Greg Lewis – Acceptance Speech ISHA Lifetime Achievement Award for Broadcasting Hotel Jerome / Aspen, Colorado / April 7, 2016
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Greg Lewis – Acceptance Speech ISHA Lifetime Achievement Award for Broadcasting Hotel Jerome / Aspen, Colorado / April 7, 2016 Thank you, all, for being here tonight. Thank you for this extraordinary honor. Congratulations to the other honorees this evening. The philosopher Joseph Campbell said: “It’s not so much life we’re looking for, but the feeling of being alive.” I always feel alive when I ski. And I feel very alive tonight. Thank you International Skiing History Association—John Fry and your team. Thank you, all my friends, for being here tonight. There are three people here who give a profound meaning to Lifetime Achievement: Klaus Obermeyer, 96, who skis almost daily. Mr. Obermeyer, would you be so kind as to start me off with a yodel? [Klaus yodeled beautifully.] Aaron Fleck, 95, who is my dear friend and business Zen master. Thank you to my mom, who turns 94 in eight days. Every quality I have comes directly from the marrow in her bones. 1 And thank you to my two sons, Yale and Wyatt, who grew up in Aspen but hardly knew who I was, because I was gone so much—200-250 days a year for three decades... about six million miles of flying. When my oldest son was in third grade, I went to his parent- teacher meeting. The teacher said, “Mr. Lewis, I want you to look at the information sheet your son filled out at the start of the school year—specifically the section where he had to write his father’s occupation. I looked; it said, “My daddy works at the airport.” Where I really worked was in mountains... everywhere... from St. Moritz to Nagano, from Sarajevo to Salt Lake... from Lillehammer to Lake Louise to Las Lenas in Argentina. As a producer, news reporter, or sports commentator, I was involved with seven Winter Olympics. The most amazing experience was Sarajevo, 1984, where I was part of the team making the Games’ Official Film. My job was to interview as many gold medalists as possible, across all Winter Olympic sports, immediately after they won. I had my own camera crew, translator, driver, and IOC credentials to go anywhere I wanted. I enjoyed access that Mark Zuckerberg couldn’t buy. 2 And not just access to places and events, but, as I experienced throughout my career, a microphone with a network logo afforded access to inaccessible people, along with the implied right to explore their hearts and minds... even their souls. I got to ask people questions, only seconds after meeting them, that others, who might have known them for years, wouldn’t have asked. It was journalism in the form of a one-night- stand—intimacy before familiarity. And I got to talk about it afterward. I, myself, had been a ski racer, growing up. I had Olympic dreams. But during my ski racing career, I won only one major event. And I received this trophy. Excuse me; I think I can lift this by myself. [This trophy is four inches tall, and half of that is the wooden base. It says...] First Place. Polar Bear Ski Club. 1959. It wasn’t too long after I won this (trophy), I realized I could turn a phrase faster than I could turn skis. In 1972, I got a lucky break—Bob Beattie, who has done more for ski racing than anyone else, ever, hired me to be the publicity director and PA announcer for World Pro Skiing. Spider Sabich and Jean-Claude Killy were the stars my first 3 year. I announced hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of head-to-head races. And I began to learn what would be my craft. In December 1977, I won the serendipity lottery. NBC Sports contacted me and asked if I’d like to commentate on a pro ski race they would broadcast on the network’s new, weekly series called “SportsWorld.” Let me briefly step back in time. In college I regularly watched ABC’s Wide World of Sports, with envy. Could there be a better job than Jim McKay or the other announcers for Wide World had, I wondered? Covering cliff diving in Acapulco this week; the bobsled championships in St. Moritz next week; and then, soon after, some other event in hallowed Madison Square Garden? I once asked a network TV executive I met at a college alumni event how I could get one of those Wide World jobs. He said, “Well, if you’re not a famous athlete, you start as a sports reporter in, say, Grand Junction, Colorado, then hope you do well enough to trek on to Peoria, and then Boise, and then Toledo, and then maybe Denver... and that somewhere along the way someone in NYC at a network sees you, likes you, and gives you a break.” 