Alex Trebek and Me

I met Alex Trebek one day in the mid-1970s, about 10 years before he started his long-running gig as the host of Jeopardy. The staff at New York magazine received word (maybe from Best Bets editor Ellen Stern, who seemed to know everyone and everything in New York City) that a new game show was in pre-production and looking for contestants. There was a local (that is, Manhattan) phone number to call about trying out for the show. At the other end of the line was a staffer who administered a quick general-interest quiz. Anyone who answered the questions correctly was invited to a makeshift studio (on the west side, I think) for an interview and a second round of questions. 

Many of us on staff enthusiastically took up the challenge. My immediate boss, Arts Editor and Music Critic Alan Rich, much to his dismay, did not make the cut. He got the sports question wrong. Alan was more worldly and much more knowledgeable than any of us in every category except sports. 

Things were moving fast. We were advised that we needed to get to the studio that afternoon for the second stage of our tryout. I don’t remember a single question from either quiz, but somehow, I was still standing, along with Copy Editor Quita McMath, after the second round. We were then escorted into another part of the studio and, with one other contestant, positioned behind separate counters or lecterns (with game-show buzzers), much like those in use today on Jeopardy. 

A producer explained that we would now take part in a pair of mock shows, to be played straight, including banter with the host and appropriate breaks for what in a real show would be commercials. As we were ready to begin, Alex Trebek materialized from offstage. After a few quick preliminaries, the show began. 

 

I wish I could recall any part of the conversation with Alex, any of the questions, or even the name of the show. I do remember that Alex, a professional and a gentleman, played it like the real thing. Watching him on Jeopardy years later, I saw the same personality he showed in that mocked-up show. Oh, and I remember that I won both games, each worth $10,000. Alas, it was play money. The show, for whatever reason, never made it past that stage. Rest in peace, Alex.

Similes of a Summer Night

There’s no transforming America’s pig male

Donald Trump was in the news in mid-summer for the cold-blooded manslaughter of the English tongue. O.K., that’s hyperbole, and I’m not Henry Higgins, but what Trump said got my attention. President Do Little, who has described himself as “being, like, really smart,” used a simile.

Of the coronavirus, Trump said on August 5, “It will go away like things go away.” (In a much bigger story that broke September 9, Trump, according to Bob Woodward of the Washington Post, acknowledged on February 7 that COVID-19 was a deadly virus and that his approach was to “play it down.” Three weeks later, Trump called the virus a hoax.) 

The American Heritage Dictionary defines simile as “a figure of speech in which two essentially unlike things are compared, often in a phrase introduced by like or as, as in: He was as strong as a bull.” Not “He was as strong as a thing.” 

“It will go away like things go away.” What does that say about an imagination so bereft that it cannot complete a simple simile? Cannot think of a specific “thing” to compare it to?

“It will go away like things go away.” What things? The coronavirus will go away like the sunset goes away? Like global warming goes away? Like the debasement of the law by the leader of the free world goes away?

In Trump’s metaphorical American Carnage inaugural address he spoke of “rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape.” That might have sounded profound at the time to Trump and Stephen Miller, but “landscape” is a word favored by cliché lovers, language manglers, and the unimaginative. You see it everywhere—the political landscape, the sports landscape, the business landscape, the sports business landscape—except perhaps in horticultural writing.

Nina Burleigh in Newsweek in 2018 wrote of a study that found Trump “communicates at the lowest grade level of the last 15 presidents…according to an analysis of the speech patterns of presidents going back to Herbert Hoover.”

Burleigh wrote, “The analysis assessed the first 30,000 words each president spoke in office, and ranked them on the Flesch-Kincaid grade-level scale and more than two dozen other common tests analyzing English-language difficulty levels.”

The study concluded that “Trump clocked in around mid-fourth grade, the worst since Harry Truman, who spoke at nearly a sixth-grade level.” 

Still, I know and have taught fourth graders with more proficient and sophisticated language skills than Trump, who is condemned by every syllable he utters. To paraphrase Frederick Loewe, “Trump’s way of speaking absolutely classifies him. The moment he talks he makes some other American despise him.” 

Anyone who has listened to Trump’s propaganda briefings is familiar with the President’s limited vocabulary. He favors the adjectives “tremendous” and “fantastic,” often attaching “very” one or more times to the front of them. Describing his fiscal policy during his first presidential debate, against Hillary Clinton, Trump said, “I’m going to cut taxes bigly, and you’re going to raise taxes bigly.” Some listeners thought he said “big league.” But it was reported that Trump told his supporters, “We’re going to win bigly” and that Iran was “taking over [Iraq] bigly.”

