Spartacus and Me

The Atlanta Braves were a baseball team on the on the rise in 1984. They were managed by future Hall of Famer, Joe Torre, and they had a two-time Most Valuable Player in centerfielder Dale Murphy. They were still owned by Ted Turner and their games were televised on his cable TV Superstation, TBS, my employer at the time.

Two seasons earlier, TBS had produced a marvelous documentary about the Braves and their surprising emergence as a National League West contender. Glenn Diamond, with whom I worked at TBS on The Coors Sports Page, produced this behind the scenes look at the Braves and their division-winning season and called it A Long Way to October. Its host was an icon in the world of baseball play-by-play broadcasting, Red Barber, who was about 115 years old at the time. Through hidden mikes and closed-door access, Glenn and his crew cobbled together an inside look at the game unlike anything else previously done. So naturally, it needed to be topped and I was called upon to write it.

I was still doing features as a reporter for The Coors Sports Page but though this new assignment was behind the scenes, it was a great opportunity to bring my writing skills into the light for a bigger audience. It made me a more versatile commodity and, as a result, more valuable. That could only help me in the future.

We were going to follow––and sort of pester––four players from different aspects of the game from the starting lineup to the bullpen. We started in spring training and stationed a crew at Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium for almost every game of the season. Since TBS also aired the games nightly, we had that additional footage to mix with the original behind the scenes stuff for which our cameraman, Jack Frost, and director, Rohan Backfisch, were responsible.

I felt that as the writer of this epic, my job was simple; simple but not easy. It just looked that way, and in the early stages of the project it pretty much was. I observed the season unfolding, usually from the comfort of the press box and I spent the bulk of the summer dining on press box food, drinking press box coffee, and contemplating story lines we wanted to pursue as we saw them develop.

We made a few road trips with the team, which for a baseball fan of long standing like me, was like snagging backstage passes to The Beatles North American tour. Though I tried not to show it, I was giddy whenever we boarded a charter plane, rode the team bus to another ballpark, talked to players at their homes, or stood at the end of the dugout during a game. I may have been older than most of the players on the team, but I was emotionally only 14 years-old when it came to baseball, so this was heaven to me.

As the season waned, the Braves didn’t look as though they were going to make the playoffs. That made no difference for our purposes. We still had two hours of television to put together and we needed to decide on a host. Would we get another broadcasting legend? A former player? How about a Hollywood celebrity? They didn’t necessarily have to have a connection with baseball, though it might help.

We finally landed on Kirk Douglas, who watched the Braves frequently on TBS. He said that whenever he saw a shot of Joe Torre and his pitching coach, Bob Gibson, side-by-side in the dugout, he was reminded of another black and white power couple, Bill Cosby and Robert Culp on the groundbreaking TV show, I Spy. That was apparently enough to at least get Kirk onto the short list of potential hosts. That and the fact that he was one of the biggest names in Hollywood, even though his most notable career achievements were behind him. He wasn’t just a great actor; he was a movie star. He was Spartacus. He was Vincent Van Gogh and Einar the Viking. He was a movie star before movie stars started flaunting their movie starness on reality TV. He was perfect.

During the second half of the season Glenn and I headed to the West Coast to meet with our host and were ushered into Kirk’s surprisingly modest home in Beverly Hills. I say modest because it wasn’t a stately mansion like the Clampetts’ from the outside, but upon entering, you could see that the one-level floor plan extended back approximately four miles. Original artwork lined the walls and every room was accessorized with at least one large ashtray, and each ashtray held a different brand of cigarettes, this in spite of the fact that neither Kirk nor his wife, Ann, smoked.

We started our first meeting in one of the front rooms. Kirk, 68 years old at the time, was dressed in a blue velour running-suit and looked the picture of health. I was just 31 and Glenn 26 so despite his energetic appearance, we felt we were talking to a fossil from Hollywood’s golden age, a well-preserved and vital fossil to be sure, but a senior citizen nonetheless.

The first thing Kirk wanted to know from us was the answer to a simple question: “What’s your theme?” Neither Glenn nor I seemed shaken by a question we would have been wise to ask ourselves, oh, I don’t know, seven months earlier. Neither were we prepared for it. So we babbled on about the concept for the show––we’re following these four guys, you see––but Kirk kept at us.

