![]() Gumbel pointed to the end of the first half, when the 3-12 Jets found themselves on the Dolphins' 3 with three seconds left on the clock. There were other moments, in the rewatching, that would have benefited from an announcer's ability to provide that context. We'd sit around in the truck and say, 'Let's play the tape now.' But it would just come out of the blue and didn't make a lot of sense out of context." "Early on in the game we realized that we could do whatever we wanted. "Normally, you're following the announcers, and the announcers are directing the flow of the telecast," Weisman said. Several times, prerecorded interviews - with Dolphins coach Don Shula and receiver Duriel Harris - appeared on the screen. In retrospect, Ohlmeyer said he wishes he'd gone to Gumbel more often. Fox was the first, in its debut league telecast, in 1994. ![]() Weisman's only lament is that NBC didn't employ a score bug and a running clock they had the technology, they just didn't think of it. Nonetheless, no NFL broadcast had ever featured so many graphics. "They look like troglodyte communication. "These were, to us, state-of-the-art," Ohlmeyer said, shaking his head. "And, 'That last drive took seven minutes and 20 seconds.' The graphics also filled in some of the holes."Īh, those graphics. "You would hear during the game, 'They're measuring for the first down,' " recalled Michael Weisman, the telecast's co-producer. Orange Bowl public address announcer Bob Kaufman was instructed to embellish his usual observations of who carried the ball, down and distance. "There's all sorts of strange noises going on, buzzing and things that sound like a frying pan." "The audio was not nearly rock-solid," said David Neal, a 23-year-old associate producer at the time, who would go on to direct NBC's Olympic coverage. As a result, even the quarterback's signals are inaudible. Problem was, the NFL would not relax its usual restrictions, and NBC was unable to place microphones on players. To compensate for the lack of words, Ohlmeyer and his technical people placed sensitive microphones all around the stadium. Gumbel artfully teed up the game without the aid of a teleprompter and returned for several updates as the game progressed. I viewed it as kind of a stunt with a small 's.'" I thought it was more amusing than anything else. "The young guy in the white sweater looks fat," Gumbel said, watching a DVD of the game in a midtown Manhattan hotel suite. What if this crazy idea really worked?"īryant Gumbel, the host of NBC's pregame show, appeared on camera - in a form-fitting white, V-neck sweater - before the game, then put his microphone down and walked into the Orange Bowl in Miami. I mean, he was flirting with the rest of our lives. "We all gathered together, hoping that Ohlmeyer was dead wrong. "We're paid to talk, so all of us want to fill the air with lots of exciting words. "My first reaction was of incredible nerve, nervousness," he said at his home outside of San Diego. "Part of my thinking was what could we possibly do to get fans to watch this? People could follow a game with pictures, graphics, and hearing the PA announcer in the background."ĭick Enberg, a current ESPN announcer who was one of NBC's lead football announcers at the time, was not amused. "Here we had this dog of a game," Ohlmeyer said. NBC, with its smaller AFC markets, was giving CBS all it could handle and this might be a way to squeeze a few more points out of an unattractive matchup. And, company man that he was, Ohlmeyer had an eye on the ratings. He always had believed that announcers talked too much here was an attention-seeking vehicle that would drive that point home. Ohlmeyer, currently the ESPN ombudsman, announced the decision in October and it served several purposes for the executive producer of NBC Sports. ![]() "All the stuff I've done in my career," Ohlmeyer mused recently at ESPN, "and that's what I'm going to be remembered for. And yet, one of the stunts that will follow him to his grave was a game without a play-by-play crew. He was the first producer of "Monday Night Football," produced and directed three Olympics broadcasts, won 16 Emmy awards and is a member of the Sports Broadcasting Hall of Fame. It was a meaningless, season-ending game for two mediocre NFL teams, but Don Ohlmeyer turned it into a happening - and a piece of history. The fact that we try something different and dare to has been greeted with almost every kind of reaction, from good-natured humor to applause to some surprising anger." - Bryant Gumbel's first on-camera words on Dec. "We are just moments away from the kickoff of today's Jets-Dolphins game and a telecast that figures to be different. You have reached a degraded version of because you're using an unsupported version of Internet Explorer.įor a complete experience, please upgrade or use a supported browser
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