Trump also overuses “incredible,” which is probably fitting, given that much of what he says is not believable, and uses “incredibly” as a synonym for “very.”

Now, you might wonder, “What’s a little language abuse for a President who has abused his oath of office, the Constitution, and the laws of decency?” You might also conclude that such a slovenly disregard for the written and spoken word is a reflection of the man who has contempt for science and medicine, as evidenced by the health crisis his negligence has exacerbated and that has claimed nearly 200,000 American lives, for which he admitted that he takes no responsibility.

In Hamlet, Claudius tells Gertrude, “But, like the owner of a foul disease,/To keep it from divulging, let it feed/Even on the pith of life.” That’s a simile.

Here’s another: In Julius Caesar, Marc Antony compares Caesar's wounds to mouths: “Thy wounds.../...like dumb mouths, do ope their ruby lips,/To beg the voice and utterance of my tongue.”

And finally, one from Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim that seems appropriate here: “Tormenting itself in its invincible ignorance like a small bird beating about the cruel wires of a cage.”

An original simile can make prose sing. Take these, for example, from Kingsley Amis:

From Girl, 20
“Kitty got up and behaved for a few seconds like somebody about to be machine-gunned from the air.”

“The ice compartment of the refrigerator looked like a small sample of a glacier.”

From Lucky Jim
“This morning he looked more than ever like Genghis Khan meditating a purge of his captains.”

From Take a Girl Like You

“On the way he came to the edge of a rug, which he surmounted as one might step over a sleeping Great Dane.”

Trump is a long way from the prose style of Kingsley Amis.

Come November 3, let’s hope that Trump just goes away.

One-on-One With Gary Smith

This interview was conducted on December 2, 2008. Excerpts of the interview were published in SBJ on January 26, 2009.

Gary Smith is a senior writer at Sports Illustrated known for the penetrating insights in his long-form (8,000-word) personal profiles. He has earned numerous accolades, including four National Magazine Awards, and has been recognized 11 times in the Best American Sports Writing anthology. Smith's work has also appeared in Esquire, Inside Sports, Rolling Stone and Time. His most recent collection, Going Deep, was published late in 2008 and contains 20 of his favorite stories.
Update: Gary Smith retired from Sports Illustrated in in 2013 after 30 years.

Q. In the foreword to Ira Berkow’s book Beyond the Dream, Red Smith wrote, “Ira Berkow knows that what is important about a game is not the score but the people who play it.” The same could be said of you. 

Smith: Well, hopefully so. That’s how I approach it. 

Q. It’s characterization rather than plot that drives your stories.

Smith: There is some plot in there because I’ll often cover the arc of a person’s life from deep into a situation that can be quite complicated. I think there is a decent amount of plot in there, but it’s not the plot of the games that’s critical. There is just a stage on which things play out and the different aspects of character manifested. 

Q. You wrote, “My subjects just happen to be in sports,” yet the subjects could come from any profession: arts, politics, business, for example. 

Smith: Maybe you get more audience around the table because it’s sports. But really, it’s much more dealing with universal aspects of character and dreams and wants and things that all of us deal with. There’s where the reader can begin to connect with some of these people, even celebrities, that maybe they only looked at in a vertical way and never saw much relationship to themselves. The hope is that when they read some of these stories, they’ll come away seeing that these people are human beings dealing with a lot the same demons, fears...whatever, that they are also dealing with.

Q. Al McGuire said, “Inside, I think, all the thoroughbred athletes have uncertainty, the fear of being unsuccessful.” Do you sense that?

Smith: Oh, yeah. Once you get deeper into a person—even the greatest athletes—the fear becomes so much more prominent. And it humanizes them because it seems like they're in such control, and the fear...oftentimes you find it's the centerpiece of who they've become. And how they've managed to deal with it is what's made them great. But it doesn't lessen one iota how much fear is in play in the whole process.

Q. The New York Times referred to you as the “Sports Whisperer,” and Mike Veeck said, “People warned me he’d get deep inside my head, but I had no idea. That piece could have saved me 20 years of psychoanalysis.” Rick Reilly, in the introduction to Going Deep, wrote, “God, please don’t let this guy ever profile me.” I think he was kidding. How are you able to get inside the heads of people?

Smith: I can’t say that I do, but I’m really fascinated by what makes human beings tick and how they respond to circumstances, how they solve their problems. Sometimes it’s the problem of their life, with the circumstances they were dealt, and there are so many problems and so many different ways to solve them. That interests me. 

Q. That requires trust on their part.

Smith: I hope some trust as the process develops. Maybe we’re able to get to some terrain that you might not get in a typical interview where’s there’s much more of a time limit. Most journalists need a quick impression and a quick take on something, whereas I have the luxury of really getting down into some complexities and paradoxes and really trying to understand on a deeper level. I hope most of the story subjects appreciate this, that there is some sincerity in that attempt.

