Sometimes You Have to Cross When It Says Don't Walk

by Lesley Visser

While visiting Les Moonves at home in Malibu, 1994

  After I was let go, Monday Night Football bounced around and went to ESPN; Al Michaels left for NBC, and John Madden went with him. Ohlmeyer lasted exactly one year as MNF producer; he had to hire a sideline producer to stand with Stark during games, and she was gone two years after that. Now Sunday Night Football on NBC is the place to be, where Al Michaels, Chris Collinsworth, and Michele Tafoya have settled into a gold-standard group.

  I had other embarrassing moments. I tried everything I could think of to keep my feet warm in places like Soldier Field, Giants Stadium, or Foxborough. One time in Green Bay, I bought battery-operated socks—with big batteries that hung out the back of my boots and went dead in the second quarter as I was galumphing around the field. On the air, John Madden said it was the most pathetic thing he’d ever seen. Another time, CBS thought it would be great if I took batting practice at the World Series. You can imagine how that went. I never came close to connecting and had nine innings to get over my humiliation.

  The darkest hour in sports, of course, was the massacre in Munich in 1972, when Palestinian terrorists invaded the Israeli dormitory at the Olympic Village and the ensuing bloodbath cost seventeen lives and inflicted deep psychological terror. My mini-dark hour was in 1986, when the Red Sox had thirteen third-strike pitches to win the World Series over the Mets. My assignment was the Red Sox clubhouse celebration—whee, after sixty-eight years! With the Sox leading and two outs in the bottom of the tenth, Shea Stadium’s scoreboard flashed, “Congratulations to the Boston Red Sox, 1986 World Champions.” Of course, it was not to be. And it unraveled so quickly, when Bill Buckner let Mookie Wilson’s baby ground ball bobble between his legs. Ray Knight skipped home with the winning run and I ended up doing a story on Kevin Mitchell. The Sox, of course, lost in Game 7 and Buckner moved to Idaho. Next?

  At the 2004 Houston Super Bowl pregame party with Jim Nantz, CBS Sports Chairman Sean McManus, Greg Gumbel, and Hall of Fame running back Marcus Allen

  With CBS announcer Greg Gumbel at the 2012 Final Four

  On one or two occasions, the embarrassment ended up being on the other person. For some reason, I got over being afraid of Bobby Knight, the brilliant coach from Indiana. One time in the NCAA Tournament, the Hoosiers beat Temple in the Regional Semifinal. I asked Knight about it after the game and he said, “Well, you may not have noticed, but we scored more points—you people in the media sometimes miss that.” I laughed and said, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, how did you handle their matchup zone?” Then Knight started laughing and we’ve been friends ever since. I got a standing ovation in the press room. Like the ad says, sometimes the greatest risk is not taking one. I loved the coaches who didn’t cheat—Knight, Krzyzewski, Izzo, Carril—and I had admiration for all of them. It’s extremely hard to recruit and teach and strive to make the NCAA tournament. Many coaches have cut corners to get it done.

  I had another embarrassing moment (do you think I’m a loser?) at one of the tournaments in the early 1980s. The coaches always had their own hotel, and I had a standing date with the brilliant writers John Feinstein of the Washington Post and Dick Weiss of the Philadelphia Daily News to go over to the lobby and say hello to our friends. This was when Roy Williams and Bill Self were kids in the business, just like we were. I remember going up to the great Pete Newell, the California and Olympic coach, and saying, “I just want to thank you for all you’ve done for college basketball, what a giant you’ve been.” He looked at me with a screwed-up face, thanked me, and walked away. I went back to Feinstein and Weiss and told them of my epiphany and they said, “Well, that’s nice, but that’s not Pete Newell, that’s Charlie Spoonhour of Southwest Missouri State.”

  Wanna get away?

  But I soldiered on. I went to practices, games, and press conferences, and one time tried to run Feinstein over. Feinstein, Weiss, and I spent our lives together, all covering the same events at the same time, all over the country. One year in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Feinstein had really irritated me and I tried to run him over with my rent-a-car in the parking lot. He stuck out his Portabubble (these big computers we had back then) to defend himself and he somehow managed to live. I couldn’t sleep after this horrific event, and he was and is one of my best friends, so that night, in our crummy motel, I called his room. The phone rang a few times, he picked up, and I started in, “John, I’m so sorry, I love you . . .” And all I heard was, “Zzzzzzzzz, zzzzzzz” really loud. I hung up, stunned and furious. Can I chalk this up to boys, or is that sexist?

