By: Bella Michaels
It’s NFL Draft Day. Rather than sitting in his broadcast studio wearing a suit and tie, CBS sportscaster Greg Gumbel is sitting at home in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., wearing a blue Under Armour t-shirt and a white ball cap.
“I’m coping,” Gumbel said. “Spring was a bit strange without March Madness. I’ve been doing that every year since I returned to CBS in 1998.”
In a world without live sports, the three-time Emmy Award winner keeps himself busy with swimming, chasing lizards in his backyard and rocking to his theme song “Brown Sugar” by his favorite band, The Rolling Stones.
While sports are on pause, journalism isn’t.
But Gumbel doesn’t quite consider himself a journalist.
“I would consider my brother more of a journalist than I am,” said Gumbel. “He does those things like dig deep down and get into the backgrounds of people and sometimes things that aren’t very pleasant.”
His younger brother, Bryant Gumbel, is most known for his fifteen years of co-hosting the “Today Show.” He currently hosts the HBO investigative series “Real Sports.”
“I think [Bryant] is superb at what he does,” said Gumbel. “But I don’t want to watch a college quarterback, who threw for four-hundred yards last week and then go back and learn that his maternal grandmother is the one that taught him how to pass because his parents left him all alone.”
He cares about what happens on the field and why it happens. He focuses on accurately relaying, to viewers and listeners, what he sees on the field.
Gumbel says sports journalists need to improve the intent and focus of their work.
“There are far too many people in my field who are more concerned about nailing someone to the wall than they are about getting information,” said Gumbel.
He’s not a big fan of sports talk radio. “There are a few who do it intelligently,” Gumbel said. “Most do it to be argumentative.”
Raised in Hyde Park on the South Side of Chicago, Gumbel grew up in a family that highly valued education.
“The fact that it was a racially diverse neighborhood was terrific,” said Gumbel. “I miss Chicago, and I thought that it was as integral to me growing up as my dad was. My dad was a hell of an influence on me and my brother.”
His late-father, Richard Gumbel, was a probate judge and also served through an illness in the Philippines during World War II. He marched forward despite having both his tonsils removed in the midst of it all.
“My dad, if there was one thing he was vehement about, was to be educated,” said Gumbel. “His mandate was to listen carefully, think clearly and speak distinctively.”
But many in sports talk radio don’t do those things, and that’s why Gumbel wanted out after two months working at a radio station.
He was hired on a three-year contract to be the first morning man on WFAN radio, the first all sports radio station in the U.S.
“I go back to sports talk radio because they’re the ones with the biggest mouths and trying to make the most noise,” Gumbel said. “But the fact is, they’re trying to make a name for themselves more than delivering information.”
This also applies to insiders– reporters that specialize in getting and giving out information before anyone else.
“They all want to claim to be the ones who broke the story,” said Gumbel. “Not once, when I’ve heard any piece of breaking news in the sports world, did I ever say ‘Gee, I wonder who had that first…’ It just doesn’t seem that important to me. But it is important to them, and apparently to the people who hire them. But that’s not me.”
He believes sports journalism is straying away from the most important thing: the game.
Sports shows these days have many hosts that sit around and talk for several hours leading up to the game.
“It’s a problem because I think you could talk something out to the point where I’m not interested anymore,” Gumbel said. “If you watched all of that, by the time you get around to kick off, you’re almost tired of the game.”
Now in a pandemic, there is no game.
Would Gumbel refuse to call a game that didn’t have fans? No. Does he think it would be tremendously different? Absolutely.
“If you don’t have [the fans], then I would worry about going out of my way to create excitement– which I hate,” said Gumbel. “What I do on air– my reaction– is not rehearsed. It’s genuine.”
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