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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