  I have learned many things while covering sports and I would give this advice above all others, from a song by Lee Ann Womack. I’m sure many of you remember it, but sing it to yourself: “And when you get the choice to sit it out or dance, I hope you dance!”

  Interviewing Atlanta Falcons quarterback Matt Ryan at the NFC Championship Game versus San Francisco in 2013

  I’ve had many, many more embarrassing moments in my forty years, but I’ll leave this chapter with Mary Decker. You might not remember, but she was the great American middle-distance runner who was heavily favored in the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles. She had won gold medals at the World Track Championships in both the 1,500- and 3,000-meter events and she was training twice a day in Eugene, Oregon, in preparation for the Games. In 1983, CBS sent me to do a story with her. We agreed to meet in the hotel lobby and take, in her words, “a light jog while we do the interview.” I was no runner, but I was no slouch, running five miles a day . . . only Mary ran ten miles a day at six minutes a mile. We left the hotel and I asked her how she was preparing for the Games in L.A., where her rival, Zola Budd, would be her undoing when she tripped Mary and ruined her opportunity for Olympic gold. Mary said she was running twice a day, stretching, and doing push-ups because “You need upper body strength in the final yards.” That was the answer to my first question. By the second question, she had sprinted so far beyond me that I had to yell, “OH, MARY!” That was the end of the interview.

  CHAPTER 16

  Everyone always asks me my favorite event in sports, and I always say it’s the semifinals of the Final Four. On that Saturday, every school thinks it has a chance and all four of them do. You might say, “No way,” that one team is clearly the best, but I’ve been there when NC State beat Houston, when Villanova beat Georgetown, and when Butler almost won the title. Jim Calhoun built a dynasty out of the desert and won three titles for Connecticut. Pitino took Providence to the Final Four. It isn’t always powerhouses, like when North Carolina beat Michigan State at sold out Ford Field in 2009, but sometimes those are great games, too.

  The best basketball game I was ever a part of or witness to happened in 1992, when Grant Hill found Christian Laettner to beat Kentucky in the Regional Finals in Philadelphia. Verne Lundquist, Lenny Elmore, and I were on the broadcast, and we all heard Mike Krzyzewski say in the huddle, “Grant, can you throw it?” and, “Christian, can you catch it?” Not, “Can you make a perfect pass?” or “Can you make the shot?” Grant Hill said people had forgotten that he played high school football. Pitino decided not to guard the inbounds pass, and Hill threw it perfectly. Laettner calmly put the ball on the floor, pivoted, and made the shot at the buzzer. He was ten for ten from the field and ten for ten from the line. The spectacular finish gave Duke the historic 104–103 win. I had to wait for the postgame interview because as soon as the game ended, Krzyzewski walked down press row to shake hands with legendary Kentucky announcer Cawood Ledford, who was retiring after thirty-nine years.

  There have been so many moments, in every sport, that are both personally and professionally meaningful, but my biggest assignment was not a sporting event. It was the fall of the Berlin Wall. On the evening of November 9, 1989, East Germany announced the “easing of travel restrictions” to West Berlin—a simple statement that changed the world. CBS Sports, in a brave decision by executive producer Ted Shaker, sent me to do a story on how sports would change in East Germany once the wall came down. The GDR (G
erman Democratic Republic, its official name) had been insignificant economically, but a giant athletically. From 1976 until 1988, the GDR finished second in both the Summer and Winter Olympics, and at the 1980 Games in Moscow (which the United States boycotted), the GDR won forty-seven gold, thirty-seven silver, and forty-two bronze medals, second only to the USSR. With a population of only sixteen million, the country was staggeringly successful in athletics and widely believed to be doping at every level of its twenty-five state-sponsored sport schools.