“Get your theme,” he urged us as if to say that before doing anything, we needed to lay a foundation, which would give direction for every frame of footage we were going to shoot and every interview we were going to conduct. That was great advice…if we were having that discussion/lecture in February instead of June.

Kirk, not one to mince words, said after a brief discussion with these apparent halfwits from Atlanta, “Do you guys know what you’re doing?” We assumed it was not a rhetorical question and answered that yes, we two products of the California State University System were very confident in what we were doing. Come on, I had almost ten years experience as a reporter to go along with my seven months as a writer of documentaries. But we were willing to concede that someone who had been in 74 movies to that point, had produced ten films, directed two, and written, uh, a documentary, might have one or two insights worth listening to. So we did. And we tried our best to “get our theme.”

We met Kirk again at his office a few weeks later with a first draft of the script. Seated at a table with our host, I was waiting for him to tell me this was either the greatest thing he’d read since Lust for Life or that, despite his instruction, we had obviously not gotten our theme, this so-called script was pure dreck, and he would assign the writing to one of his minions. But he actually liked it.

“‘Grace under pressure,’” he read thoughtfully from the pages before him. “Who said that?” I thought the answer was obvious.

“I did,” I proudly crowed.

“No, I’ve heard that somewhere else,” Kirk mused.

So not only had I not gotten my theme, now I was a plagiarist. How was I to know, with Google still 14 years away, that “grace under pressure” was Ernest Hemingway’s description of Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea? I never even read it.

All in all, Kirk was pleased. Our next step was to head back to Atlanta, polish up the script, and prepare for the arrival of our on-camera host. The show now had a title: Baseball: Behind the Seams.

We had saved the last weekend of the season for Kirk to do his eighteen stand-ups at Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium. That’s a lot of set-up and a lot of equipment, equipment more suited to shooting movies than the kind of news stories I was used to producing. We rented a crane, laid down tracks in the outfield for dolly shots, and even rented a motor home and parked it inside the stadium for our host’s personal use. It was in that Winnebago where Kirk told me over lunch of ham and potato salad that yes, he was Jewish, but obviously not observant. (That would change several years later after a near-death experience in a helicopter, when Kirk––born Issur Danielovitch––returned to his ancestral religious roots.)

The one area of the production that we gave short shrift to was wardrobe. Kirk showed up in a casual khaki jacket over his sport shirt and jeans and as we were doing a run-through on the field, our executive producer (and my boss), Don Ellis, asked, “What will he be wearing when we actually shoot?” After we said, “That,” our next job was to get our production manager, Teresa Buoch, to dress him up. Kirk’s own wardrobe that he brought to Atlanta was every bit as nice as what Teresa had bought, so they settled on his pink golf shirt and blazer. In reality, Kirk possessed an air of authority that wasn’t dependent on the right threads. He was Spartacus, after all.

Turns out that Spartacus, while accomplished at freeing slaves from captivity, wasn’t all that great with cue cards. These days, we have the capability of putting a teleprompter over the lens so talent can speak directly to camera while reading every bit of his script. Three decades ago we were still––on location, anyway––stuck with cue cards. We tried to get as close to the lens as possible, but the occasional subtle glance off-camera was a dead giveaway that the words coming out of his mouth weren’t necessarily from the heart or the result of concentrated study and memorization.

As the scriptwriter, I had every confidence that if anyone could bring my words to life, it would be Kirk Douglas, bad cue card reading or not. And he didn’t disappoint. But though he was a baseball fan, he wasn’t a baseball authority. So when, during one stand-up, he strolled among the empty stadium seats emoting about the tension of a baseball game and said, “It’s the ninth inning, the bases are loaded, and the count is three to two,” I cringed.

“That was great, Kirk, really good. But actually, it’s three and two, not three to two.” So we did it again. But Kirk was not big on re-takes. If he had a good take, it was his opinion that it was time to move on. “Next shot,” he’d bark.

As TV people who had seen our share of tape creases or something distracting in the background upon playback that we hadn’t seen while shooting, we were trained to shoot “safeties,” backups in case the money shot wasn’t as valuable as we originally thought.

“That was great,” Rohan Backfisch, our director, would say. “Let’s do a safety.”

“Why?” Kirk asked.

“Uh, we had an audio hit.” We’d generally blame it on our sound guy, Ken Noland. Better to have someone take a little heat than for us to lecture a three-time Oscar nominee on the nuances of location shooting.

