s lead to nine. But it was back to thirteen going into the fourth quarter. The Spurs cut Dallas’s lead to single digits in no time, and when Stephen Jackson hit back-to-back threes, we had a game. And then, like I said, Steve Kerr happened. A three-pointer to tie the game at seventy-one, another for the lead, and yet another for an eight-point advantage with five minutes left. San Antonio would win by twelve. Steve Kerr played thirteen minutes, scored twelve points, and didn’t miss a shot.
They held the Western Conference Championship trophy presentation in a meeting room near the locker rooms in Dallas because the road team had won, and there weren’t many fans in Dallas interested in watching the Spurs celebrate. During the commercial break before the ceremony, as I got ready to interview Steve Kerr, I said, “Hey, Ted!” Steve laughed. When we had spoken earlier in the week about his lack of minutes in the series, he had said some of his teammates had been referring to him as Ted Williams. The news had carried stories about the baseball legend being frozen after his passing, and now a few of Kerr’s buddies had joked that they’d have to break the ice around Steve if he got a chance to play.
Somebody took a picture of us during the interview, and it was later mailed to me, and I still have it. When I look at it, I remember that night . . . one of those incredible unscripted play-off games that turned on the performance of a guy who was ready when his name was called. And I’m reminded of a moment in which I got the best of both worlds. I wouldn’t have to miss a second of work, and I would get to proudly watch my first child, Eric, walk onstage, turn his tassel, and begin the next chapter of his life. And I remember a phone call and a wife’s encouragement. A blackberry.
At this point, you may be thinking, and rightfully so, that with our NBA coverage finished and a little vacation time coming, it was time for me to see a doctor about whatever was lurking just below the surface near my left ear. I always had an excuse for putting it off. Fear and denial were winning out over common sense. We had a family week at the beach coming up in June before I would leave for England and Turner’s first venture into the Open Championship in July, followed by the PGA Championship at Oak Hill in Rochester, New York, in August. So I made a little deal with myself and vowed that if that “thing” hadn’t gone away by the time the PGA Championship was over, I would go to the doctor. But for now, it was time to pack for England.
Ever seen photos of the white cliffs of Dover? Spectacular. With their chalky composition, they stand out brilliantly on the English shoreline, and to many people there, they stand as a monument to freedom, not unlike the way the Statue of Liberty is revered by Americans. Long ago they stood as a fortress for English troops protecting the homeland against invaders, and they were celebrated in the song “The White Cliffs of Dover” during World War II.
My hotel room for the Open Championship was fourteen miles from the golf course. It was tiny. It had no air-conditioning. On the sun-drenched, cloudless day I arrived, I opened the window in the room, hoping a stray breeze might somehow make the room a little less like a sauna. And when I opened that window, I saw, not half a mile away, the white cliffs of Dover. Spectacular indeed.
In the three days leading up to the Open, I made time each day, when I wasn’t at Royal St. George’s preparing for our broadcast, to go running near the cliffs, which were even more breathtaking when viewed from close range. I love runs like that. When I’m not trying to push through fatigue or wondering which hurts more, my left ankle or my right calf, I use that time to sort of soak in God’s creation. I do a lot of thinking, a lot of praying—for my family thousands of miles away, for friends who might be facing tough situations. And as I ran down well-worn paths, and on the grassy plateau above the cliffs, and past the South Foreland Lighthouse, I’ll be honest, I was praying that everything was all right with my health.
Sure, I’ll remember that week for the stunning performance of Ben Curtis, who rose from anonymity to claim the famed Claret Jug, which goes to the winner. And I’ll remember Tiger Woods teeing off in round one and promptly losing his ball in the ankle-high rough to the right of the first fairway. And I’ll remember thinking our TV tower was going to blow over in frighteningly high winds. But in some odd way, and I guess it’s because I’m wired a little differently, the first things that come to mind when I think about our first Open Championship are the white cliffs of Dover and the song of hope they once inspired. Because at that time in my life, I was five months deep into a period marked by anxiety, fear, and still . . . hope.