Q. The profiles require that you spend a considerable amount of time with the subjects, right? 

Smith: For sure. They’re probably sick of me by the time it’s done.

Q. Is it ever awkward?

Smith: Sometimes at the beginning. I remember Mike Tyson, I put my hand out to introduce myself and he just walked away and left my hand hanging in the air. So, that was a rather awkward moment. And there are moments when you’ve got to ask them about things that are very sensitive, and that can be difficult. You hope that occurs at a point when they have enough trust to at least appreciate where the question is coming from. They may not be able to answer it completely frankly, but at least they won’t, hopefully, kick me out the door. 

Q. What attracts you to a particular subject in the first place?

Smith: It’s hard to say exactly what it is. It’s got to have ripples and twists and turns and some legs to it to go 8,000-9,000 words. Just something in there that will suggest there’s a lot more to this, or how it might play out. The other thing that interests me is how sports, or certain people in sports, strive or do something that really pulls people together. They punch through barriers between human beings and find something very connective among people from all different races, backgrounds, religions… whatever. Sports has that possibility strongly within it. People who find a way to use it that way interest me quite a bit. 

Q. Do you do all of your own research and fact-checking?

Smith: Yes.

Q. The research into the subject’s background can elicit interesting or surprising results.

Smith: You never know where you’re going to end up. You treat each one as an expedition where you just don’t know where it’s going to go, rather than going in with preconceived ideas. 

Q. You wrote, “It fascinates me what makes a person tick. It’s the contradiction, the paradox. In ambiguity, there is a gold mine. There is a lot of tension involved.” Also, “Ambiguity is where the reality lies. It’s much more honest.”

Smith: A lot of journalism, because of time and space limitations, has to pretty much flee ambiguity. The way it deals with paradox, it gets somebody’s quote on one side and somebody’s quote on the other side. So, it’s like they’ve covered their bases. They want to get a sociologist to check in with a quote, or something that covers it. That seems to be how a lot of that is treated. It’s understandable because, like I said, of the restrictions of the daily swirl. 

Q. It’s different for you.

Smith: I’m lucky. I have the time and the space to explore more. In the paradoxes of human beings and their behavior, why they do things and how conflicted it is and how it’s running in two different directions at once. Often, I’ve found if you can really get to that and convey it in the writing…there’s great stuff there, and I think it just strikes a more authentic bone in the reader. The reader knows usually enough about himself, or has some glimmer about himself, even if he doesn’t always want to let that ambiguity rise to the surface. 

Q. It’s there, though.

Smith: It’s there; things aren’t that clean. Our actions are often the result of very mixed impulses and drives. There’s tension among those impulse drives, which obviously is a great boon to storytelling: the rubbing of those different conflicts and how we find resolutions. We solve a lot of problems in ways that attend to a couple of different things at once. They’re not ideal always, but they satisfy conflicting drives sometimes. That, to me, is really interesting and is more honest to what a human being really is.

Q. Your style is non-judgmental.

Smith: Well, I’m trying. I think when you really get down to the bottom and trace back why people do what they do and see the circumstance they created and who they became, it strips away a lot of that desire to judge. Sometimes—oftentimes—it was just sheer survival that compelled the person to settle on a certain behavioral pattern or personality that they show to the world. 

Q. And then?

Smith: Once you see that, it’s hard to take that manifestation or that mask that they may be showing the world and just judge it as if is not connected to all that came before it. Or what may have happened to that person at 2 or 3 years old, say, and that mask became a survival tool. Once you start to see that, I think it becomes a lot harder to judge. 

Q. About Jim Valvano, you wrote, “He wanted to make amends, resolve some things with the world, and I knew I was his voice for that.” Any pressure or responsibility in telling a story like that?

Smith: I always feel a deep sense of responsibility when I take somebody’s life, in a way, into my hands. There’s even more when a person’s facing the end and their family is about to lose them. Yeah, it definitely ups the ante. I’ve felt it.

Q. You have written, “Celebrities are often more into protecting their image. Derek Jeter at age 60 would be a hell of a story.” Why? 

Smith: Well, perhaps at that age he might be able to drop some of the veneer that he's so successfully created for what he's dealing with in a very professional, but not very revealing, way. Who knows? Maybe more ossified? It's hard to say.

Q. A broader life experience? A mature perspective?

Smith: The idea basically being that somebody’s lived a lot more life, and had a lot more life experiences. He’s basically been in the bubble of baseball and perfecting, you know, a single skill set. Kind of limited in a lot of ways since he was probably 10-11 years old. When he has to leave this and experience a lot of things…about letting that go and getting to a lot more of life.