Sometimes Rohan just figured that there were better takes ahead for both talent and team. It was after one of those third-take scenarios that Kirk, convinced the second take was just fine, ribbed Rohan: “No doubt one of these days you’ll be a great director…but not today.”

Kirk, who had worked under even bigger-name directors than Rohan Backfisch and more celebrated writers than Paul Ryden, is one of those larger-than-life characters that magnetically attracts attention. Riding with him on a golf cart on the stadium concourse between takes, I noticed that every head––I mean every head––turned to watch us pass. So unanimous was the attention that I told Kirk, “I think they recognize me.” Oh, how I dreamed that one day I would attract as many curious eyeballs.

So riveting was Kirk’s presence that he even was able to get Ted Turner to sit still for a few minutes. Turner, in his role as owner of TBS and CNN, would occasionally tape on-camera promos or internal messages in the TBS studios, and it was understood that the production crew would be ready to roll as soon as Ted put on the mike. When The Boss was headed their way, the crew was put on instant Ted Alert. Tie askew or a light out of place? Too bad. It was one take and done. Ted Turner was a busy and animated man. But during Kirk’s visit, it was as if Ted had eaten a bowl of Xanax for breakfast. He patiently waited as Kirk, during one of his stand-ups, approached him in the owner’s seat in the front row to chat about whatever it was I wrote for them to chat about.

Kirk commanded respect, but even he knew that as host, he still had to follow orders. On the closing stand-up, he was to address the camera and say, “And that’s baseball, pure and simple.” Then he was to walk away from the camera, down the stadium steps, onto the field, and down the right field line. Ro yelled “Action,” and off went Kirk.

He got to the field, took a right turn, headed down the line, and just kept walking. Then from off in the distance, we heard the distinctive voice of Kirk Douglas echoing through Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium.

“Is anybody gonna yell ‘Cut!’”

A few days after getting Kirk on tape, Ted Turner yelled, “Cut!” on Joe Torre’s tenure in Atlanta, but by then we were well into post-production and Kirk, secured with a contract that called for more money in a week of work than I made all year, was already back in LA.

A few weeks later, three of us, Glenn, Ken, and I, returned to California to supervise the voiceover session with our host. The first day went off without a hitch and we scheduled a half-day to finish it off.

The three of us enjoyed a nice dinner that night and shared stories of working with a Hollywood legend. Then, knowing that there were some finishing touches to be made on the script, I wrote out some revisions. There weren’t that many changes, so I jotted them down on a piece of notebook paper and handed them to Kirk the next day. This didn’t sit well with our star, who apparently was used to reading off scripts that were actually typed out.

“I hope you guys had a nice time last night!” he barked from the other side of the glass. “You couldn’t find a typewriter?”

But much of what Kirk said was just Kirk being Kirk. He graciously posed for pictures with us in the booth, he signed our scripts, and we said goodbye. I told him at the end of the project that it was the easiest $50,000 he’d made in his life. I don’t know that he disagreed.

What I got out of the project was an education. By simply being at Kirk’s side, I got a taste of what it’s like to be so universally recognized the way I had always hoped to be. I didn’t see any downside to it and wasn’t opposed to enjoying a little bit of that myself some day. Soon, I hoped. I also learned that for all their quirks and eccentricities, and maybe because of them, movie stars can be both challenging and fun to work with if you don’t take them or yourself too seriously. Eight years later, we did it again on another Braves documentary, this time with actor John Goodman, who could not have been more cooperative. The key to success? Grace under pressure.

And that, Kirk, is my theme.

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Begin

“Begin.”

There was a pause. Not even two seconds earlier I was brimming with confidence. Now I felt the whole world was looking at me and waiting. But why? Waiting for what? I knew I was right. Now I wasn’t so sure. What did I do wrong?

There was silence but for the rushing sound of blood coursing through my head. Then I heard a familiar voice.

“Roger. Hurry. Time’s running out,” the voice said from just a few feet away. It was encouraging, even hopeful, but firm. Time was ticking on. What did I forget? Then just in time, it dawned on me.

“Who is Begin?” I shouted, surprising even myself.

The audience erupted in applause, as did the two women on my right and left.

“That was close,” said Alex with a smile. “But you got it in time. ‘Who is Begin?’ We’re talking about Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, the third world leader at the 1978 Camp David Accords. The others, of course, President Jimmy Carter and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat.”

