Live Chat with Dick Ebersol

My pleasure, Lou. Thank you.

I've been fortunate enough to have been selected as a student to go overseas on a full scholarship to live with a French family, part of American Field Service, something that was started back at the time following World War I and World War II. When I found out about it, I went home that afternoon, waited for my father to come home for dinner, trying to summon up the courage to tell him I didn't want to go because I wanted to be on the varsity basketball team that was pegged to win the small town state championship. Litchfield was a very small town. And he beautifully, softly, as all country lawyers do, usually persuaded me that it was the thing to do, that I should go. And I did go to France. I lived with this wonderful, glorious French family. He was the town doctor. And very quickly I got caught up in town activities to the extent I played on the town basketball team, injured myself, ended up in a hospital in Paris while they worked on my knee. And it was during that period of time that I just became fascinated with writing to friends who would keep me up to date on what was happening on the TV show Wide World of Sports, which started only a month or two before I went overseas. This was the first show of its type on American television where they took you to different parts of the world every week and you got to watch their championship sports events. I thought it was a great show, completely absorbing with the stories that it told about those regions of the country and the people who lived in them. And I just wanted to be part of it. Some months later, still living with that French family, they decided to go to the 24 Hours of Le Mans car race. We went. While my family went to watch the race, they trusted me, and I went looking for the Wide World of Sports people and got hired, as they say, as a gopher. Go for ice cream, go for cigarettes for them. And one thing led to another. When I was done, they thought it was a glorious gopher, I guess, and encouraged me to contact their offices in New York when I got back in the States. And I became a gopher throughout the college football season, traveling across the country to do things on various college football telecasts. I think the first time I ever saw another game come up close was that way. I was there to run coffee and, in some cases, cigarettes to the announcers. And my career took off from there. Yeah, and I dropped out of Yale at the height of the war in Vietnam to really pursue it as a career. My parents were away at the time. They probably would have tied me up and kept me home if they thought I was going to do that, but by the time they caught up with me a month or two later in the Rocky Mountains where they were, and I was doing an event, and that was the beginning of my sports television career.

Well, with both Arledge and Jim McKay, his star talent, everything was giving the audience at home a chance to get to know these athletes. These are not athletes who played Major League Baseball or NBA basketball. These were guys who lived in these various towns along the way, and we had to bring them to life by knowing their life stories. Whether their dad had died in the war, whether their mother had taken in laundry from the Nazis, whatever it was, it was my job to ferret out those stories of those families, put them together in a presentable manner, not too overwritten, so that Jim McKay could just glance at it and get a couple of notes and then begin to paint a word picture of those people. And that was the beginning of me as a young storyteller and producer.

Well, the most important people involved in the show were there by the time I got back there the second time. But the first week's show that I was to produce didn't have a host yet, and I insisted that that host be an actress who I kind of had watched on TV, roughly my age, wildly attractive. Her name was Susan Saint James, and she was pushing a movie called Carbon Copy at the time. She came to New York to host the show. By the end of that week, rehearsing and getting the show ready in the show area, she arrived, and when it came time for her to go home after about six days or nights, I knew that she was going to be part of my life forever. She would be, and indeed the love of my life. And we were married within two or three weeks. She moved back East, brought her kids, she had kids some years before they came, and we started a family with a couple more that we had together. And we've been married, as I say, more than 40 years.

She's the best co-host I've ever had and will ever have. I'm never going to let her go. So she also makes a pretty radical decision in her life. As a television and movie star, McMillan and Wife and Kate and Allie, she decides, as your career takes off, to become a full-time mother to raise the five kids as you're able to travel. It seems like the success that you've enjoyed is only because of the partnership that you've had with Susan over the years.

Fred Rogers arrived unannounced downstairs in the lobby at 30 Rockefeller Plaza in New York and was ushered up to the Saturday Night Live offices to meet with me. He came up, he was as charming as you can imagine him to be. But he came up and he said, 'I just have to convince you to stop doing this. This is just not the image that I want Mr. Rogers to have.' And I said, 'Sir, we're not playing with this image. In fact, we're glorifying this image. It's a very loving portrayal.' And he stayed. He met Eddie, who played Mr. Rogers on our show. And I thought all would be fine. He never got quite comfortable with us continuing to do it, but he never had an uncomfortable word to say about it to anybody.

Well, I think first of all, life's too short to hold grudges. They're almost like a poison that you're injecting into your own body, so I always try to avoid that. But in this particular case, somebody had given me great advice along the way, which was life needs happy stories, life needs good. In each one of those instances, I succeeded at every one of those jobs. I never failed at any of those jobs. I did not have perfect relationships with some of those men. I think in many cases they were jealous of my success, but I wasn't going to gain anything by attacking them in the book. In fact, somebody told me, 'Well, I guess you're going to go after this guy or that guy.' I said, 'No, I worry about why. Why let it continue?' In fact, it may be more fun that that guy may be living now out in the Rocky Mountains or something, or go down to the bookstore, buy the book, go looking through the book to see what I had to say about him. And maybe more shocking for him to find out I said nothing about it. Exactly. So I think that's a great lesson for everyone, all of our viewers, to handle the setbacks with grace and to not hold on to that kind of insidious cancer of resentment that festers in a lot of people along the way.

Well, I think the most important thing that you can do with your life as you're building a career is concentrate on relationships. And if you build good relationships with a solid base, I believe your life will be a success, whether it's the relationship with your spouse, whether it's the relationship with your co-workers. And I try to talk about that in the book in a way that people will see it's not a mystery. It's just putting in the time to help other people when they need help, to look to help them when there's tragedy in their family, as people did without. It's on you to build a life around you, and you can't build a life around you unless you build it through the relationships you make with friends and neighbors.

