“There was a kid standing at the ice oval with a sign hanging around his neck that said ‘Keith Jackson,’ ” Roberts recalled in a phone interview last month.
Forty-four years later, Roberts is as recognizable to Olympic TV viewers as McKay was then. The Paris Games, where Roberts will work as a reporter for NBC, will mark the University of Maryland graduate’s 20th Olympics. His excitement hasn’t waned in the decades leading up to the milestone assignment.
“The Olympics never disappoint,” he said. “They’re just so full of stories, which is what I think sports is all about.”
A silver lining
Roberts might not be the one telling those stories if he had been a slightly better lacrosse player. The captain of the lacrosse team at White Plains High in New York, Roberts arrived at Maryland as a freshman in 1975 hoping to earn a spot on Coach Bud Beardmore’s team, which had just won its second national title in three years. He was cut before the season began.
Roberts, who did some sports broadcasting in high school, called lacrosse games for Maryland’s student-radio station, WMUC, instead. After ABC announced in March 1976 that its “Wide World of Sports” would broadcast the lacrosse national championship game two months later, Roberts dialed the network’s main number to volunteer his services. He wouldn’t take no for an answer.
Maryland made it to the final, where the Terrapins met fellow undefeated Cornell in Providence, R.I. The Big Red prevailed, 16-13, in overtime in what’s considered one of the greatest games in college lacrosse history. Frank Gifford did play-by-play for ABC, while Roberts sat in the production truck, helping the TV crew understand the intricacies of a sport the NCAA began sponsoring just five years earlier. He would do similar work for ABC throughout his undergraduate years.
Working as a waiter at newly opened RJ Bentley’s in College Park after graduation in 1979 and unsure of his next steps, Roberts called a production assistant he knew at ABC and offered to work the U.S. Women’s Open in Fairfield, Conn., later that summer. The production assistant — none other than Sean McManus, McKay’s son and the recently retired chairman of CBS Sports — gave him the job.
Roberts worked the golf tournament and several other events for ABC that fall, including freshman quarterback Dan Marino’s first start at the University of Pittsburgh. When ABC needed someone to help with a variety of tasks at corporate headquarters in New York to prepare for its coverage of the 1980 Winter Games, it hired Roberts. From there, he said, it was “off to the races.”
Roberts was assigned to the speedskating venue in Lake Placid, where he was responsible for working with the chyron operator to display information and graphics. Roberts still considers American speedskater Eric Heiden’s record five individual gold medals that year the greatest athletic achievement of all time.
After Lake Placid, Roberts was promoted from production assistant to associate director. He won his first Emmy Award in 1984 as an associate producer for “SportsBeat,” a 30-minute investigative program hosted by Howard Cosell, and then worked for ABC News.
“It was just such a dream come true for me, the fact that I was making a living in sports television,” Roberts said.
ESPN and NBC
In 1988, fearing that his job might be eliminated amid organizational changes at ABC, Roberts considered a future telling stories in front of the camera. He asked a cameraman to shoot a stand-up of him reading features he had written and produced for Cosell, McKay and Jackson, and he sent his audition tape all over the country.
The only outlet willing to overlook Roberts’s lack of on-camera experience was ESPN, where John Walsh, a former Washington Post editor, was running “SportsCenter.” The first event Roberts worked for ESPN was the Mike Tyson-Michael Spinks heavyweight boxing championship fight in June 1988. Despite what he recalled as a steep learning curve, Roberts would become the face of the cable network’s golf and boxing coverage over the next decade.
In 1999, NBC signed a deal with General Motors to create features at the Olympics called “GM Moments.” Longtime NBC sportscaster Dick Enberg had been slated for the role, but after the network lost its NFL broadcast rights, Enberg decided to leave for CBS. NBC Sports President Dick Ebersol saw Roberts as the perfect replacement.
At the 2000 Summer Games in Sydney, his first Olympics with NBC, Roberts wrote and narrated a memorable piece about swimmer Eric “the Eel” Moussambani. The 22-year-old from Equatorial Guinea qualified for the Games as an International Olympic Committee wild card and had learned to swim just a few months earlier. After the two other swimmers in Moussambani’s 100-meter freestyle heat were disqualified for false starts, he found himself swimming solo. Moussambani, who had never been in an Olympic-size pool, struggled to finish, but the crowd got behind him. Roberts’s account of the emotional scene won an Emmy.
Two years later, at the Winter Games in Salt Lake City, Ebersol tapped Roberts to interview Mike Eruzione and Jim Craig after the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey duo lit the Olympic cauldron with their teammates. The Opening Ceremonies came five months after 9/11, and Roberts said the “feeling of unity was palpable.”
NBC invited McKay, who hadn’t worked an Olympics since 1988, back for his 12th Games in Salt Lake City, where the 80-year-old offered nightly commentary alongside studio host Bob Costas. In a segment at the start of the Games, Roberts had the honor of introducing McKay, whom he grew up idolizing.
“I remember saying, ‘Now I get to say something that I never imagined I would ever be able to say on television: I’m joined by Jim McKay,’” Roberts said. “Cut to a shot of Jim, and he says, ‘You were always my favorite production assistant.’”
Paris bound
Of his 19 previous Olympics, the most memorable event Roberts covered was Dan Jansen’s gold medal-winning race in the 1,000-meter speedskating final at the 1994 Games in Lillehammer, a triumph that came after so much heartbreak.
Last year, Roberts had the privilege of telling one of the most meaningful stories of his career, a deeply personal essay about the U.S. Army regiment that liberated the small northeastern France town of Farebersviller from Nazi occupation in late 1944. Roberts’s father, who died in 2007, was a 21-year-old private first class in the regiment’s Company C.
“NBC put the full weight of its resources behind it,” Roberts said of the Emmy-nominated feature, which he wrote after visiting Farebersviller for the first time. “I’m enormously proud of that piece. It’s the best thing I’ve done and the most important thing I’ve ever done. It was totally surreal to me.”
Today, one of Roberts’s Emmys sits on a shelf behind the bar at RJ Bentley’s, where framed jerseys of former Maryland greats adorn the walls. Roberts still makes it back to College Park to speak to journalism students, and he remains a devoted follower of the Terps’ lacrosse program. In Paris for his 20th Games, he was eager to experience the Opening Ceremonies, which took place on the Seine, and curious to see how U.S. gymnast Simone Biles performs at her third Olympics. He’s most looking forward to the unexpected.
“Something always happens to make you come away from it thinking this is the greatest thing you’ve ever seen,” he said.