My heart returned to as normal a rhythm as could be expected while under the glare of klieg lights and the unblinking gaze of television cameras. I let out a big breath and loosened the vise-like grip on my buzzer.  

“All right, Roger, you’ve doubled your score with that true Daily Double and you still have control of the board. And I think this may be a good time to remind our contestants again: all responses must be in the form of a question.”

I chuckled as I shook my head and plowed on in my first appearance on Jeopardy.

“I’ll take ‘In the Tweet Top’ for a thousand, Alex.”

With that close call conquered, I had newfound confidence in my ability to bring to mind every piece of useless information I’d ever heard. My friends back in Bowling Green, Kentucky knew me as quite the master of minutia. I ruled trivia nights at OT Sports Grill every Saturday. No one wanted to play Trivial Pursuit with me anymore––unless I was on their team. But here on the brightly-lit set of Jeopardy I was surprising even myself. I began running categories, firing off questions as answers.

“What is Unix?”

“Where is Bangladesh?”

“Who is Lord Byron?” (In “British Poets” it’s always Lord Byron. I knew that from watching Jeopardy since I was in college at Western Kentucky. I made note of trends like that for such a day as this.)

I was unstoppable. The category didn’t matter.

“Rivers That Run North.”

“Sheik It Off.”

“Fry Me a Liver.”

The audience was clearly on my side and as the dollar amounts piled up with each response, my mind started jumping ahead to what could be. One-day winner, two-day winner, the Tournament of Champions. I saw myself as the next Ken Jennings. I would be a force to be feared. It was time to be recognized.

“Roger Blowfelt is a museum curator from Bowling Green, Kentucky,” said Alex as he introduced me to the television audience during our first commercial break. “And it’s a rather unusual museum, am I right?”

“You’re right, Alex. It’s the National Corvette Museum.”

There was a buzz of appreciation from the audience. And then I delivered the kicker, the little bon mot I had been writing and re-writing ever since I knew I would be appearing on the show.

“But don’t tell anyone, Alex. I drive a Honda Civic.”

Alex smiled and tapped my arm. “We’ll keep that our little secret.” The audience laughed appreciatively.

With the perfunctory interview out of the way, I returned to concentrating on the task at hand. That focus paid off. I swept through the Jeopardy round, barely breaking a sweat by the time we took our second commercial break.

“You’re so smart,” gushed Janice, the Grand Rapids librarian, as she leaned in from my left.

I sloughed it off, even as I agreed with her. “Hey, so are you.”

The two-time champion to my right, Glenna, the dental hygienist from Tampa whispered, “I have a feeling this is my last game.”

“Ladies, don’t be so hard on yourselves,” I said, “I’ll probably blank out in Final.” I knew I wouldn’t. I just didn’t want them to feel badly. I had the game in the bag.

Double Jeopardy went pretty much as I expected. My strategy of going after the $2,000 answers first and risking huge amounts of money along the way and calling for “true Daily Doubles” was working well. James Holzhauer had nothing on me. By the time we reached Final Jeopardy, I had built up such a strong lead that, as Alex liked to say in such cases, I could not be caught. And when I saw that the final category was “U.S. Presidents,” I knew I was going to be the next Jeopardy champion. All I had to do was avoid doing something stupid.

I was left alone with my thoughts during that last commercial break. This presidential category was like a gift adorned with ribbons and bows. It was exactly what I had hoped for. I knew Shakespeare and opera and rivers well enough––categories that put the fear of God in other, less well-versed contestants––but American chief executives throughout history? That was my sweet spot. I couldn’t wait to get back in the game. No way would I be stumped.

The playful between-segments music faded out and the audience settled down as we prepared for the final lap. My victory lap, as I thought of it.

 The floor manager’s voice cut through the studio air as he barked out his countdown before signaling Alex with the wave of his hand.

“Back in 5-4-3-2––!”

“All right, players,” said Alex. “The Final Jeopardy category is a good one: ‘U.S. Presidents.’ Good luck.”

Luck? Who needed luck? Certainly not I. But then it hit me. In a rush of unnecessary bravado, without even hearing the clue, I had wagered everything I’d won to that point. I didn’t have to do that. Even the dullest math student would have known that I simply had to wager enough to keep ahead of my opponents should I make the wrong response. Now, in order to win the game, I had to respond correctly or lose everything I’d earned and head back to Kentucky a disgraced man, the guy who “couldn’t be caught” and still got caught. I’d never live it down. My only hope, besides getting the right response, was that Glenna and Janice weren’t as smart as they looked.

