Current Biography Excerpts: Sportscasting

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COSTAS, BOB
EBERSOL, DICK
GIFFORD, FRANK
GUMBEL, BRYANT
JOHNSON, JIMMY
MADDEN, JOHN
SIMMS, PHIL
WALSH, BILL

COSTAS, BOB
Mar. 22, 1952- Broadcast journalist; sportscaster.

With his rare combination of dedicated and expert journalism, encyclopedic memory, ad-libbing ability, laid-back style, and irreverent sense of humor, Bob Costas, an NBC Sports broadcaster since 1980, has achieved undisputed preeminence in his field. Costas is best known as NBC's prime-time anchor at the Olympiad XXV games in Barcelona, Spain in the summer of 1992, as the longtime host of NFL Live, NBC's Sunday pregame and wraparound coverage of professional football, and as the host since 1991 of the network's pro basketball pregame show, NBA Showtime. He handled the play-by-play of major-league baseball, his favorite sport by far, for NBC's Game of the Week from 1983 through 1989, when NBC lost its major-league television rights. His other baseball assignments during the 1980s included hosting the pregame shows at four All-Star games and four World Series and calling the action at four American League championship series. On radio, Costas conducts the weekly syndicated sports talk program Costas Coast to Coast.

Beyond sports, Costas has since 1988 demonstrated his wide-ranging knowledge of contemporary pop Americana and his prowess as an interviewer of celebrities from fields ranging from politics to rock music in the post-midnight half-hour NBC television program Later with Bob Costas. In recognition of the excellence of his sports announcing and hosting, the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences has awarded Costas three Emmys and his journalistic peers have named him the outstanding sportscaster of the year four times. "In a profession dominated by clownish jocks and theatrical maniacs," Lee Green wrote in a Playboy profile, "Costas stands apart--bright, articulate, witty, and insightful."

The complete article can be found on the Current Biography CD-ROM and in the 1993 Current Biography Yearbook.

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EBERSOL, DICK
(EH-buhr-sahl)
July 28, 1947- Television executive.

In December 1995 Dick Ebersol, the president of NBC Sports, made an announcement that stunned the television industry: the broadcast rights to the Olympic Games in 2004, 2006, and 2008 had been purchased by NBC. That news came only four months after Ebersol had garnered the rights to the Games in 2000 and 2002 for his network. "What sets Dick apart is his ability to establish a level of comfort with his partners," David Stern, the NBA commissioner, who has negotiated basketball agreements with the hard-working NBC executive, told a New York Times reporter. "This Olympic deal is classic Dick Ebersol."

Ebersol's career in television began while he was in high school, when he got a part-time job as a gofer for ABC's Wide World of Sports. By the time he was in college, he was a producer and assistant to that network's sports president, Roone Arledge. Hired away by NBC in 1974, Ebersol was assigned to create youth-oriented, late-night programming, and with the producer Lorne Michaels, he devised Saturday Night Live, which became a big hit. Shortly after the show's 1975 debut, he was promoted, becoming at the age of 28 the youngest vice-president in the network's history. In 1989 Ebersol was named head of NBC's sports division as well as the senior vice-president of news. In the latter capacity, he was put in charge of the Today show, where his decision to promote the newsreader Deborah Norville to the position of cohost with Jane Pauley and Bryant Gumbel led to Pauley's departure, alienating many viewers. Owning up to his mistake, Ebersol took leave of Today. He has spent most of the last five years building up the network's sports programming. In addition to the Olympics and NBA contracts, he has made megadeals involving football and baseball broadcasts. "The implications for the other networks are potentially devastating," a writer for Sports Illustrated recently noted, "because Ebersol has now all but cornered the market on premier sports events."

The complete article can be found in the July 1996 issue of Current Biography. An updated version of the article will appear on the 1983-1996 Current Biography CD-ROM ( released in January 1997) and in the 1996 Current Biography Yearbook (to be published in December 1996).

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GIFFORD, FRANK
Aug. 16, 1930- Sportscaster; former football player.