  Covering the fall of the Berlin Wall for CBS in 1989

  I went to Berlin with producer Ed Goren, later a big cheese at Fox, and producer/interpreter Draggan Mihailovich, who become one of the main producers at 60 Minutes. We had visas and interviews set up, and in the meantime, we chipped away at the Wall and saved the souvenirs in small plastic bags. None of us could believe we were witnessing the story of the century. For nearly three decades, the Berlin Wall had been a symbol of repression, an eleven-foot-high concrete barrier topped by barbed wire that prevented the people of East Berlin from being free. The inner German border was officially closed in 1952, but people still left through Hungry to get to freedom in Austria. The Berlin Wall was not erected until 1961. Construction began under the advice and counsel of Nikita Khrushchev, who, like the socialist chairman of the GDR, Walter Ulbricht, was worried about the “brain drain”—the emigration of engineers, doctors, lawyers, and smart young people to West Berlin, Austria, or beyond. Khrushchev and Ulbricht felt the exodus had to be stopped, even though our young president, John F. Kennedy, had declared himself a Berliner in June 1963. The world was watching, but East Germany didn’t care.

  The Wall wasn’t just a short divide between East and West Berlin. It was eighty-seven miles long, with a 100-yard field between two fences known as the “death strip.” The strip was covered with sand so that footprints could easily be seen by the East German border guards, who were ordered to shoot on sight. Reinforced concrete barricades were added to further deter would-be defectors—a bed of nails was even added near the top of the Wall. There were 116 watchtowers, multiple lines of trained dogs, and at least twenty bunkers. The people of East Germany weren’t going anywhere. If you’re ever in Washington, DC, it’s worth a trip to the Newseum, which has four original panels of the Berlin Wall, plus a guard tower. You’ll feel exactly how chilling an attempted escape had been back then. There were nine official crossings, the most famous, of course, being Checkpoint Charlie, which was restricted to Allied personnel and foreigners.

  We had a visa to cross at Checkpoint Charlie, officially the corner of Friedrichstrasse and Zimmerstrasse, to do an interview with Katarina Witt, the figure skater from Karl-Marx-Stadt, East Germany (now called Chemnitz). Time had called her “The Most Beautiful Face of Socialism,” and she was paraded around as the symbol of success in the GDR. In East Berlin, we sat on some bleachers in an old skating rink, and I remember her being charming and guarded. She’d been raised, after all, in the strict disciplines of skating and Communism. She would not talk about any doping scandal or the separation of families because of the Wall, or even her world behind the Wall. And there was no way she was going to address the topic of the Stasi—the East German secret police, which employed 90,000 people to spy on ordinary citizens. The Stasi definitely had a file on her. They’d even chronicled her first sexual encounter in their secret archives, which were opened in 1992.

  Witt was different as a young athlete. She was once called so pretty she would cause “a 12-car-pileup.” She did, after all, pose for Playboy in December 1998. Witt said she did it because athletes from Soviet Bloc countries were seen as stiff and robotic, which many of them appeared to be. Now we know that many of them were terrified of the government and most likely doping. The East German government knew the popularity and power of Katarina Witt. Although everything was controlled, she had a nicer apartment, easier travel restrictions, and better food than many East Germans.

  On the day we met her, she was happy to discuss her gold medal in Sarajevo and a second gold at the Games in Calgary. After Ronald Regan implored Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall” in June 1987, the protests got louder and the world joined in. I had heard stories from my stepmother, Barbara, whose family had walked from Dresden to get through the Brandenburg Gate and taste freedom, with nothing on their backs. The Wall was finally dismantled in November of 1989, and Katarina Witt went on tour in the United States with the brilliant skater Brian Boitano. She now runs a production company in Berlin and endorses everything from BMWs to German cosmetics.

  It was our only day in East Berlin, and I was struck by some of the grandiose Stalinist architecture. Most of the buildings were drab, as were the skies, but here and there you could see a slice of what it might have been. There was a stately boulevard, Karl-Marx-Allee, and a couple of parks, but the people shuffled along quickly, wearing watches with wristbands that said CCCP. The few cars on the streets, which were just pulled up in front of the dirty buildings, were Trabants—the most common car in East Germany, with an inefficient two-stroke engine that emitted a dangerously smoky exhaust. I remember one time I had to use a bathroom and we stopped at a hotel. The toilet paper was close to sandpaper, and I told the camera crew I wouldn’t complain ever again.

  We did a few more interviews to try and give the piece some perspective, but I think the stand-up I did in front of the Wall really summed it up. Goren told me to write something that would reflect how enormous the occasion was, and what we might see. I had covered Wimbledon that year, and it had been won by the flamboyant Boris Becker, who was born in West Germany. I mentioned him, the luck of the draw, and finished my stand-up by saying we could only wonder how many great athletes would now come from “the other side of the Wall.” Most of the great athletes who were born in what used to be East Germany, though, have now moved to the West for better training and better opportunities. The next doping scandal moved to Russia.

