I had worked a number of college games for ESPN2 and ESPNU when I was first recovering from my injuries, and it wasn’t a great experience for me, the network, or, probably, the viewers. I didn’t know anything about doing television. I’d been interviewed on camera, but I was never a great sound-bite guy; at Duke we learned to give the politically correct answer, because Coach K didn’t want anything taking away from our focus on the team. So if someone asked me what I thought about the game we’d just played, I would say, “Well, we did everything we needed to do. We worked hard, we ran our plays correctly, and we executed defensively.” And if they got into more specifics about an opponent who elbowed me or something like that: “Well, I’m not really worried about that; my game spoke for itself, our team played hard.” Boring, right? That was the point. It always seemed to work for K, but never the viewer. Now it was my job to be interesting, insightful, and knowledgeable about two teams I didn’t know very well, if at all, and I had to do it while learning all the simple technical things that everybody else learned in Broadcasting 101: whether to look at the camera or at the person who’s asking me a question; how to think and talk while a producer is giving me information in my ear about the next thing coming up; even just how to have a conversation with a studio host, a coach, my play-by-play partner.
What do You think about Life Is Not An Accident (2015)?
