Welcome To Connecticut
When I am called to the NBC Sports Group headquarters in Stamford, Connecticut to host studio shows for Golf Channel, the first order of business is picking an airport.
The best options are JFK, LaGuardia, or Westchester County Airport in White Plains, NY (HPN). White Plains is much closer to Stamford; a 20-minute drive through very expensive real estate. HPN is tiny, however, and prone to delays when the weather gets nasty. I usually take JFK because there are so many direct flights to and from Orlando, so if something goes askew, I have options. Plus, I am a Delta loyalist and sometimes get upgraded.
A train takes me from Terminal 4 to the Rental Car Center on Federal Circle, where I start the adventurous 32-mile trek north. Those 32 miles can take anywhere from 45 minutes to two hours to complete. Welcome to New York.
Wading through the traffic rubicon on the Van Wyck Expressway in Queens rewards you with a great look at Flushing Meadows, the National Tennis Center, and Citi Field. Cross the East River on the Whitestone Bridge and glance left for a magnificent view of the Manhattan skyline. Once I hit the toll booths at Ferry Point, I become a slave to GPS. Hutchinson River Parkway or I-95? Your call, Siri.
Pelham, New Rochelle, Larchmont — Winged Foot is somewhere over there to the left — and then across the river, where Siri cheerily welcomes me to Connecticut. Greenwich. Cos Cob. Exit 8 for Canal Street. Couple more turns through downtown Stamford, and welcome to the Residence Inn on Atlantic Street. Valet parking is in the back, on Summer Street.
The Residence Inn happens to be smack dab in the heart of Stamford’s Restaurant Row. High end gastropubs, seafood places, local pizza joints, sushi, and wine bars all within a few blocks. I’m partial to Bartaco and Kashi. If, however, you just want to slum it and watch the game, Buffalo Wild Wings is right out the back door of the Residence Inn.
If you’d prefer to stay in, the lobby bar at the Residence Inn can have food delivered. Best bet there is Divina Modern Italian, which is located inside the Courtyard hotel next door. So sneaky good that I almost want to keep it a secret. The other benefit of staying in the Residence Inn lobby is Frida, the bartender. She’s from Mexico, is an entrepreneur who owns several rental properties back home, and knows every detail of what’s going on inside the Residence Inn. Every hotel needs a Frida.
Now: time to go to work. The NBC Sports Group building is two miles from the hotel, located in the Chelsea Piers complex on Blachley Road. NBC’s building is a former Clairol shampoo factory, and it is massive, to the tune of 300,000 square feet of production and office space. 50-plus editing bays, 50 graphics suites, and over 1,200 miles of cable. Eight sound stages that house sets for the Premier League, Sunday Night Football, Golf Channel, the Olympics, and more. Control rooms, green rooms, makeup and wardrobe wings, dressing rooms. There’s a full-sized commissary that allows you to order food via an app on your phone. It’s difficult to convey the scope of this building. Luckily, there are maps posted on the walls to let you know what “zone” you’re in, and directions to the next one. And that’s just the production side of the complex; the executive offices and business operations are in another wing.
Using an ID card to scan in through security, make a left turn, head down a short hall — commissary to the left, maybe a quick check to see what the specials are today — and then a right turn into a cubicle farm that is now the Golf Channel newsroom. It’s an open floor plan surrounded by offices with glass walls. Many of those offices are occupied by friends who made the move here from Orlando, so I add a few minutes to say hello.
The other reason I add a few minutes to get there early is because I have always been a meticulous copywriter, and I hate to feel rushed. While the production meeting is usually at least two hours before air, I like to get a head start. Using a loaner laptop, I log in to iNews, the software system we use for laying out studio shows. My iNews login hasn’t changed since 2010, which is oddly comforting. I can use a function key to automatically slug my name into the top of the script; that, too, hasn’t changed in 13 years.
