For NBC Sports’ Jimmy Roberts, spending this week working at Congressional Country Club and covering the U.S. Open is very special. Roberts, a graduate of the University of Maryland, loves to get back to the Washington area as often as he can.
As a young production assistant working out of College Park, one of his first jobs was working for ABC Sports and being a spotter for Jim McKay at the 1976 PGA Championship at Congressional.
He worked his way up from a production assistant to a writer for features for a number of ABC Sports shows from “Wide World of Sports” to Howard Cosell’s “Speaking of Sports” that gave him the foundation for own career as NBC Sports’ premier storyteller and essayist. He began doing features for ESPN full time in 1988 before Dick Ebersol hired him at NBC in 2000.
I spoke to Roberts about his career and some of his favorite features.
Roberts on the weekend’s special “Presidents and Golf” feature » “This has been something I have wanted to do for years and since the U.S. Open is here in Washington, it simply just made a great deal of sense. I wanted to show in the piece how so many American presidents loved the game of golf and I think that the one part of the feature that fans will find most interesting is when in the summer of 1963 President John F. Kennedy had the White House photographer shoot film of his golf swing. He had asked Arnold Palmer to come to the White House and analyze his swing. The two were supposed to meet after Kennedy came back from Dallas.”
Roberts on some of his favorite features » “It has been an honor to work on the Olympics and there have been a number of features over the years that I have been involved with, but the most special one might have been in Athens — the Summer Games of 2004. I went to ancient Olympia, the site of the first-ever sporting competition, to do a feature on the men’s and women’s shot put. To walk the grounds and be on the site of the first-ever games was very, very special and it really put the entire Olympics in perspective on so many levels.”
Roberts will be quite busy after the U.S. Open. He will be headed to Wimbledon where he will be doing a number of features and getting a head start on some work for 2012 London Olympic Games.
Just a note: if you missed Roberts’ feature “Presidents and Golf,” it will be re-airing on the Golf Channel and I will post the times in my blog.
Examiner columnist Jim Williams is a seven-time Emmy Award-winning TV producer, director and writer. Check out his blog, Watch this!
