2024 Sports Broadcasting Hall of Fame: Bryant Gumbel, Journalism Icon
2024 Sports Broadcasting Hall of Fame: Bryant Gumbel, Journalism Icon Theres a lot to say about s career, but the end of it is a great place to start.
In 2023, HBO announced that, in December 2023, after 29 seasons, would be no more.
The monthly show leaves a formidable history: 37 Sports Emmy Awards and two Peabody Awards and what was arguably the most thoughtful sports program on television and is certainly the most honored.
His induction into the Sports TV Hall of Fame this year is just another feather in an already brilliant plumage.
Not long after the HBO announcement, Gumbel had an announcement of his own.
He said he was retiring, and he seems to mean it.
His work on is but one of the accomplishments on his resume.
In 1975, he was hired at NBC to co-host its Sunday NFL pregame show, shortly after the show was invented.
He did baseball and NFL and college-football telecasts for NBC until 1982.
Then he became the first Black host of the show, teamed with Jane Pauley.
He hosted the show for 15 years, taking some side trips to lead NBCs coverage of the Seoul Olympics in 1988 and the PGA TOUR in 1990.
All in all, for anyone keeping score, Gumbel worked an astounding 52 years in television.
And, as he told fellow sports commentator Rich Eisen, I think thats enough for any person.
If I never look into a television camera again, thats okay by me.
He added, I never say never but noted that theres not much demand for a 75-year-old sportscaster.
Hes probably right about that.
The evolution of sports-TV programming is faster paced, more buddy-buddy than it used to be, and its not for Gumbel.
I watch very little of the yelling back and forth, he says.
But, you know, Im the old guy in the room.
Gumbel is the consummate pro.
On , he was known as Never Stumble Gumbel.
He may always have been unruffled, but he didnt inspire calm in those he interviewed: when he wants to, he can have a sharp edge.
In 2018, Gumbel rattled some sports fans on when he interviewed Derek Jeter, after the celebrated former New York Yankee shortstop became CEO of the Florida Marlins, which were bad when he got there and bad when he left in 2022.
The interview started nicely.
Are you as happy as you look? Gumbel asked.
I am, Jeter replied.
Things are going well.
Its a good time in my life.
At that, Gumbel chortled.
Why do you laugh? Jeter asked.
Because, from what I read, things arent going great, Gumbel replied.
Youve been blamed for everything from firing people who were beloved to blowing off the [MLB] winter meetings to tanking, fronting an ownership group that needs money.
Where do you want to start? Bryant explains, He purged nearly everyone from popular team ambassadors and front-office personnel to broadcasters and even the team mascot.
Then he traded away virtually all of the Marlins best players, including that years league MVP, Giancarlo Stanton.
For Jeter, who seemingly could do no wrong as a player, his management stint was tough.
Yet he insisted to Gumbel that he expected this team of inexperienced players to compete in another rebuilding phase.
The two went head-to-head until Jeter at one point said, joking but not, Youre mentally weak.
Gumbel retorted, But, as an executive, it looks like youre delusional.
Thats Gumbel, who, to use the sturdy civil-rights phrase, succeeded in speaking truth to power as much as any sportscaster.
Speaking to Eisen before the last edition of , Gumbel said that doing hard-hitting TV sports reporting is increasingly difficult: The cross-pollination of networks and sports is now so ingrained, it is naive to believe that any media entity can say [of a story it is pursuing] that Im just going to go where this story takes me and be damned with any relationship weve got.
I dont think the front office would be too pleased with that.
Players and owners and league executives now have an easy way out, he told .
I grew up in a time when, if a guy ran afoul of something or had a problem, his only way out of it was to be seen sitting for a serious interview with somebody who was equally serious.
Thats no longer the case.
...
Now, if a guy gets a DUI or gets in trouble with his team, he goes on ...
the leagues network, answers a couple of softball questions, and, next time hes asked about it, he says he addressed it.
Im not saying theres a bad guy in this, but times have changed.
Issues, not star profiles, were the stuff of .
In one memorable segment, it chastised the NHL for denying a link.
In 2014, noted an apparent connection between chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) cases and another NFL scandal domestic-abuse incidents plaguing the league.
There were lots of other issues.
One story reported how young children some as young as 3 from Third World countries were enslaved in the United Arab Emirates and forced to be camel jockeys and were housed in an open-air pen, fed sparingly, and sometimes beaten.
The footage is ugly.
had that story, reported by Bernard Goldberg, in 2004.
A follow-up several years later said that, in part because of its report, the race organizers stopped the enslavement and began using tiny robots.
When the show received a Peabody Award in 2012, the judges said, Uninhibited by league affiliations, sponsors, or the blinders of fandom, unafraid to be irreverent or aggressive, is what sports journalism for that matter, journalism, period should be..
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