Live From New York! (Part One)

Some of you may have known that I was broadcasting Olympic events for NBC the past couple of weeks. I was assigned to weightlifting, which has now concluded, so I have some time to share with you the story of how we did it.

First off, I wasn’t alone doing the Olympics among my colleagues around the league. The Knicks’ Mike Breen was the primary voice of basketball from China and Golden State’s Bob Fitzgerald was working water polo in China. The New York contingent included basketball voices Chris Carrino (Nets), Mike Crispino (Knicks), Eric Collins (WNBA Chicago Sky) and Steve Jones. Jim Kozimor, the sideline reporter for the Sacramento Kings got his first taste of Olympic broadcasting in badminton. Matt Devlin, the former Grizz TV play by player and new voice of the Toronto Raptors, was in China doing all the wrestling play by play.

I had originally been called to reprise my role from 2004 as the handball announcer and I was fine with that, though there would be no American presence in the sport. Handball is an incredibly fast-paced and exciting sport (think basketball, but scoring by throwing the ball into a floor-mounted net a la a hockey goal). In March, I got another call from Molly Solomon who does a lot of the hiring for NBC Olympics and she asked if I would be good with moving over to weightlifting. At first, I wasn’t sure because I hadn’t done much in the way of events like weightlifting as compared to team games such as basketball, football and baseball.

Part of the deal was that I had to go and cover the US Olympic Trials in Atlanta. It was a good run-through working with my partner, two-time Olympian and America’s strongest weightlifter, Shane Hamman. Shane is a massive dude with a funky goatee that he braids, but with a great heart and he’s a lot of fun to be around. He’s over 300 pounds, but can dunk a basketball and drive a golf ball 300+ yards. One of the biggest lessons you learn about weightlifting is that so much of a lifter’s success is tied to their athletic ability – to be flexible, coordinated, precise and quick. Strength helps too, but it’s not the whole enchilada. We enjoyed watching the Trials and getting to know each other as we traveled across the country to Los Angeles to voice over the final program.

I should note that we didn’t go to China. About a dozen Olympic sports were being called from New York. The International Olympic Committee was a little concerned with all the folks NBC was bringing overseas (around 3,000 is a fair number), so a compromise was reached: some sports would not be called from China, but rather from audio booths set up on the largest stage—studio 8H, the studio used for Saturday Night Live.

A regular day for us would include a 5 a.m. wakeup call at our hotel, which was three blocks from 30 Rock. Once or twice I went a little early to the commissary at NBC to grab breakfast there, but more often I ate something in the room and took along a Starbucks chaser. We were in the office (actually one of the SNL dressing/makeup rooms) by 6 a.m. to talk about our schedule for the day. Producers for MSNBC, USA and the other networks put together a master plan for the day’s coverage and we’d get an assignment with the number of segments and the amount of time we had. Usually we had either three or four segments and parceled them out between snatch and clean and jerk. We also discussed who would be legitimate contenders for medals.

After the meeting, there was still time to go over my notes and refresh my mind with who we’d be seeing and what their stories were. After a while, all the names and countries begin to blend together. In the lighter weight classes, most of the elite lifters are Asian; in the heavier classes, the Europeans dominate. The night prior to the competition, I would go through the research manual that had been prepared for us by the NBC Olympics research department as well as the International Weightlifting Federation website. I put together thumbnail biographies of each lifter, documenting their best competition performances, their coaches and some personal information. Some lifters had a ton of interesting material, others very little. In any event, I wanted to be prepared for whoever was going to be atop the medal stand.

To be continued!

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