4 What I realized at that moment that my dream job wasn’t going to come true... I mean, the likelihood of me becoming a network sports announcer was about the same as the likelihood of an Olympic decathlon gold medalist having a sex change operation. Well, thank you, Bruce Jenner. That first show for NBC went well enough. I was so nervous I puked twice right before the opening on-camera. I had no idea what I was supposed to do. And I had a giant black mustache that Groucho Marx and Frank Zappa would have envied, but NBC hated. Nonetheless, the producer asked me afterward what other sports I knew. At that moment, ambition tangled with integrity in my thoughts. But... being honest to a fault, I did the right thing. I lied. I can announce anything NBC wants me to, I said. Three weeks later, the network offered me an assignment to cover aerial acrobatic skiing in St. Moritz. I accepted, though I knew nothing about aerial skiing... nothing about somersaults and twists. And then I remembered what my father used to say, “Chance favors a prepared mind.” 5 So, I read, watched, listened, asked, studied and memorized everything I could find. I crammed. I took a chance... and I worked for NBC for another 25 years. During my career, I also covered skiing for CBS, ESPN, HBO, Turner, and an alphabet soup of others. When I started announcing World Cup races, skis were skinny, straight and long. Only downhillers wore helmets. Super G wasn’t invented. Gates weren’t hinged. The only high-speed quads belonged to NFL running backs. Lindsey Vonn and Ted Ligety weren’t born. And Mikaela Shiffrin’s parents hadn’t even met. [By the way, I heard a rumor that Mikaela just signed a Rolex sponsorship deal. They gave her a lot of money and a one-of-a-kind watch; it runs two seconds fast than all the others.] When I started announcing, there was no Internet. No iPhone. No selfies. No moguls or aerials competitions. No snowboarders. No rockered skis. No terrain parks. Nobody skied backward... at least not intentionally. And if you had a half-pipe, you smoked it, and it wasn’t legal. So I got to chronicle an amazing transformation in skiing—the advent of new sports, new stars, and new nomenclature. I 6 never imagined that using the terms front-side, back-side, tail- grab, nose-press, tail press, lip slide, poke and fakie was something I’d do on television... unless, perhaps, I was working for the Playboy Channel. In 1981, I was part of the NBC team that produced the first top- to-bottom coverage of a World Cup downhill. We were in St. Anton, Austria for the legendary Arlberg-Kandahar. The race was on a Saturday. NBC’s broadcast would air the following day in the US [which isn’t the way it’s done anymore; virtually everything airs live now] but then everyone worked through the night to piece all the interviews and features and racing together. My co-host and I were stationed in our announce booth, about the size of a refrigerator and just as cold, located near the downhill finish line. As soon as the production group built a segment of the show, we would do voice-over commentary, and then wait... and wait... until they were ready for us again. Between voice-overs, we stayed warm by sipping schnapps that a race sponsor had placed in all the announce booths. As the night went on, we got warmer and warmer, and our commentary seemed to get better and better. And that show won an EMMY. It’s amazing what you can do... high in the Alps. 7 I also covered the rise of American ski racing. Phil Mahre, winning the World Cup overall in ’81, ‘82 and ‘83. And Tamara McKinney, World Cup overall champion, also in 1983. Two Americans... the best in the world, at the same time. US racers had never dominated like that... never—which reminds me of a story. The king of sports agents, Mark McCormick, wanted to represent France’s charismatic Jean- Claude Killy, the World Cup Champion in 1967 and ‘68, who would win the slalom, GS and Downhill in the 1968 Winter Olympics. McCormick flew to Europe and met with Killy over lunch. It was a World Cup weekend, and Killy was drinking wine. McCormick, said, “Jean-Claude, I know you’re the greatest skier ever, but drinking wine and racing... as your future agent, that makes me uncomfortable.” Killy looked up and said, “Mark, would you like me to drink milk and ski like an American?” It’s not what you drink, but what you think that makes a champion.