Bryant Gumbel

There’s a lot to say about Bryant Gumbel’s career, but the end of it is a great place to start. In 2023, HBO announced that, in December 2023, after 29 seasons, Real Sports With Bryant Gumbel would be no more. The monthly show leaves a formidable history: 37 Sports Emmy Awards and two Peabody Awards and what was arguably the most thoughtful sports program on television and is certainly the most honored. His induction into the Sports Broadcasting Hall of Fame is just another feather in an already brilliant plumage.

Not long after the HBO announcement, Gumbel had an announcement of his own. He said he was retiring, and he seems to mean it.

His work on Real Sports is but one of the accomplishments on his résumé. In 1975, he was hired at NBC to co-host its Sunday NFL pregame show, shortly after the show was invented. He did baseball and NFL and college-football telecasts for NBC until 1982. Then he became the first Black host of the Today show, teamed with Jane Pauley. He hosted the show for 15 years, taking some side trips to lead NBC’s coverage of the Seoul Olympics in 1988 and the PGA TOUR in 1990.

All in all, for anyone keeping score, Gumbel worked an astounding 52 years in television. As he told fellow sports commentator Rich Eisen, “I think that’s enough for any person. If I never look into a television camera again, that’s okay by me.” He added, “I never say never” but noted that there’s not much demand for a 75-year-old sportscaster.

He’s probably right about that. The evolution of sports-TV programming is faster paced, more buddy-buddy than it used to be, and it’s not for Gumbel. “I watch very little of the yelling back and forth,” he says. “But, you know, I’m the old guy in the room.”

Gumbel is the consummate pro. On Today, he was known as “Never Stumble Gumbel.”

Sports Broadcasting Hall of Famer Ken Aagaard, EVP, operations and production services, CBS Sports, recalls that, when Gumbel anchored pregame and halftime shows for NBC, “We did not have technologies that we have today. Turning around quick updates and highlights was difficult, and Bryant was able to navigate our technical challenges. He had the ability to handle multiple simultaneous games with wit and accurate commentary. He led the way for so many others.”

He may always have been unruffled, but he didn’t inspire calm in those he interviewed: when he wants to, he can have a sharp edge. In 2018, Gumbel rattled some sports fans on Real Sports when he interviewed Derek Jeter, after the celebrated former New York Yankee shortstop became CEO of the Florida Marlins, which were bad when he got there and bad when he left in 2022.

The interview started nicely. “Are you as happy as you look?” Gumbel asked.

“I am,” Jeter replied. “Things are going well. It’s a good time in my life.”

At that, Gumbel chortled. “Why do you laugh?” Jeter asked.

“Because, from what I read, things aren’t going great,” Gumbel replied. “You’ve been blamed for everything from firing people who were beloved to blowing off the [MLB] winter meetings to tanking, fronting an ownership group that needs money. Where do you want to start?”

Gumbel explains, “He purged nearly everyone from popular team ambassadors and front-office personnel to broadcasters and even the team mascot. Then he traded away virtually all the Marlins’ best players,” including that year’s league MVP, Giancarlo Stanton.

For Jeter, who “seemingly could do no wrong as a player,” his management stint was tough. Yet he insisted to Gumbel that he expected this team of inexperienced players to compete in another rebuilding phase.

The two went head-to-head until Jeter at one point said, joking but not, “You’re mentally weak.”

Gumbel retorted, “But, as an executive, it looks like you’re delusional.”

That’s Gumbel, who, to use the sturdy civil-rights phrase, succeeded in speaking truth to power as much as any sportscaster.

Talking to Eisen before the last edition of Real Sports, Gumbel said that doing hard-hitting TV sports reporting is increasingly difficult: “The cross-pollination of networks and sports is now so ingrained, it is naive to believe that any media entity can say [of a story it is pursuing] that ‘I’m just going to go where this story takes me and be damned with any relationship we’ve got.’ I don’t think the front office would be too pleased with that.”

Players, owners, and league executives now have an easy way out, he told The Washington Post. “I grew up in a time when, if a guy ran afoul of something or had a problem, his only way out of it was to be seen sitting for a serious interview with somebody who was equally serious. That’s no longer the case. … Now, if a guy gets a DUI or gets in trouble with his team, he goes on … the league’s network, answers a couple of softball questions, and, next time he’s asked about it, he says he addressed it. I’m not saying there’s a bad guy in this, but times have changed.”

Gumbel’s show was not a place for the typical sports story. Wins and losses weren’t important.

Mary Carillo, who was a correspondent for the show, recalls an example of that. She reported on Dick and Rick Hoyt, whose story is certainly among the most awesome in sports history. Dick Hoyt began doing long-distance races pushing his severely disabled Rick for more than 30 years, from the Boston Marathon to Ironman competitions, in which Dick swam with his son on a raft in tow. Theirs is a story of true love, especially because Dick Hoyt had no fondness for or experience in running. He did it because Rick had communicated that he wanted to try it. Carillo won a Sports Emmy Award for the story.

Interviewed by Awesome Announcing, Carillo emphasized that Real Sports kept it real. “There are a lot of documentaries where there’s music under pretty much the whole thing,” she noted. “Although it might add drama, the story was the thing for Real Sports. The whole idea is, we’re not going to do anything to distract from that.”

Issues, not star profiles, were the stuff of Real Sports. One memorable segment chastised the NHL for denying a link between violence in the rink and chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). In 2014, Real Sports noted an apparent connection between CTE cases and another NFL scandal — domestic-abuse incidents — plaguing the league.

There were lots of other issues. One story reported how children — some as young as 3 — from Third World countries were enslaved in the United Arab Emirates and forced to be camel jockeys, housed in an open-air pen, fed sparingly, and sometimes beaten. The footage is ugly. Real Sports ran that story, reported by Bernard Goldberg, in 2004. A follow-up several years later said that, in part because of its report, the race organizers stopped the enslavement and began using tiny robots.

It’s a series Gumbel is clearly proud of working on. When the show received a Peabody Award in 2012, the judges said, ”Uninhibited by league affiliations, sponsors, or the blinders of fandom, unafraid to be irreverent or aggressive, Real Sports With Bryant Gumbel is what sports journalism — for that matter, journalism, period — should be.”