Jimmy Roberts has a well-deserved reputation as one of the most respected sports broadcasters, but even he has a broadcast moment he’d like to forget.
The 16-time Emmy winner was a guest on GOLF’s Subpar podcast this week, regaling co-hosts Colt Knost and Drew Stoltz with the story of his biggest broadcasting blunder.
The moment took place during Roberts’ coverage of the Deutsche Bank Championship in the early 2000s. Roberts said at the time that he was tasked with providing brief updates on highlights from the wider sporting world during the tournament’s broadcast.
In this particular case, Roberts was preparing to introduce a home run clip from an MLB game.
“The information was sometimes quite vague,” Roberts began. “And you really had to ad-lib, and you just had to fly by the seat of your pants. But that’s okay, because that’s kind of what we do, right?
“Anyway, so the note I got was I was doing a baseball game or a highlight of a baseball game, and I don’t even remember who the player was. But I had my outline in front of me, and I’m doing my intro, and then they’re going to run some tape, and I know the first event is a baseball highlight. And I say, ‘We’re going to Cleveland, where, you know, whoever the player’s name was, a huge home run,’ and it’s underlined three times.
“And there’s no more details. It could say: 4th inning, whatever, someone’s pitching, right? So we go to the highlights: ‘We’re going to Cleveland, 3rd inning. Don Smith on the mound, opposite Jim Jones. And the field…’
“And I’m here to tell you that’s the most of it enormous home run I’ve ever seen. And the trick to doing this is not by reading, but by looking at the screen so that you can intuitively describe what you see, and that’s broadcasting, right? But I was completely unaware of how big this home run would be.
“So I look at the screen, I say, ‘And the pitch, it -‘ and I say this, ‘Holy sh!’
“And I can only get to ‘sh.’ And I didn’t have the presence of mind at that moment to turn around and say something like: Holy sugar! Holy crap! Whatever, right? I was just so overwhelmed by the magnitude of this home run. I just left it at holy shh.
Roberts said he was humiliated by the blunder but consoled himself by believing few people would see it. That is, until he left the booth.
“I’m walking back to the clubhouse and I run into Steve Stricker,” Roberts said. “And he says, ‘[Stricker’s wife] Nikki just texted me that you just said holy sh– on air! Is that true?’
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