Q. A more complete or detailed picture.

Smith: I would imagine he’d be a much more interesting story because there would be more turns and twists to his life and with the loss of something that gave him an identity: baseball. It’s going to have an effect on him, you know. I would think a large effect in how he deals with it. Sometimes it’s when you get a person for a story, not necessarily when they’re in the limelight. There could be a lot more expansion to the story beyond that. 

Q. John Cage said, “I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones.” Who are the original thinkers in sports?

Smith: They're probably few and far between now. John Wooden—there seemed to be something there going on beyond the obvious and typical and clichés. Muhammad Ali had a big imagination. He had an ability to link his personal journey to the world. It was an act of inspiration because it took him through moments in the ring that would have melted other men. It felt like he was doing it to help the world. And, so, he had a much larger motivation in a way that people who were just on a singular quest for their own betterment or riches. What's been lost to a large degree is that sports are a vehicle through which you grow as an entire person. When it becomes an end in itself, imagination gets quashed.

Q. In this increasingly technological age, is the printed word becoming passé?

Smith: It’s definitely under siege. I feel that it’s always going to have a place because I think it gets to a deeper spot in the reader. Stories still strike us, and have an effect and a power on us. They’re still really important on some deep level, and I don’t think that the Internet is the best medium. It’s a great medium for information and a horizontal knowledge. 

Q. What about something like the Kindle?

Smith: Maybe that will work. I don’t mean to say that it can’t happen electronically, but something about the [reading] experience has to be different from what we’re getting right now on the laptop, or whatever, for that kind of exchange to really work in its truest, deepest sense. Something that takes us more into what a book or magazine experience is like, where we can walk off with it and be alone and linger over it and not have your finger on the trigger button of your mouse or have to scroll down, the way you approach material on the Internet. If that’s doable, then maybe there is a way that books and magazines will thrive, but in a different format from what is being served up right now.

Q. The trouble with the electronic format is that you can’t write in the margins.

Smith: That’s exactly right. The other thing about it is that it needs to be served up in a way that doesn’t have advertisements or links that you click on to go to something else. All that stuff is taking you away from boring deeper and deeper into the words and the story and how it connects with you and your life. All that stuff is calling you away. Real writing is all about chiseling every word and every sentence and every paragraph that just pulls the reader closer and deeper into it. 

Q. Who has influenced your style?

Smith: It’s hard to point to any particular writer. I’ve gone through different phases in my life, as anybody else who is interested in writing and reading. After I went through the kind of Steinbeck/Hemingway earlier phase, I turned to writers like Herman Hesse, who was more intrigued by human growth and what’s going on inside them, and Camus and Dostoevsky and Kundera, who really are much more psychological. Those guys influenced the way I think, for sure.

Q. Do you go back to them now?

Smith: You referred to writing in the margins. There will be times when I’ll pick up and leaf through one book and see what I’ve marked, and reread some of those nuggets that are in there.

Q. It’s a curious thing to reread a novel years later and see what you once underlined or noted as being meaningful at the time. 

Smith: That’s right. You’d probably underline something very different now. It’s amazing how you can go back to the same book and get so much more out of it now that you have that much more life experience. It will resonate in a way that it didn’t back then, even though it may have interested you then. It’s felt reality vs. intellectual reality.

Q: Any fictional character you would enjoy interviewing?

Smith: Wow, you better believe that! Ahab would be a good one. Steppenwolf would be an interesting guy. We could go all over the place for that question.

Q. What about an interview with anyone, past or present, living or dead?

Smith: There are so many. It would be fascinating to talk to Jesus Christ. It would be fascinating to talk to Friederich Nietzsche, to Dostoevsky. I’d love to sit down with them and throw some ideas around.

Q. Not a sportswriter’s typical interview subject. If you could switch places with any athlete, whom would you choose? Or would you even want to?

Smith: I probably wouldn’t because for the most part they’ve had to whittle down their lives so much to excel at something that their possibility for personal growth is greatly compromised. There are a few who have gone beyond that and found a way, probably mostly after they’ve retired. It’s like they die young and if they haven’t figured out something before that death occurs, about where the water and the deeper life is, then pretty much it seems like a Sahara of an existence after that death of the end of their careers.

Q. You wrote about Andre Agassi. 

Smith: Agassi was a guy who really struck me because he was a seeker even while he was an athlete, which is so rare. Most of them just don’t have the time, or they’re afraid of tinkering with the equation and looking too far beyond the immediacy of the skill set they’re trying to perfect. That was a rather striking experience to spend a lot of time with him and see how hungry he was to grow and to learn and to understand himself, even while he was still playing. It intensified even more toward the end of his playing days, but he was on that kind of quest throughout his playing career, which is why he was so confusing to so many people, to tennis fans.