There was a ding of the bell and then Alex read the clue:

 “He is the only president whose native language was not English.”

I let out a sigh of relief. Everything was going to be okay. The only president who didn’t grow up speaking English? Are you kidding? I had known the answer to this one since I was ten years-old, rattling off the names of every president––and their vice presidents––from Washington to Reagan for the amusement of my parents’ friends. It was Martin Van Buren. Everyone knew that. He grew up speaking Dutch.

I scribbled my response on the slick screen in front of me as quickly as I could and watched as Glenna and Janice pored over theirs. The final notes of the Jeopardy think music faded out and I crossed my arms, awaiting my coronation as the next champion.

“This was a tough one,” said Alex, as I smirked to myself.

“Janice, this just wasn’t your day. You’re going to finish in third place,” said Alex. He slowed down as he strained to read Janice’s childlike handwriting. “Who is this guy next to me who knows so much?”

“Well,” chuckled Alex, “Roger is a smart one indeed.”

I laughed and shook my head, affecting a form of humility. But I agreed with the assessment.

“And you wagered nothing. So nothing gained, nothing lost.”

As Alex next directed his eyes toward the defending champion, I started inwardly rehearsing how I would react in victory. I settled on a simple fist pump.

“We turn now to Glenna, our champion. You started off well but just couldn’t keep up with Roger.”

Glenna shook her head and shrugged her shoulders.

“And you wrote down––nothing. A big question mark. How much did you wager? Oh, $10,000. Interesting. And that leaves you with $5,500. Not a bad payday. That’s a very fancy question mark, by the way.”

A what? Suddenly I felt faint. My knees buckled. What had Glenna written down? A question mark? A big fancy question mark? The one punctuation mark that the whole game of Jeopardy is based on?

“We come now to Roger who couldn’t be caught. And you wrote down––Martin Van Buren. Oh, my goodness. Right answer but it must be in the form of a question.”

There was an audible gasp mixed with laughter from the audience.

“But all is not lost. Your lead was big enough to overcome that mistake. And you wagered––hello! Everything! Oh, my. Glenna, that means you remain Jeopardy champion with a three-day total of $34,600!”

It’s hard to remember exactly what happened after that. I heard music and applause. I saw Alex approach the three of us. He was shaking his head and smiled a wry smile, if I remember correctly, as he shook my hand, patted my shoulder, and said something, presumably to make me feel better. He moved on to the others and I stared straight ahead, thinking nothing.

It wasn’t till I got back to my hotel that I was able to somewhat objectively evaluate the dumpster fire my life had become. Other unfortunate things had happened to me in my forty-seven years. How did this rank among the worst of them? Where do I begin?

The time I dropped my car keys overboard during an Alaskan cruise?

The time I called my first wife by the wrong name during our wedding vows?

The time I tried to run a marathon without training for it?

No, they all pale in comparison to the time I forgot the basic rules of Jeopardy and blew $47,000 and a chance to return the next night as champion. By all standards, it was the worst day of my life.

Without question.

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A Walk in the Clouds

JoeGreeneSF 1984SF

If you’re going to dream, dream big. I took that advice literally back in 1984 when I was a feature reporter for The Coors Sports Page on TBS. While craning my neck to interview behemoths like 7’4″ Mark Eaton of the Utah Jazz, I fantasized what it would be like if I, like him, had to duck before entering any room. Not so I could run into chandeliers or scrape drywall off living room ceilings. No, I wanted to see what life would be like as a dominant center in the NBA. At 5’11”, that simply wasn’t going to happen organically.

My playing career, if it could be called “playing,” consisted of two years as a bench rider for Blackford High School’s “C” and “D” teams. We played our games during football season and out of view of the student body, which was just as well. It was from those benches that I would spring into action with forty-five seconds left in the game, knowing that whatever contribution I made, good or bad, would have no effect whatsoever on the outcome. That relieved me of a lot of pressure. Like the pressure to keep the plays straight in my head and translate them into action on the court. In two years of high school ball, I scored a total of seven points.

But in an unguarded moment of compassion, my coach allowed me to start a game late in my second season. I can still remember sitting in the visitor’s locker room prior to the game against Camden High School and soaking in the coach’s instructions. He was diagramming plays on the chalkboard and my only thought was, “What in the world is he talking about?”