In the history of prime-time television, few have proven to be more durable than Frank Gifford, the former star halfback who is the senior member of the trio of sportscasters on ABC's Monday Night Football, which celebrated its twenty-fifth year during the 1994 football season. As a player, Gifford made All America as both an offensive tailback and defensive back at the University of Southern California, and subsequently he was All Pro in eight of his twelve years with the New York Giants. Following his retirement from football in 1965, he served his apprenticeship in network television broadcasting with CBS Sports. He moved to ABC Sports to team up with Howard Cosell and Don Meredith on Monday Night Football in 1971, when the show was in its infancy. Since then, the weekly program, consisting of live coverage of a specially selected premium National Football League game beginning at 9:00 p.m. Eastern time on Mondays, has become television's longest-running prime-time attraction and a consistent finisher (over the past five years) in the top ten among 130 competing shows in national TV ratings. In the present Monday Night Football broadcast booth, Al Michaels does the play-by-play announcing, and Gifford adds his own relatively soft-spoken analysis to the more bombastic color commentary of Dan Dierdorf. "What I do is help blend the three of us together," he has explained. In private life Gifford is the husband of Kathie Lee Gifford, the cohost of the popular morning television talk show Live with Regis and Kathie Lee.

The complete article can be found on the Current Biography CD-ROM and in the 1995 Current Biography Yearbook.

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GUMBEL, BRYANT
Sept. 29, 1948- Broadcast journalist.

The "Best Morning TV News Interviewer" of 1986, according to more than 1,000 journalists who voted in the Washington Journal Review readers' poll, is Bryant Gumbel, the glib and quick-witted cohost of NBC's long-running Today show. Following a fast-paced career as NBC's prime sportscaster (1972-1981), in 1982 Gumbel became the first black to help host Today in its thirty-year history. The same skills that he honed on sports programs serve him well as he grapples, without set scripts or retakes, with national and international news and popular culture. Disarming those critics who point to his lack of journalistic credentials, Gumbel has said: "My job isn't to interpret the world or prove how much I know; it's to be conversant enough to do sensible interviews, seek out the truth, and sense when people are lying....People like me are important by virtue of the proximity to people who are really important. I see myself as a go-between."

The complete article can be found on the Current Biography CD-ROM and in the 1986 Current Biography Yearbook.

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JOHNSON, JIMMY
July 16, 1943- Football coach; sportscaster.

When Jerry Jones bought the Dallas Cowboys in 1989 and abruptly replaced the coaching legend Tom Landry, the only coach in the team's history, with Jimmy Johnson, a brash college coach with no NFL experience, many football fans were shocked. The venerated Landry seemed to have been shunted aside in favor of a college coach known as much for his lacquered coiffure as for the successful, if controversial, teams he fielded at the University of Miami. In the Cowboys, Johnson inherited a once-mighty club that had fallen on hard times, but in just three seasons he silenced his critics by transforming Dallas into a title contender. When the Cowboys demolished the Buffalo Bills in Super Bowl XXVII, in January 1993, Johnson became the first coach to have won both a college national championship and a Super Bowl. With Dallas's second consecutive NFL championship, in 1994, Johnson joined the select company of Vince Lombardi, Don Shula, and Chuck Noll as the only coaches to win back-to-back Super Bowls. Former college teammates and roommates, Johnson and Jones had been portrayed in the media as best friends who shared the responsibility for restoring the Cowboys to greatness. The reality, however, was that the two men had never been close. After several well-publicized verbal jabs at each other, they ended their productive but tempestuous relationship in March 1994, when Johnson resigned as coach of the two-time defending Super Bowl champions.

The complete article can be found on the Current Biography CD-ROM and in the 1994 Current Biography Yearbook.

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MADDEN, JOHN
Apr. 10, 1936- Sports commentator; former football coach.

Bluff and boisterous John Madden, formerly a football coach and currently a television pitchman and commentator, as well as author of a best-selling, entertaining autobiography, has become heralded nationwide as perhaps the best football "color caster" on the airwaves. Thirty seconds of exposure on his first Miller Lite Beer television commercial brought him more popular recognition than his decade, from 1969 to 1978, as head coach of the mighty Oakland Raiders. The youngest football coach at the time of his appointment, at thirty-three, John Madden guided his troops to seven division championships, an American Football Conference championship, and a world championship in Super Bowl XI, in 1977. With a career record of 103 games won, thirty-two lost, and seven tied, and a .763 percentage, Madden was the second coach in forty years with 100 or more victories in ten seasons--an achievement equaled only by the Miami Dolphins' Don Shula.