Q. John McEnroe turned you down. That would have been interesting, to explore what happens when the cheering stops. 

Smith: Yeah, I would have enjoyed that a lot. 

Q. Billy Martin said, “There is nothing greater in the world than when someone on the team does something good, and everybody gathers around to pat him on the back."

Smith: Except for when somebody does something bad and everybody gathers around to pat him on the back.

Q: He would have been an interesting personality for you to profile.

Smith: Who, Billy? Oh, God, yeah! I don't know if anybody ever really nailed him and got to the bottom of what created him to be who he was.

Q. There is a song in The Mikado in which Ko-Ko lists things that would not be missed: “nuisances who write for autographs…people [with] irritating laughs.” What in sports would you not miss if it were eliminated?

Smith: Bats that break so easily. I have a real fear that somebody's going to lose an eye before they get a grip on this. I wouldn't miss PSLs. I wouldn't miss baseball games starting at 8:30 and ending after midnight and days off in between tournaments and games and playoffs and World Series, where they just stretch out forever. I wouldn't miss boxing, you know, with the total way that it's legislated and run.

Q. What makes you see red?

Smith: Gosh, I don't get real angry about a lot of things. Anger isn't one of the major components of my personality

Q. Red Holzman said, “The best feeling in the world is to wake up early in the morning when you don’t have to go anywhere.” What do you consider the best feeling in the world?

Smith: One would be waking up in some strange place on the other side of the world and just drinking in all the different sights, sounds, smells, and people. Or just waking up to a full day to read and think and not too many errands to run or obligations to fulfill. To have a good cup of coffee and settle down with something that's going to take you somewhere new. That's also a great day.

Q. Is there a sports story or sports business story you are watching closely?

Smith: Not really. It’s going to be interesting to see how the economy plays out on sports and see if we can kind of whittle back our mania or religion or whatever you want to call it and adjust. Or if it will just be the escape from everything and motor on. I’ve got to believe there’s going to be some pretty massive effects of it. But for the stories I write, something like that would need to play out in an individual or a small group for it to be compelling. That’s definitely a worthy story, and needs to be done, but it’s not where I make my most hay.

Q: What's the best new idea in sports?

Smith: I don't know if it's come to fruition yet, but I'd like to see the approach of coaches and teams be, “Let's see how we can grow through this and contribute to society through this journey we're on as a team.” That it become more of a relationship between sports and the fans and their communities, instead of just to win the championship and a zillion dollars. 

Q. Do you see that happening?

Smith: A great chance is being missed because it's so rare that you have these laboratories (sports), where you're bringing in so many different kinds of people into one setting. They're spending more time with one another than with their own families, and they have to have incredible discipline. It's a rare and beautiful situation, but it's not being seen for what its possibilities are. That's where I wish the new ideas would go to, but it's not happening that much.

Q. Bobby Knight wrote about the panorama you see through the car’s windshield, that the rear-view mirror greatly restricts life. What do you see looking straight ahead that excites you?

Smith: In general, it’s continuing to grow and understand more of what this whole mystery and miracle of life is. 

PERSONAL

Date & Place of Birth: 10-27-1953
Education: La Salle University

Last book read: Psychotherapy Without the Self, by Mark Epstein

Earliest sports memory: It would probably be when I was 6 or 7 years old and out in the yard playing and my mom called me in. The Phillies were batting with two outs and the bases loaded in the bottom of the ninth. She explained just enough about the situation to pull me into the drama, and it sparked something.

Superstitions: I've pretty much whittled those stupid little things out of my life.

Extravagances: As soon as I hear something about a book that sounds interesting or introduces new ideas, I jump on Amazon and buy it in a heartbeat, which means I'll have about 30 books lined up in the on-deck circle when I should be knocking off the ones I've got. 

FAVORITES

Vacation spot: I try to mix them up. I loved living in Sydney for a year.
I've been back there several times. I loved living in Bolivia and Spain and Paris.

Piece of music: "Thunder Road," by Bruce Springsteen, is right up there.

Authors: Nietzsche, Camus, Kundera

Movies: Ghandi, Lawrence of Arabia,The Shawshank Redemption

Best and worst sports movies: I don't watch too many sports movies. They're kind of mainstreamed, and mainstream movies don't do much for me.

Sporting event: Baseball and basketball have been my two favorite sports since I was a kid.