Some twenty years later, when I was a reporter for TBS and was interviewing Golden State head coach Don Nelson, I related that story to him off-camera. He smiled knowingly. “I still have guys like that,” he said.

So I have always known that if I were going to make a splash in the realm of sports, it would have to be as a reporter or announcer, not a participant.

Which brings me back to 1984 and the day that I decided to change all that, if only fictitiously. I called a buddy of mine, Phil Gambill, who coached a middle school basketball team, and convinced him to get his team to meet me at the Omni, where the Atlanta Hawks played then, and let me fulfill a fantasy. We lowered the baskets, drew up a few plays, and transformed this one-time feckless sub into a superstar. I’ve got to be honest. It was a rush. One less item in the bucket list:

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Oh, and for the pop culture reference at the end, you’ll have to watch this to understand it. If you’re over 50, you already got it.

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So what was your sports fantasy and did it ever come true?

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Celebrity Encounter: Robert Goulet

It was 1982 and I was working for one of Ted Turner’s shows called Winners, a magazine show that featured successful people, some well-known, others just regular folks with great success stories.

The actor/singer, Robert Goulet had fallen into a bit of a bad way in the early eighties, what with his drinking issues and a messy divorce, but now he was back in Las Vegas after an eighteen-month absence. His manager thought it would be a great idea to get him back into the public spotlight. What better way than through a positive, fluffy program like Winners? Little did he know that no one actually watched Winners. But if nothing else, it would certainly be good practice for when he encountered actual journalists on the comeback trail.

So my cameraman, Steve Shepard, and I, showed up at the home of the chagrined performer and were welcomed in a way that said I have no idea who you are, but I think my manager put you up to this so let’s get it over with because I’ve got other things to do like have meetings in the next room while you’re setting up to do whatever it is you’re here to do. Right this way.

So in through the door we went, ushered into a suburban Vegas ranch-style house decorated in what can best be described as post-divorce modern. Apparently, Carol Lawrence (Mrs. Goulet) had secured the better lawyer and had left Bob with his piano, a few wall hangings, a portrait of Robert Goulet, and his collection of ceramic frogs.

We did our interview, during which we explored his problems with the bottle and how he overcame them. His answer was, if I can paraphrase here, “I just quit.” I could tell we would not exactly be plumbing the depths of his psyche, and if we were counting on bringing the great man to tears, we could forget that. In fact, here’s how it went:

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We were told ahead of time that Goulet would sing for us as part of the piece we were doing. I brought that up to him the way that Johnny Carson would “convince” his guests to get off the couch and favor the audience with a song the guest was desperate to plug. If you’ll remember, the audience would cheer them on, and the singer would hit his mark and croon.

But when I suggested, “How about we hear a song from you?” Goulet took a deep drag on his cigarette and uttered the words that are forever sealed in my memory bank as the ultimate brush-off: “I don’t feel like singing, Gentlemen.”

But he finally relented and sauntered over to the piano in the otherwise gutted living room and emoted his way through a ballad, flicking ashes as he sang. A cat made an appearance in the background, possibly to see what all the noise was about before making its way back down the hall.

That night before the show backstage, Goulet graciously spoke with us on camera about the excitement of being back in the big room.

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Then he performed and the fans loved it, cheering his every move.

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In the years to come, he would revive his career, make more movies, and even became a spokesman for ESPN in a series of tongue-in-cheek, self-deprecating promos for the network. They were actually pretty funny, and they won an Emmy. He died in 2007 and I was sorry to hear that. I would love to have seen him once more so I could rib him about the time he blew me off.

One sweet memory I keep with me from my encounter with Robert Goulet was that I was probably the last reporter he ever sang for in his living room.

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Huck ‘n’ Buck

For those of you tuning in because you saw my name on Tyler Stanton’s blog, welcome. That’s not me in the picture to the left. Furthermore, I am not, as Tyler would have you believe, the real Ron Burgundy. I did, however, start my television career five years before young Tyler was born, a time when real-life Ron Burgundy types were dotting the “happy news” landscape.

If you saw Anchorman, you know that Ron Burgundy was an idiot. I was an idiot too, but for much more forgivable reasons. Let’s just say that Mr. Burgundy was funny unintentionally. I like to think I knew exactly what I was doing.