As Sarah Pileggi wrote of John Madden in Sports Illustrated (September 1, 1983): "His big, doughy, unmade bed of a face and his hulking figure are known and loved by total strangers from Meridian, Mississippi to Missoula, Montana. He is both the good-natured but slightly dangerous--to himself as well as others--goof who breaks through the paper walls in all those Miller Lite commercials and the CBS football pundit with the common touch who leads us all through television's swamps of verbal hogwash onto the high ground of enlightenment."

The complete article can be found on the Current Biography CD-ROM and in the 1985 Current Biography Yearbook.

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SIMMS, PHIL
Nov. 3, 1955- Sportscaster; football player.

The all-time passing leader of the New York Giants is Phil Simms, a battle-scarred veteran of fifteen NFL seasons, who fought back from injury and adversity to become one of football's most respected quarterbacks. Drafted out of tiny Morehead State University in the first round of the 1979 draft by the then-struggling Giants, Simms showed promise as a rookie, but his potential seemed unlikely to be fulfilled as injuries forced him to sit out at least part of four successive seasons. Even though he set club passing records in his first full season as a starter and, in the 1986 season, won most-valuable-player honors for both the season and Super Bowl XXI, in which he led the Giants to their first championship in thirty years, Simms was never fully embraced by the notoriously fickle Giant fans. A gritty, blue-collar quarterback whose tenacity, disciplined work habits, and fearless composure earned him the admiration of his teammates and the respect of head coach Bill Parcells, Simms was again leading New York to the playoffs when, in 1990, an injury forced him to the sidelines, where he watched as his substitute, Jeff Hostetler, guided the Giants to their second Super Bowl win in five seasons.

Simms and Hostetler competed for the starting job in 1991 and 1992, a period of disarray during which the Giants compiled a two-season record of fourteen and eighteen under the indecisive tutelage of Parcells's successor, Ray Handley. In 1993 a new head coach, Dan Reeves, returned the offense to Simms, who unexpectedly took the team to the playoffs with a Pro Bowl season. "Some quarterbacks can just drive Cadillacs," Bill Parcells said to Frank Litsky of the New York Times (December 2, 1990). "But I think Simms can drive a Ford, too. When the surrounding cast is sufficient, a lot of quarterbacks can drive the car. But there are only a few who can do it whether the supporting cast is sufficient or not. And I think he can do that. When he's gone, people will say about the Giants' quarterback, He's good, but he's no Phil Simms.'" Despite his strong performance in 1993, Simms was dropped from the team in June 1994, partly because of the new NFL salary cap limiting the total amount a team can spend on its players, leaving two untested quarterbacks to face the inevitable comparisons. He has since signed on as a sportscaster with ESPN.

The complete article can be found on the Current Biography CD-ROM and in the 1994 Current Biography Yearbook.

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WALSH, BILL
Nov. 30, 1931- Sports commentator.

When San Francisco won its third Super Bowl in eight seasons on January 22, 1989, the 49ers were hailed as the football team of the decade. Throughout the 1980s the 49ers had won consistently because they possessed the NFL's most imaginative and sophisticated offense, whose inventor was Bill Walsh, the team's head coach from 1979 until his retirement after the Super Bowl in 1989. One of the most innovative coaches in the history of the game, Walsh has been called the Vince Lombardi of the 1980s and a "genius," though Walsh himself denies that a term so hyperbolic can be applied to anyone in the profession of coaching. An unlikely inheritor of the mantle of the gruff Lombardi, Walsh is a distinguished, cultivated, and white-haired man of professorial appearance who toiled as an assistant coach and developer of quarterbacks for seventeen years before becoming a head coach at the age of forty-five.

The complete article can be found on the Current Biography CD-ROM and in the 1989 Current Biography Yearbook.

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