One-on-One With Sean McManus

Published in SBJ January 12, 2006

Sean McManus is wearing two hats these days. As President of CBS Sports since 1996, he led the acquisition (and later renegotiation) by the network of broadcast rights to the NFL and extended its broadcast rights for the NCAA Division I men’s basketball tournament and the PGA Tour. As newly named President of CBS News, he takes on a dual role so famously made at ABC in 1977 by Roone Arledge, with whom McManus’s father, legendary sports broadcaster Jim McKay, collaborated. That same year, McManus began his professional career at ABC Sports as a production assistant before moving to NBC two years later as associate producer and to Trans World International in 1987 as Senior VP. 

Update: McManus served as President of CBS Sports and News for five years. In February 2011, he was named Chairman, CBS Sports.

  

Q. The French writer Rabelais wrote, “One falls to the ground in trying to sit on two stools.” How will you be able to keep your balance as president of CBS Sports and CBS News?

McManus: Probably 95 percent of my time now is being spent in the news division. I’m fortunate in that my No. 2 in sports, Tony Petitti, is more than qualified to not only maintain what we have achieved at CBS Sports but indeed to take it to the next level. I’m involved in the PGA Tour negotiations directly, but other than that I’m going to be an overseer and let Tony run the operation. So, I’m not sitting on two stools right now. I’m sitting on one stool and I’ve got my hand on another one.

Q. As you know, there is a precedent for your move. In 1977, ABC placed Roone Arledge, its top sports executive, in charge of its news division. But as Jacques Steinberg wrote in the New York Times, “Arledge operated in a time in which the networks did not have to contend with the defection of viewers to newer outlets, like Fox News and Yahoo.” What unique challenges does that additional competition present?

McManus: The competition, for the best anchorman, the correspondents, and the best personnel behind the camera, is intense. The competition for viewers is far more intense. In Roone’s day, the first opportunity most viewers had to watch national news was in the national news telecasts. Now, with Fox News and CNN and MSNBC, anybody who wants to watch news 24 hours a day obviously can. So, the challenge is to put on a news program at 6:30 that not only gives the viewer a good summary of what happened in the day, but also presents an alternative to what not only the cable stations are doing but also what the other two networks are doing. And that is an enormous challenge.

Q. The technology has also come a long way since 1977.

McManus: The production values in news when Roone took over ABC News in 1977 were minimal. Graphics and music and production techniques that were common in sports were never used in news, nor were a lot of the technologies that Roone had developed in the sports area. By transferring those over from sports to news, Roone revolutionized the news business. But we’re all doing that now. We’re all using the technology to its fullest, so that opportunity was obviously exploited by Roone. 

Q. Of the time you as a youth spent with Arledge, you said, “I’d like to think some of his genius rubbed off on me.” What was his genius?

McManus: Roone’s genius was manifold. First and foremost, he understood the importance of on-air talent and building stars, whether it was a Peter Jennings or a David Brinkley or a Ted Koppel or a Jim McKay or a Howard Cosell. He understood how much of your identity really is placed in the people who are in front of the camera. That’s No. 1.

Q. And No. 2?

McManus: He understood that all good television, whether it’s sports, news, drama, or entertainment, comes down to good storytelling. And whether he was telling the story of a sporting event or of a major news event, he had the best storytelling sense of anyone I’ve ever seen in television. 

Q. In any discussion of Roone Arledge, the word “storytelling” always comes up. Dick Ebersol said it the most valuable lesson he learned from Arledge, and Jim Nantz has referred to storytelling.

McManus: Yes. 

Q. Who are the good storytellers, in sports and news, and what makes them good?

McManus: I don’t want to get into specific names in news or sports at the moment as far as on-air talent. That’s a tough question for me to answer, because I don’t want to mention just one or two of our guys.

Q. What is your biggest challenge?

McManus: To make CBS News the leader in this industry, both in terms of viewership and quality.

Q. How would you characterize your management style?

McManus: I’d probably want to ask other people who work for me. I would say I’m very involved in all aspects, whether its production or operations or business affairs or programming because I like all of those. I try to give the people who work for me a great deal of flexibility and liberty to do their jobs without interference, but I really want to be kept abreast of everything that is going on. I’m fiercely loyal to the people who work for me, but conversely expect just as much loyalty in return. And I want people who are working for me to really enjoy being at either CBS Sports or CBS News. I think I’ve accomplished that at CBS Sports, and I believe I will accomplish it at CBS News.

Q. What’s the best advice you received?

McManus:  It was from my father, which is to be true to yourself and to be your own man. And if you do that and you’re talented enough, everything else will fall into place.

Q. Let’s talk a little about your father, Jim McKay.

McManus: I learned a lot of lessons from him also. First and foremost, when you’re on television, you can’t fool anybody. Your personality and whatever’s inside you come out. You can’t fool the American viewing public, whether you’re doing sports or doing news.

