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IN THE ARENA

I now had experience in music videos, talk-shows and live coverage of the New Jersey Legislature which was like watching paint dry.  Next on my new forms of production list was sports coverage.  NJN and Rutgers University Football games had been added to our schedule.  So I volunteered to act as assistant director for Frank Belmont who was on a comet ride to a major network sports job.  He started as a production intern and worked his way up the TV ladder to producer/director of ABC national network sports productions after “graduating” from the Jersey “training” studio.   I would be  the director for replays – which was pioneered by ABC's Monday Night Football.  Frank was determined to make our modest production facilities look like the new network coverage – which the audience now expected for all sports programs.  Video replays started out as off-line videotaped segments being recorded during the broadcast feed.  Because of our close ties to New Jersey’s own RCA Corporation which was born in Camden NJ our head of engineering “borrowed” an experimental “slo-mo” machine which was to be the state of the art technology for all network production soon  – the unit recorded about 30 seconds of video on a metal disc about the size of LP record.  My job would be to pick one of the 5 cameras to feed into the machine and give the camera-person an idea of what play I anticipated was coming up – obviously there was as much guessing as a defensive coordinator had to do with only a few seconds to decide which camera to “take” on machine from the off-ari switcher that I would operate.  I would control rolling the playback and freezing it before the play ended – which sounds simple and easy, but it wasn’t.  It took a lot of concentration and  some luck to pick the right camera and cue the right place in the 30 second piece.  Each week I would research the upcoming contest and do a “chalk-talk” for our crew about the kind of plays to expect from both teams.

As the season began the crew loaded our gear and ready the production truck.  Road trips were always an adventure in more ways than one.  One of the most memorable or infamous for some of us was our trip to  the Penn State Lion's den.  The remote van lumbered its way up across Pennsylvania and with our crew caravan of vans leading the way.  Friday afternoon was set-up day at the enormous stadium.  I had never been in a big sports college stadium (I had attended Princeton games played in an arena that could fit in the Lions Den five times or so) and this was an impressive facility that mirrored how big football was for this college.  Lugging two cameras up the hundreds of steps to the rim of the bowl was the hardest part of the prep.  After all the systems were tested and the sun was setting it was time for the crew to play.  Our crew of about 20 guys checked into a motel and then made our way to this college town's happy hour hot spot.  And our crew were not only TV pros, they were also at an Olympic level partying.  Our large group was given an upper floor party room  - our dinner had quickly become a banquet for the eatery's wait staff.  Plus, I think the management had previous experience with TV crews that were famous for outrageous antics.  The libations flowed and the conversations punctuated with roars of laughter elevated to a painful decibel level.  The next day our guys did a great job - even though I knew many were hung over from the night before - but being TV party pros that didn't  affect the quality of their work.

      And our experiment worked!  The coverage of our first big time sports event got excellent reviews and I now had added sports to my resume.

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