Well, in particular for me, the last Olympics that I produced were the Beijing games, about, I can't remember exactly, seven or eight years ago. And I had the good fortune, there were some complications, nothing major, but there were some complications between our world and the Chinese government. And President Bush, Bush the younger, President Bush, he reached out to me and asked me if I would accept this letter that would be delivered to me for me to give to the president of China. And this was a time when people didn't know whether we were going to come to the Olympics. And he was resolute, young President Bush, that we, the United States, are going to come to those games, so no matter what other politicians said, we were going to do it. And they got me this letter, and I became the first person in about two or three years from the United States to have a direct relationship with the president of China, not because I was Dick Ebersol, but because I was representing the United States. And I delivered the letter, and that began a relationship through those games where I could talk directly to the leadership of China to facilitate things during those games, including some peaceful solutions to issues that rose during those games.

Well, for starters, this took place at the time that Father Malloy, I believe, was the president of Notre Dame at the time, and he welcomed us with open arms. And we developed the same relationship with all of the various athletic directors who've been there since. And it became incredibly intimate. In my particular case, it became an eye-opener for me into the Catholic faith, so much so that on a trip on the Amazon with a bunch of Notre Dame alums and their wives, and Susie and I went along, you were on that trip. It was on that trip, one day sitting with you and Father John, that I said I really wanted to become a Catholic. And Father John was key at my early education in that direction. And then in that typical selfless way of his, he sent me back to my local parish priest, who he had met at Teddy's funeral, to finish my conversion to the Catholic faith. So I have multi-ties to the community there. And Susie and I still come to South Bend anywhere from four to eight times a year.

Yeah, the only thing I would pound home a little bit more is just how blessed I was that I met Susie, because she's the one who always kept me focused, reminding me of maybe I was going a little bit too far this way or too far that way. She was fearless in her approach to calming me down and setting me off in the right direction more than once. So that marriage has been essential to keeping you in check, keeping you humble, grounded, focused, and all of that. And I'm sure she would say the same about you.

So let me ask you a little bit about Teddy. I know that you guys were flying back after Thanksgiving from the Notre Dame USC game, and you fly back to Colorado to drop Susie off with a friend, and there, as you begin to take off again, the tragic accident occurs. You're on the plane together with Charlie and then your youngest son Teddy, who's 14 years old at the time. He tragically loses his life in the accident. You seem to break just about every bone in your body, and Teddy somehow comes out unscathed. I mean, it's just the full spectrum of that in terms of physical injury. I remember about a month later going to Teddy's funeral in that small Catholic church in the Litchfield area, and it's still one of the most memorable events in my life. It's etched on my soul. I remember you being rolled in, still in your hospital bed, for the ceremony, surrounded by your family. I remember that there were Notre Dame priests on the altar, there were Notre Dame students that led the choir, and Paul Simon got up to sing a special tribute song to Teddy. And then each and every one of the family members eulogized Teddy. But I'll never forget Susan's plaintive cry to keep her family together as she addressed each and every one of you and why you shouldn't beat yourself up over this moment. But holding her family together was one of the most memorable talks that I will ever be exposed to in my life. You guys as a family have really worked to kind of keep Teddy's legacy alive. Tell me a little bit why that's so important to you and the family.

Well, I'm a big believer, as is Susie and as are some of our kids, that by talking about Teddy, telling stories about Teddy, he was quite a character, his legacy is maintained, particularly among our grandchildren. It's as if Teddy continues to live through them because I can hear them as their younger brothers or sisters grew up, they tell them about Uncle Teddy, who they have never met, and the ones they're telling the stories to will never meet. But he's a presence in their lives, and it makes me smile every time I hear it. And I recommend to families that lose a child, keep that child alive by telling stories, talking about them in family gatherings. Don't suppress it. Let it come up. Let it fill the room. It works.

Well, it's about a four-mile walk, and I head out from our house, walk down the streets of this incredibly well-preserved town, preserved by people over hundreds of years, not by some grant from the government. And there are homes where people who fought the Revolutionary War lived, where George Washington slept, all of that. But I ultimately get to Teddy's grave. And there's a friend who passed away sometime just before it, said he died. I lean against his big tombstone and have a conversation with Teddy. And sometimes with him. I'm not that I believe that they're physically going to appear to me, but just because sharing with their spirits makes me feel good. And I recommend to people doing the same thing. It is so important to keep that spirit alive of those family members.

Well, they're not fortunate enough to have Susan Saint James in their family, because she was not alone.

Oh, well, Susie's reminding me from off camera a story that I most often love to tell. It's my favorite memory of my entire career. It's convincing the Atlanta organizing committee to let me invite Muhammad Ali to light the cauldron at the start of the Atlanta Olympics. And the spectacle of that, watching Ali, still trembling from his infirmities, but even as the flames were looking back over his hand, what you see in this video, he's still going forward trying to light the cauldron. And then the flame flies up and lights the big cauldron at the other end of the stadium. And nothing, nothing still moves me in my entire career like that does.

I didn't tell Dick Enberg. I had too much faith in them. They were the best announcers of their time. They were surprised at seeing the spectacle would carry the day, and indeed it did. And I still get goosebumps looking at it today.

Well, thank you, Lou, very much. I want to point out that there were many of those great moments from that Olympics that were produced by people other than Dick Ebersol. So I had the good fortune to be there and be involved in some of them, but I don't want the world to think that I did all that just myself. I didn't.

Well, thank you, Lou, very much. Look forward to seeing you again in a couple weeks.