Monthly Archives: June 2008

June 8, 2008 · 4:22 pm

Jim

One of the most exciting moments I’ve had in my career came when I met Jim McKay for the first time. To sports fans, ABC’s Wide World of Sports was a must-view piece of appointment viewing every week. That’s where one could watch everything from Muhammad Ali fights to the Lumberjack World Championship to NASCAR. In those pre-ESPN, pre-regional sports nets, pre-everything is ON RIGHT NOW, Wide World was your weekly sports lifeline.

In the center of Wide World was Jim McKay. While he’s probably best known as the man who told America that the Munich athletes were “all gone” in one of the greatest performances in broadcasting history, my favorite memories are of Jim and horse racing, specifically the Triple Crown. How ironic that Jim passed on Belmont Saturday.

Anyway, I was fortunate enough to work at ABC Sports late in the Wide World cycle and to walk into a room and meet someone who had meant so much to me over the years was moving. Despite his stature in the world of broadcasting and sports history, Jim was as nice a man as you’d ever meet (and that is NOT the case with many lesser lights with whom I’ve worked over the years – they just thought they were Jim!).

The first chapter of Jim’s book, The Real McKay, should be mandatory reading for anyone who wants to work in sports and the rest of it is a great read as well. ABC Sports was, and still is, a family, despite the demise of the ABC Sports brand. There is a very active alumni association and the moving mails that have been circulating over the last two days are an indicator of how special Jim was. I will always hear his voice in my head – the Wide World opening is indelibly burned in there: Spanning the globe to bring you the constant variety of sports… the thrill of victory… and the agony of defeat… the human drama of athletic competition… This is “ABC’s Wide World of Sports!”

Thank you, Jim. You were one of a kind.

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June 6, 2008 · 9:18 am

In retrospect

I’m having lunch today with a few people I’ve known for a lot of years. All of us went to high school together, one of them was in my Hebrew school class, and one I met when I was 8 years old and went through 10 years of public school and 4 years of college with. Phew!

When we first meet people, whether personally or professionally, we don’t usually think about the fact that they might just be a part of your life many years down the road. That might be a good thing or a not so good thing depending on what you do with the relationship. Some turn out to be trusted partners; others turn out to be bad pennies you can’t make go away.

I’ve tried to explain to both my daughters that some of the kids in their lives now might hang around one way or another so they might examine their behaviors in that light (not that they’re the Mean Girls sorts).

And so should we all!

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June 5, 2008 · 8:24 am

If you can’t stand the heat…

As someone who fancies themselves able to cook a bit, I am addicted to Hell’s Kitchen and the rantings of chef Gordon Ramsay. For the better part of this season, one contestant, Matt, has done very little well other than whine about everything. The heat in the kitchen. The other contestants. His bad luck.

The interesting part about Matt was brought out in this week’s challenge, which was an individual challenge (most of the others were team-based). Each contestant was given an ingredient and told to make something out of it. Matt was given veal and, despite his never having demonstrated much in the way of skill, created something of which Gordon approved. Yet when the team went back to cook as a team, he reverted to his unskilled, whiny ways (this week, he had a “migraine”). He had the nerve to go back to Ramsey as the group left and have a chat about why eliminating him would be wrong since he gutted it out through his pain. This is the full episode recap.

I’ve seen individuals like Matt throughout my years of managing people. Their individual skills are fine – that’s probably what led you to hire them in the first place. But they seem to be totally different people when they have to work in a group. Their skills vanish under pressures, both from peers and from deadlines. They have a million excuses, generally things they can’t prove (like a headache) and you can’t disprove (like a headache). As a manager, you never quite know if you want to fire them or promote them because they do have talent. But they drag down their team in the process of drowning themselves and that’s really the determining factor. Either get them in positions where they can work by themselves or get rid of them.

Just as Chef Ramsey did with Matt!

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