A brief historical look of the best – and worst – of figure skating and gymnastics TV hosts
Embed from Getty ImagesThe Gymternet (gymnastics fans on the Internet) might not be able to agree about much, but they can agree that Terry Gannon is one of the best TV hosts the sport has ever had. The reason why Gannon stands out as such a solid host is similar to how Verne Lundquist stood out for figure skating fans in the 1990s: he doesn’t act too good for the sport.
While Gannon has spoken little on his work on gymnastics (which only started last year), one needs to look at his long-time work on figure skating to see how he might approach gymnastics – and why he is so good at it.
“He never makes a mistake. He’s got a photographic memory; he just looks at something and talks to himself for about 20 seconds … then they’ll do a take, live, and he’s perfect every time. That kind of delivery demands that you are on your ‘A’ game, too. Plus, he has a profound understanding of what goes into being an elite skater. He’s a quick study of sport.” –Peter Carruthers, one of Gannon’s skating analysts, in Kelli Lawrence’s Skating on Air
Lundquist, who covered figure skating from 1989 – 1998, received similar praise to Gannon’s. It’s hosting based on respecting the sport, putting in the necessary work to cover it right, and developing a rapport with his analysts. Also from Lawrence’s book:
“Verne isn’t a play-by-play guy who steps over the line,’ says Rick Gentile (CBS Sports). ‘He’s not a guy who needs to show the audience how much he knows about the sport. He gets the basic strategy of deferring to the analyst: ‘What’s good about that … why they are doing this…’ set up the skaters, let Scott (Hamilton) analyze, then give them the scores.’”
Contrast those views with those of former NBC Sports gymnastics host Al Trautwig, who struggled with showcasing his analysts and treating gymnastics as a true sport.
“’I don’t spend any time at all learning what an Amanar is,’ Al Trautwig, NBC’s longtime gymnastics play-by-play man said in a recent interview. This willful ignorance has affected viewers.” – Reeves Wiedeman, Women’s Gymnastics Deserves Better TV Coverage , The New Yorker, August 2016
Trautwig admitted that he was not interested in studying the details of gymnastics, and that he preferred relying on telling personal stories of the athletes. He gave in a bit to the popular producing view of either wanting to make it a soap opera or this rare activity that no one has ever seen before, ever. He, and some of his fellow hosts, didn’t want to compliment his analysts, but talk over them and assume that their analysis was completely foreign. His point-of-view was never well-liked, and took an awful turn in recent times when he decided to insist both on air and on social media that Simone Biles’ adoptive parents were not her parents. Biles doesn’t hide that her biological parents have not been a part of her life, and that she refers to her grandparents as her parents. Any media member who would take time to review their prep material would know that, and to either not review that, or decide that that “correction” would be the hill he died on was Trautwig’s gymnastics undoing.
There are times that an educated fan of a sport may find the announcing poor, but it is the best that can be expected given the situation. An example of this in these sports was the late Jim Simpson, who was paired with Olympic silver medalist Peter Carruthers during TNT’s 1992 Winter Olympics figure skating coverage. The first ever radio announcer of a Super Bowl had a difficult task in Albertville: he had to cover the entire event, last place finisher to gold medalist. He had done his preparation, but still struggled to commentate when women were struggling to get double jumps around in the long program. Simpson’s commentary struggled, but at some point, what can you say? He did what he could. He wasn’t the best, but nothing came from a place of dislike or disinterest, like some other announcers have done over the years.
It is well-noted that Jim McKay downright disliked his skating assignments, and it is seen in his recycling of phrases from Olympics to Olympics — most notably, “This is the loneliest sport in the world,” a phrase used in both John Curry’s and Robin Cousins’ gold medal winning free skates in 1976 and 1980. Luckily for McKay, he was bolstered by skating’s most famous commentator, Dick Button, who has no filter, but a Harvard vocabulary to make the lack of restraint sound authoritative.
As a gymnastics commentator, John Tesh (who covered multiple Olympics in the 1990s and 2000s) showed interest and treated the sport with gravitas, but was befallen with the presentation (either from him or his production team) that the sport was a soap opera. He had to set every single routine as a do-or-die event, even if it wasn’t. (If he did that in Atlanta, with a seven gymnast team, what would he do with the four gymnast team format being used in Tokyo next year?!) Part of this could be Tesh’s background – toggling from entertainment to sports to back learn to his style and how he was used. For a production team, it’s easy to assume that the guy well-known for covering fluff should be the guy who hosts what they perceive as the fluff sports.
Gannon – and the best host prior to him, Lundquist – treat gymnastics and skating as something not beneath them, not as fluff, but something they genuinely want to learn more about. They like what they are doing. They don’t want to deduce it to a drama (despite some of their analysts trying to do so, cough cough Tara and Johnny), but showcase them as difficult and fantastic athletic events. That’s why Gannon is so refreshing to gymnastics fans – getting true athletic commentary for a sport that rarely gets it is exactly what fans have wanted for decades.
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