  CHAPTER 17

  Minneapolis in the winter is beautiful: frozen lakes, clear skies, and the gorgeous Swedish Institute for hot chocolate, plus a glimpse of how the Scandinavians settled here with their ornate woodwork and complicated tile. When the Super Bowl was there in January 1992, John Madden suggested that we take his bus north and go ice fishing. Remember the line by singer Bob Seger, “Wish I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then”? That song was written for ice fishing. What a terrible sport—freezing, wet, cutting wind, hardly any fish. Mille Lacs, Minnesota, the huge freshwater lake one hundred miles north of Minneapolis up Highway 169, is enormously popular in the winter, and the walleye fish are supposed to be plentiful. Ha! We hardly caught any. And a walleye is about the most unattractive thing you’ve ever seen. It looks at you from both sides of its head, like some kind of Marty Feldman, plus it’s got a giant Carol Channing mouth and oily skin. Hard to believe it’s the state fish of Minnesota (and also Vermont—what were they thinking?).

  Mille Lacs (“One Thousand Lakes” in French) drains into the Mississippi River, but in the winter, it freezes four feet deep and is desolate, except for the ice fishing houses: sort of A-frame playhouses that sit in the middle of the lake, with rugs on the floor and toasty blankets for the shivering participants. Madden said we couldn’t rent an ice house, that we would fish off of turned-over buckets, because “ice houses are for chickenshits.” We stopped along the way north to get our gear: long underwear, wool socks, big mittens called “choppers,” and heavy, thick boots. There were seven of us, and we had no idea what we were getting into. The Madden Cruiser went to the edge of the lake (forty-two feet deep), and we walked, like spacemen on the moon, to the middle with our short poles and plastic buckets. Our guide—hired on the spot—drilled ten-inch holes for us, where we dropped our lures, which were some disgusting combination of nightcrawlers and bugs.

  We were told there would be no “goofing around or loud talk”—two of my favorite things—because there were serious fishermen on the lake
who were not to be distracted. Walleye, we were told, bite best just before sundown, so we sat there for hours. Did I mention I was freezing? Did I mention that not talking for four hours froze my jaw shut? Mille Lacs was settled by the Ojibwe tribe (part of the Chippewa) in the 1700s. They endured by hunting deer and moose and small game—nothing about fishing for walleye. I kept saying to myself, “I’m only five hundred miles from Chicago, I bet I could walk there.” But then something great happened. The sun went down and we took our ten crummy fish back to the Madden Cruiser. On the two-hour trip back to Minneapolis, producer Lance Barrow cleaned the fish and fried up a pan full of walleye filets, swimming in butter and sprinkled with basil and salt. The fresh fish was the best thing any of us had ever eaten!

  Ice fishing with John Madden before Super Bowl XXVI, the game where I became the only woman to ever present the Lombardi Trophy. We drove his Madden Cruiser one hundred miles north to Mille Lacs and fished for walleye.

  I went fishing one other time, with the late, great Denny Green, coach of Northwestern, Minnesota, and Arizona. I had known him since the eighties, when he was at Northwestern, and one time in Minneapolis he said we should go fishing. Denny had been a fisherman for four decades, loving to debate purple worms or Texas-style rigs. He once caught a six-pound smallmouth bass in Minnesota and an eight-pounder in Florida. I could have cared less, but he had gone 11–5 with the Vikings and lost the NFC Championship badly to the Giants. If we had to go fishing to talk about what happened, so be it.

  We went to Lake Minnetonka, just west of Minneapolis (obviously my kind of fishing town). Denny wanted to go at 6 AM, but I said, “No way.” He didn’t like big fish hunting, just riding around on his little bass boat, enjoying the day. I had little interest in any of his fishing memories (trawling the Susquehanna River as a kid or the rock quarries in Iowa City), I just wanted to know about Randy Moss. But we were old friends so I tried to enjoy it. Denny was a real angler; he even had a one-day tournament in Minnesota for more than five years. I couldn’t stand the sight of worms, green or purple. Or even old Purple People Eaters. But we spent three hours on the water and had a blast. I even caught a fish.