Broadcaster Jim Lampley, who went to UNC and is a former WCHL staffer, returned to live in Chapel Hill after a long career of working at the height of sports television. His decades-long career spanning a variety of sports and major historical moments led to him embarking on a new project: writing his first book. By revisiting his journey and favorite memories while partnering with author Art Chansky, Lampley crafted “It Happened! A Uniquely Lucky Life in Sports Television,” which released on April 15.
Ahead of its launch, Lampley joined 97.9 The Hill’s Aaron Keck to discuss how the book came together and themes throughout it. Below is a transcript of their conversation, which has been edited for clarity and brevity. Listen back to the full interview here.
Aaron Keck: What motivated you to sit down and write? What was the day where you were like, ‘I’m gonna sit down and I’m gonna do this thing now?’
Jim Lampley: Well, I had stopped teaching here after five semesters of teaching in the communication department at UNC. I felt as though I had accomplished objective one of coming back to Chapel Hill. And Art [Chansky], among some others had encouraged me, [saying] “You know, you ought to consider telling the story of your unusual career and background, and at the very least, maybe people here in Chapel Hill would want to read it.” We wound up moving forward on the project, and I found it startlingly easy to write my life story. I guess because I had unconsciously laying awake on my pillow for years, imagining how that story would sound right, and what kinds of things I would say about it… And then a lot of amazing things fell into place once we began the process. [Author] John Grisham, his support is very critical to me. A sudden unexpected friendship with Taylor Sheridan led to Taylor insisting on writing the foreword for the book. And kind of a culmination of a 50-year friendship with Art Chansky, who I first met when I first got into sports broadcasting way back in the early 1970s. And here we are.
Jim Lampley (right) speaks with 97.9 The Hill’s Aaron Keck in the Chapel Hill Media Group studios. (Photo via Aaron Keck/Chapel Hill Media Group.)
Keck: I’ve had a chance to read it. And it’s a terrific book. And you mentioned one of the, the, the kind of the central through lines is those moments where you’re at the right place at the right time and things just kind of work out in your favor. What is your favorite, or the most emblematic, one of those moments that you can think of?
Lampley: Well, you know, there have been a lot of my friends who have looked at the cover of the book or the title of the book and said, “Luck…why do you cite luck? Because obviously you had skills, you had capabilities and things that fell into place.” And I said, “When you are initially brought to the process of network television by being chosen out of a 432-candidate talent hunt within which you don’t fit any of the expressed parameters for what they’re looking for, you are absolutely the anti-candidate instead of the candidate. And you wind up being the person who’s chosen from across the whole country to do this thing.” You cannot deny the presence of luck in that particular process.
And then, just to go one step further, if the executives and decision-makers at ABC Sports — who were making the choice out of who was going to be the ostensible winner of the 432-candidate talent hunt — had known that I was the one candidate who had grown up around the corner from ABC Sports President Roone Arledge parents… and caddied for both of his parents at the Hendersonville Golf and Country Club… whose mother was in the same bridge club with his mother… if they had known that, obviously they would never have chosen me, because it looks like the worst kind of favoritism and parochial interest. But that’s what happened.
The whole process has been cosmically blessed in certain ways — even up to the most perverse [twist], which is George Foreman’s unexpected death a few weeks ago. Because the prologue of the book is about me watching the 19-year-old Foreman as a 19 year-old here in Chapel Hill, winning his Olympic Gold medal. As far as I can tell in research with the members of his family, the blurb that he wrote for my book cover may have been his last public act before his unexpected death. So, there are all sorts of serendipitous circumstances related to the entire process, which make it easy for me to push back against those who say, “Why did you use the term luck?” You can’t ignore it in this situation.
Jim Lampley, a WCHL alumnus, in the mid-1970s reporting for ABC Sports. (Photo scanned by the Chapel Hill Media Group.)
Keck: This is the story of the American dream, right? Everyone, everyone always thinks the American dream is, “Oh, the cream rises to the top, and if you’re talented, you succeed. And that’s the end of it.” But it’s talent and it’s luck, and it’s people in your life that have the wherewithal to reach out and recognize something in you and pull you in. And that’s in the story too–
Lampley: Up to and including the fact that the ABC Sports organization, to which I went to work in 1974, was a Duke witch coven, and several of the executives were Duke graduates.
Keck: Makes up for the fact that you were caddying for the other people!
Lampley: Exactly right. [laughs] You know, everything just connects in such a bizarre convergence of circumstances that luck is absolutely a part of it. And of course, it all leads directly to the title. The title is lifted from one of my most famous boxing calls on HBO: Foreman’s upset win over Michael Moorer to become the oldest heavyweight champion. And that particular phrase is “it happened.” That phrase becomes an ideal touchstone for virtually everything I tell in the story in the book. There’s no other way to explain it other than… well, it happened! And so, what I said spontaneously in calling a boxing match one night became — in effect — the byline for my life.
Keck: One of my favorite moments in the book is another one of those kind of serendipitous moments and, I guess, a friendship that could have blossomed but didn’t…which was you and Harry Chapin at the Olympics in 1980.
Lampley: Well, you know, I would love to have ever run into Harry again to reminisce with him about standing on the platform on a camera platform together at The Miracle on Ice in Lake Placid, New York, February 22, 1980. I just walked into a building I was not supposed to be able to get into because I didn’t have the right credential. Roone Arledge — there’s that name again — rang the phone, and I [was in] Edit Bay where I was editing a piece related to the subjects I had covered in Lake Placid. [He] said, “Drop what you’re doing and go to the hockey arena because my golden gut” — the thing for which Roone was most famous — “tells me that something unusual is going to happen.” And I wound up watching The Miracle on Ice from a camera platform along with one other person who wasn’t supposed to be there. And that person was Harry Chapin. We never actually exchanged identities, but we did hug each other, and jump up and down in excitement and exaltation three times… prompting the cameramen on the platform to turn around three times, screaming and yelling at us, “Stop jumping up and down, you’re affecting our shots!” I never ever went through to look back at that with Harry because of his unfortunate demise.
Keck: One of the other through lines I want to pick your brain on, and I didn’t even know if this was intended to be a through line, but it kept coming up over and over again in the book… Of course, you’re known for all of the great calls and the extent to which you’re really good at speaking on the air, but also the role of silence in broadcasting. And there’s so many moments over the course of the book where you talk about your proudest moments being the moments where just nothing at all was said and you let the action like transpired.
Lampley: Well, the big fight with ABC Sports executives and production staff about whether certain moments — particularly in ultra-endurance sports events like the Race Across America and the Ironman Triathlon, which I’ve pioneered on ABC’s Wide World of Sports — [was] whether there were certain moments within those [events when] narration which might best be served by silence instead of by talking about it. That was a spirited battle between me and the background and traditions of ABC Sports. And I’m proud to say that, ultimately, I won the battle. I mean, I said to people with higher rank than me in the division, “It’s my microphone, and I’m not going to talk into it just for the sake of talking when this picture is literally worth a million words.” Some of them were in those early experiences of covering ultra endurance sports events. That was one of the things I was most proud of professionally, authoring the importance of silence in narration like that.
“It Happened! A Uniquely Lucky Life in Sports Television” by Jim Lampley and Art Chansky. The book is published by Matt Holt Books and distributed by Simon & Schuster. (Photo via Simon & Schuster.)
Lampley will be discussing “It Happened!” with Chansky and Grisham at Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill for a book-signing event on Thursday, April 24. Guests can register for the event here.
Editor’s Note: Art Chansky is a Chapel Hill Media Group employee. This post, nor Jim Lampley’s interview with Aaron Keck, was sponsored to promote the book.
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