It is the role of the show producer to create the rundown, which is a list of stories and topics in the order in which they will be presented. Everyone working on that show has access to the rundown, and can open each page to write copy, insert a note or a link, or read what has already been written. This is important for the collaborative effort — the producer wants to know what the host has written, the host needs to know what he’s going to see on that full-page graphic, the director needs to know when to cue the next shot. Think Google Docs for television. The iNews system serves another important purpose: everything you write into the pages connects directly into the teleprompter.
The show producer leads the production meeting, which is a casual affair in the cubicles. Announcers, producers, directors, graphics, research, production assistants, associate producers, all gathered to get on the same page. For a show like “Golf Today,” that’s a group of maybe 12 to 15 people. Once we’ve buzzed through the rundown, I go back to writing scripts.
“Golf Today” on Monday through Wednesday is a different animal from the Golf Central pregame and postgame shows that run Thursday through Sunday around tournament coverage. Golf Today is a descendant of Morning Drive. Only two people on the desk, as opposed to the cast of thousands who once appeared on Morning Drive, but the same idea: conversation, hot topics, interviews, trends, opinion. We might have a third announcer joining us remotely. Golf Today is a little more scripted and yet a lot more extemporaneous. There’s room for debate and discussion. The Golf Central pregame and postgame shows are focused on the golf that day, so the scripting is less tight and more reactive.
In my studio life, I have always been focused on straight news, so Golf Today is a welcome break wherein I can actually express an opinion. I do appreciate the change. It’s the same reason why I enjoy maintaining a blog and hosting a podcast (plug!) That said, my favorite shows in Stamford are the Golf Central postgame shows, where I can guide an analyst through the events of the day. My favorite task as a studio host is reading highlights cold — meaning, narrating the highlights without having seen the video first. It’s a professional challenge to draw upon background knowledge and incorporate that into the highlights, all while pulling the analyst in for commentary. There’s a dance during a postgame show between host and analyst. If we know each other well, we can read each other’s cadence and know when to step in and when to shut up. Brandel Chamblee is excellent at this, unsurprisingly. Jim Gallagher Jr. is also a pro. As much as I love calling tournaments — and I do — the compressed time frame of a 30-minute postgame studio show lends a sense of urgency that cannot be matched.
Golf Today and Golf Central generally occupy Studio 7, which is about as far away from the newsroom as possible in this building. You have to plan your schedule. Walking from the cubicle farm to the makeup area takes a few minutes, and the makeup artists want to see you as early as possible. We often pre-tape interviews for Golf Today, so I might have to walk straight from makeup to the studio, even if that is an hour or two before the show actually starts. If that happens, I carry the borrowed laptop with me into makeup, and then to the studio.
With a laptop open on the desk, a printed copy of the rundown, and printed copies of the scripts themselves, we have redundancies to make sure we don’t get lost during the show. Even so, our producers are constantly talking to us through our earpieces, acting as a tour guide. I’m often asked if it’s difficult to operate on-air with someone else’s voice in my ear. With a good producer, it’s additive. Two hours fly by when you’ve got so much help.
Golf Today usually ends at a reasonable hour, like 6:30pm. Sometimes even earlier in the afternoon. The Golf Central postgame shows might run as late as 11:00pm if it’s a West Coast event. God forbid it’s Hawaii.
The red light goes off. You pick up the laptop, take off the wireless microphone and earpiece, and say thank you to the stage manager and audio tech who have been there longer than you have. Go back to the cubicle farm, plug in the laptop for tomorrow, and maybe do a short postmortem with the producer, director, and the kids (they’re way younger than me) who worked on the show. Thoughts on today’s show and ideas for tomorrow. The young ones plan dinner in Stamford, if it’s early enough. Walk back out through security into the front parking lot at Blachley Place, into the gloaming, for the two-mile drive back to the Residence Inn. Decisions are to be made: Kashi or Bartaco? Or maybe go see what Frida knows.
Then we’re back tomorrow to do it again, and the next day. Eventually I need to set an alarm to retrieve the rental car from valet parking and figure out how to get back to JFK.