As you’ll see in perusing this blog (if you’re that starved for entertainment), I was given free rein to add to the newscast whatever I thought was amusing (to me, mostly.) This went from my start in Green Bay, Wisconsin through my stint in Louisville, Kentucky, and even to my days at Turner Broadcasting in Atlanta. I was sort of my own assignment editor, to a point.

In 1990, TNT started covering NFL games on Sunday nights and I was given the task of coming up with witty halftime features. I’d do things like stake out Lambeau Field and wait for the first person in the stands to arrive or show people in everyday jobs celebrating their little successes the way a player celebrated after scoring a touchdown. It was all quite over the top.

But occasionally, there was a legitimate story that may have actually answered someone’s question about football. One such story was a piece that answered the question: “Who came up with all those dorky football poses you see on football cards?”

Turns out, the answer was: a photographer in Dallas. He had the audacity to be dead, so we were unable to talk with him. But his son-in-law (and photographer’s assistant) was still with us. So we flew to Dallas to get to the bottom of things. We enlisted the aid of two veterans of the very first Super Bowl—Hall of Famer Forrest Gregg and the late Jerry Mays—to play with us, and this was the result:

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At the Top of My Game


Do you ever watch a newscast on TV—assuming anyone watches them anymore—and say to yourself, “That was stupid. They didn’t have anything better to cover than that?”

Well, that was sort of my niche when I worked in local news back in the day, the “day” being the late 70’s and early 80’s. I was the goofy feature reporter with an odd twist on the news or life in general. I prided myself on knowing the difference between funny and silly but was still sometimes criticized by local newspaper writers who thought that what I did had no place on the news. Looking back, they may have had a point. (More than once, costumes were involved in my “reporting.”) But how many car wrecks and house fires can you sit through before you turn off the TV? Is that what local news was supposed to be all about? We preferred to think of a newscast as a slice of life. Bad stuff happens, funny stuff happens, and we wrapped it all up in a thirty-minute package.

I speak now as someone who doesn’t watch local news anymore. It’s moved from car wrecks and house fires to more car wrecks, more house fires, drug deals, and random gunfire, all delivered with great emotion and empathy. I have a lot against local news, but I’ll bore you with that some other time.

These days, I use my reporting skills to tell other kinds of stories. (You can read more about that on my web site.) But occasionally I’ll see something in the news and it will remind me that when I was a local feature reporter doing weird little slices of life stories, I would latch on to those news events as a peg, and then put my own particular spin on them. And it was fun. I was fortunate enough to have my own little spot on the news at WLKY in Louisville called “Ryden Originals.”

The other day, I read about a guy who scaled the Millennium Tower in San Francisco using suction cups. You can see the video on-line, of course. But it reminded me of the time a guy calling himself Spiderman—it may be the same guy, Dan Goodwin—climbed the Sears Tower in Chicago. It was May of 1981 and I was at the height of my feature reporting madness. So I decided to “climb” the First National Bank Building in downtown Louisville.

Obviously, I lived to tell the tale.

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Cuba’s Dirty Little Secret

Check the leader board of any major—like this weekend’s PGA Championship—and you’ll see the obvious international influence. England, South Africa, Australia, Korea. But Cuba? Probably not in our lifetime.

But just because someone has lived under an oppressive regime, cut off from the joys of the free world their whole life, doesn’t mean they can’t at least dream of a career that involves a stick and a ball. Baseball players have done it from Luis Tiant to Yunel Escobar, why not golfers? Oh, that’s right—where would you practice? Are you ready for Cuba’s dirty little secret? The Diplo Club.

I had a chance to tee up a few shots there for a story I did during the Pan Am Games of 1991. People ask me how I was able to visit Cuba. You can actually get a visa to that diplomatically isolated island if you’re a journalist. (The Cuban government obviously never saw my work.)

I was part of a contingent of reporters and crews from TNT and ABC to cover the Pan Am Games, and it was my job to capture stories about Cuban life, much the way I did a year earlier when I rounded up feature stories in Italy for the World Cup coverage.

Turns out there are a lot of fascinating and unusual stories coming out of Cuba, even if their people aren’t. Coming out, that is. One of those stories was about the “elitist” sport of golf as played on Castro’s island.

A couple things to note about this piece: my golf swing is utterly atrocious, to the point of embarrassment. Bear in mind this was five years before my rebirth of interest in the game. I got better.