He always told me that when he was on television, he never imagined that he was talking to millions of people; he imagined that he was talking to one or two people. He wanted to talk to the audience, not at the audience. And he also firmly believed that he was not [part of] the story of an event he was covering, that the athletes and the competition were the story. 

Q. A good lesson for any broadcaster.

McManus: That’s a lesson that I think is lost on a lot of the young sports commentators who are coming up through the business. You don’t want to be part of the story. You want to tell the story, you want to be a storyteller, you want to do your job well, but you want to get out of the way. He was great at doing that at the right times, and it’s a lesson that more young sportscasters should pay attention to.

Q. He went from sportscaster to newscaster without warning at the 1972 Olympics at Munich when terrorists seized and killed 11 Israeli athletes. You were there at the time. What do you recall most vividly about that day?

McManus: The surreal nature of being around a group of men I had watched produce television programs my entire life and, all of a sudden, this same group of men was producing one of the most dramatic and compelling news events in history, and the entire country was watching. I don’t think the magnitude of the event dawned on anybody until we got home a couple of weeks later and realized how big a story it was and how many people were completely reliant on my father and Roone’s production team for what happened that day.

Q. Your father got a lot of mail on that, didn’t he?

McManus: I don’t think any of us, especially my father, appreciated the magnitude of that until they got home and the hundreds and hundreds of letters and telegrams that people had sent him were waiting on his doorstep.

Q. Jim McKay was part of the New York Giants’ broadcast crew in 1963. 

McManus: I went to a lot of Giants games with my father. His broadcast partner was Chris Schenkel, and I would squeeze in the little radio booth and sit between Chris and my dad and afterward go down to the locker room and see players like Sam Huff and Y.A. Tittle and Erich Barnes. They were my heroes in those days.

Q. You were at the game the weekend JFK was assassinated. The NFL games were not cancelled. What do you remember about that day?

McManus: I remember the discussion that my parents had regarding whether we should go to the game. My father had promised me that we would go, and he was trying to balance that promise with what was the right thing to do. In the end, I think he made a decision that he might have regretted, much like Pete Rozelle regretted it. He might have made the wrong decision, but he did so purely out of, I think, loyalty and affection to me because he knew how disappointed I would be. When you’re an eight-year-old boy, you might not be able to comprehend what a devastating event the assassination of a president is.

Q. What do you think has been your best career decision?

McManus: Probably in 1979 to leave ABC Sports, where I’d been given a great break because of who my father was, and go work for Don Ohlmeyer and Jeff Mason at NBC Sports, which was a little scary since I had grown up at ABC. But to make that move really enabled me to develop as Sean McManus and not as Jim McKay’s son. 

Q. Where is the imagination in sports today?

McManus: It’s a lot more challenging because everyone is doing such an unbelievably good and sophisticated job, whether it’s cable or network sports television. It’s really difficult to distinguish yourself. You can try some new production techniques or new technology, but basically we’re all doing an excellent job, and it’s more and more difficult to use your imagination to come up with new ideas. A lot of the imagination is coming on putting together the best quality broadcast team that you can. 

Q. For example?

McManus: It’s why we moved Greg Gumbel into the studio and Jim Nantz out to do the football games last season. That, I think, in some ways took more imagination than coming up with the next great graphic or piece of music to use. Imagination is trying to distinguish your telecast from what everyone else is doing, especially when everyone else is doing such a good job.

Q. What in sports would you not miss if it were eliminated?

McManus: That’s a good question. I would not miss any performance-enhancing drugs—an absurd phrase. I read that as cheating. It’s a stain that’s been put on the entire sports world.

Q. How do you assess the state of broadcast journalism today?

McManus: The job that reporters are doing is generally exemplary. One of the dangers, more on cable certainly than on network, is that in an effort to draw ratings, intelligent dialogue, to a large extent, has been replaced by shouting. I love good debates and I love opposite and divergent points of view being shared on television, but I think at times the rhetoric is dialed up too high just to attract more viewers. But if you look at the quality of the coverage of Hurricane Katrina, the war in Iraq, or any host of other events, I think the coverage is unbelievably good across the board.

Q. Steven Brill has referred to “the overall scream culture that is too often cable television.” CBS has always seemed more reserved, or less noisy, in its productions than the other networks. Is that an approach you strive for?

McManus: I wouldn’t say we have strived for that. It goes back to what I was saying about letting the story, whether it’s a news event or a sports event, be the important part of your telecast and not the person who is covering that story or the graphics or the music in that story. Doing the best job you can and letting the events play out as events. 

If anything in the last couple of years, Tony Petitti and I have tried to make our image at CBS Sports a bit more contemporary. I think that is clearly evident in our NFL and college basketball coverage, both in terms of the music and the production values. And I think we are drastically more contemporary than we were five or six years ago. That’s on purpose and was done with a plan in mind.