Second, this piece features my Turner Sports office mate at the time, Craig Sager, now known as the NBA insider on TNT who wears crazy jackets and knows everybody. In this particular feature, he was but a foil for my antics, and a pretty good one at that.

Oh, we’re on the first tee. Quiet, please.

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Golf’s Beast of Burden

I would love to play St. Andrews. What golf fan wouldn’t? The only thing stopping me (besides money—lots of it) is that I would have to play with a caddie. Obviously, I’d appreciate the course knowledge that only a Scottish caddie could bring to the ordeal, but who wants to embarrass themselves on such sacred ground in front of someone who can only be thinking, “He paid money for this?”

There is much to be said for a caddie who can walk you through a difficult round. If nothing else, it gives you someone to blame for your inability to put ball in hole in under 100 whacks.

Actually, come to think of it, I always find it amusing that when playing with regular guys, I will be preparing for a ten-foot putt when one of them will advise me to aim about an inch and a half to the right. An inch and a half? From ten feet? That’s like me being about 200 yards out and asking where the pin placement is and whether it’s playing at 200 or 203. Best advice at that point: just hit and hope. Who needs a caddie?

While I’m on the subject of my game, I have played in several tournaments where I am one of the designated “celebrity” golfers. You can just see the disappointment on the face of my partners when they find out I’m the “celebrity.” I get the feeling that they’re thinking, “How much more would I have had to pay to get Jerry Rice?” At least I make them feel good about their games.

Anyway, we were talking about caddies. You’ll see them this weekend at the PGA Championship, of course. But back in 1992, TBS sent me to North Carolina to check out a unique and novel caddie concept. And this is what I came back with:

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Have you played in a celebrity golf tournament? If so, whom did you play with? And if it was me, I’m sorry.

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Golf’s Movable Feast

Sorry, golf fans. It had to happen. The last major of the year is finally upon us, the PGA Championship. All that’s left to look forward to now is the Ryder Cup, the Tour Championship, hibernation, and Christmas.

Knowing that golf is on the front burner of sports news this week, I thought I’d drag out a couple golf features I did for TBS when they carried the PGA back in 1992. Oddly enough, they sent me all the way to Coeur d’Alene, Idaho and Pinehurst in North Carolina to do two very unusual pieces, neither of which aired.

So, making its world debut—18 years after it was produced—is the story of the most unusual golf hole you’ll ever have the privilege to play. Since you may never venture to the northern panhandle of Idaho, this may be as close as you get. But if you do ever get there, let me know how you did on the soon-to-be-famous-because-of-this-post movable green.

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Got any ideas of your own that would make golf courses of the future more interesting?

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The Best of the Worst

If ever there were a contest I could win, it was the one organized by the PGA Tour and Golf Digest Magazine in 1985. It was the “Worst Avid Golfer” contest held at the TPC course at Sawgrass, site of the Players Championship every spring. Only I wasn’t signed up to play in it; I was assigned to produce a feature on it for TBS. Though I was neither an avid golfer nor an avid golf fan, I was an avid fan of getting paid, so I trekked down to Florida.

As I said, my golf background was sketchy at best. I took golf lessons as a 16 year-old and quickly became wretched at the game. I hung on to my clubs and carted them with me across the country as I started my career, but rarely put them to use.

Then in 1996 I began what became a seven-year run hosting a show produced by PGA Tour Productions called This is the PGA Tour. It was great fun visiting incredible courses and interviewing the greatest golfers in the world and having an inside-the-ropes look at a game I had sort of ignored. Just being around guys like Davis Love, Peter Jacobsen, and Phil Mickelson rekindled my excitement for the game. So I plunged in again and, with enough practice, became marginally better than I had been a quarter century earlier. (I’m being modest; I became much better. But considering where I had started, that wasn’t saying all that much. I still struggled to break 100. Though I did shoot my age once—had I been born in 1876.)

Anyway, when you’re on TV talking knowledgably about golf with golfers, people start to believe that you’re a competent golfer yourself, not just a guy who loves the game, wears golf shirts, and knows how to do research.

But I’m getting off track, hitting it into the first cut of rough, if you will. What I want to show you today is the golfing establishment’s effort in 1985 to reach out to the everyday golfer, the golfer I have since become. I only wish this contest were an annual affair.

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What sport do you love but just completely stink at?

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