Q. What about CBS News?

McManus: I think the heritage of CBS News is of great journalistic integrity, great reporting, and great newscasting. I’m not going to ignore the fact that that image has taken a hit in the last year. That is clear, and it’s one of my jobs to help with the team here to restore that image that was so pristine for so many years.

Q. You said, back in 1998, that “because television generates the lion’s share of income in most sports, sports have to balance adjusting themselves to become more attractive to television and maintaining the integrity of the sport.” Has that been difficult?

McManus: I don’t think it’s been difficult at all. I think the leagues have done a good job of accommodating television without compromising the competitive balance. I think the one issue that is probably most arguable is start times of games. That’s the one area that all of us are a bit susceptible to. But quite frankly, it comes out of pure economics. If the leagues are going to get paid the kind of rights fees they are paid, it’s incumbent upon the networks, which are in fact a business—to maximize revenue. And regrettably, sometimes maximizing revenue means starting games later than any of us would like to.

Q. Anything else?

McManus: Other than that, I can’t think of too many instances where the competitive nature or the enjoyability (if that’s a word) of a sporting event has been compromised to satisfy television. Would we like fewer commercials in our football games? I’m sure we probably would, but I think people are getting used to commercials in all sports. So, from my point of view—and I’m probably not totally objective—I don’t see that’s it’s harmed sports irreparably.

  

Q. You said, “It’s not whether the Evening News is relevant. It’s whether I can make it more relevant to viewers.” Isn’t news by its very definition relevant? How do you make it more relevant?

McManus: You can do a story on rising interest rates that has all the facts regarding that particular story. But unless you explain to people how it’s going to directly affect them and hit their pocketbooks, and perhaps what they can do to avoid those high interest rates, unless you do that, I’m not sure you’re really engaging your viewers. 

We’ve all done stories on the Medicaid prescription benefit program, and we’ve all talked about how confusing it is and how difficult it is for senior citizens to understand it. Well, that’s half the story. The second half of the story is trying to explain to viewers what it is you can do to try to figure out this mess. That would be a much more relevant story than just saying “Here’s why this is so confusing.”

Q. To find a way to better articulate the story?

McManus: I could go down a list and any story that you do, figure out a way to make the viewer at home either be more informed or more engaged. And say, “Boy, that really does apply to me; now I understand why rising interest rates or the prescription drug benefit program really does affect me. I better do X-Y-Z to avoid this problem.”

That to me is making it more relevant. If you talk about the war in Iraq, and you report the facts of what’s happening over there, that’s very good reporting. If you explain how that might affect America, either economically or socially or militarily, then you’re making it more relevant to the person who’s watching that program. 

Q. Is there a problem with the way the news is reported?

McManus: I don’t have a problem with the way anybody, including CBS, is reporting the news. I would just like to figure out a way that the person at home is better served by being told how this affects him or her directly. That’s a fine distinction, but I think it’s an important one.

Q. Everyone, from movies and television to newspapers and magazines, is after the younger audience. Les Moonves, in the Baltimore Sun, said: “For all three evening newscasts, the average age of viewers is 60 years old.” Letterman had a Top 10 list to attract younger viewers. Do you have your own list?

McManus: My primary goal is not to attract younger viewers to the Evening News. The Evening News viewers are always going to be older, and I’ve accepted that. Trying to get the 18- to-34-year olds to watch the Evening News is not a priority, and if it was, it would be an unrealistic priority. They just aren’t watching the news at 6:30. That’s not their viewing pattern. I’m trying to get a better share of the audience that is currently watching the three evening newscasts, and, secondarily, if I can lower the average age and attract some younger viewers, I’ll be satisfied.

Personal

Date & Place of birth: February 16, 1955 in New York City

Education: Duke University, 1977

Favorites

Vacation spot: The Breakers in Palm Beach and home with my family

Piece of music: “Maggie May” by Rod Stewart and “Johnny B. Goode” by Chuck Berry. My daughter’s name is Maggie, and those are my kids’ favorite two songs.

Author: Ernest Hemingway

Quote: It’s by Winston Churchill, and it’s on my desk in both News and Sports: “We make a living by what we get; we make a life by what we give.”

Sporting event: The Masters

Movie: It has to be The Godfather

Last book read: It’s going to sound like I’m making this up, but I’m not. It’s Bob Schieffer’s book, This Just In. And I just reread Roone.

Typical day off: The perfect day off for me is golf early in the morning with Tony Petitti and the afternoon with my family.

Athlete you most enjoy watching: Tiger Woods when he’s on CBS