{"id":902,"date":"2018-11-12T18:22:45","date_gmt":"2018-11-12T18:22:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sportsbroadcastinghalloffame.org\/?post_type=inductees&p=902"},"modified":"2018-12-21T15:03:39","modified_gmt":"2018-12-21T20:03:39","slug":"bud-greenspan","status":"publish","type":"inductees","link":"https:\/\/www.sportsbroadcastinghalloffame.org\/inductees\/bud-greenspan\/","title":{"rendered":"Bud Greenspan"},"content":{"rendered":"

Late TV-journalism pioneer Don Hewitt titled his autobiography Tell Me a Story<\/em>. That would also be an apt title for a book about the late Bud Greenspan, whose legendary Olympic documentaries were less about the heroes than they were about the often heartbreaking, often exhilarating stories of athletes in competition and away from it.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe don\u2019t do sports as much as we do people,\u2019 Greenspan used to say. And he didn\u2019t do sadness or defeat as much as he did victory: victory of spirit, if not always the kind of victory that earns medals.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are people who do negative better than I,\u201d he told the New York Times<\/em>. \u201cI want to spend my time on what\u2019s good.\u201d<\/p>\n

The proof of that was in the documentary Lillehammer \u201994: 16 Days of Glory<\/em>, his chronicle of the 1994 Winter Olympic Games. Those Games will forever be remembered for the Nancy Kerrigan-Tonya Harding figure-skating fracas that shocked, riveted, and repulsed the world. But, in Greenspan\u2019s 209-minute film, that grimy crime got 30 seconds.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was offended,\u201d he said later. \u201cThese are asterisks in my films and in my stories. For our business to make such a big deal out of people who are illegal and immoral is not what I intend my life to be.\u201d<\/p>\n

Greenspan ran the company from his early days with his much beloved wife, Cappy, who died of cancer in 1983. After her death, he ran the company he named after his wife with his business partner and companion Nancy Beffa. She was executive producer of Lillehammer<\/em> and still runs Cappy Productions.<\/p>\n

Greenspan documentaries also captured Olympic Games in Seoul (1988), Barcelona (1992), Atlanta (1996), Nagano (1998), Sydney (2000), Salt Lake (2002), Athens (2004), Torino (2006), Beijing (2008), and, released after his death, the 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver. He also produced many other Olympic-themed works, such as Jesse Owens Returns To Berlin<\/em>, his 1964 documentary about the visit by the African-American runner whose four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Games mocked Adolph Hitler\u2019s claims of Aryan superiority.<\/p>\n

He also directed 100 Years of Olympics Glory<\/em>. Greenspan, who was born in 1926 and died in 2010 from Parkinson\u2019s disease, used to joke that he really hadn\u2019t been to all of them; it just seemed like it.<\/p>\n

Beffa recalls, \u201cBud always said, \u2018Every Olympic athlete needs four things: pride, talent, courage, and the ability to endure.\u2019\u201c<\/p>\n

That philosophy didn\u2019t necessarily set him aside from others who covered the Games. But some circumstances did. For one, Beffa says, Greenspan didn\u2019t care where the athletes were from. For another, he didn\u2019t particularly care if the sport they played was well-known. And he didn\u2019t care if they didn\u2019t win.<\/p>\n

The best example of all of that \u2014 indeed, one of the indelible examples of Greenspan\u2019s style \u2014 happened at the 1968 Summer Games in Mexico City.<\/p>\n

John Stephen Akhwari, representing Tanzania in the Marathon event, was seriously injured during the run. But he kept on, in obvious pain, limping on a bandaged right knee and finishing the race more than an hour after everyone else.<\/p>\n

Later, Greenspan asked Akhwari why he didn\u2019t quit. \u201cI don\u2019t think you understand,\u201d the runner told him. \u201cMy country didn\u2019t send me 9,000 miles to start the race. They sent me 9,000 miles to finish the race.\u201d<\/p>\n

That footage, painful and powerful, could make a stone cry.<\/p>\n

Greenspan, forever with a pair of glasses on top of his bald head, came to sports documentaries in an odd way.<\/p>\n

After serving in World War II as an intelligence officer, he returned to his native New York and quickly forged a career in radio at the old WHN, becoming its sports director in his early 20s.<\/p>\n

But he also loved opera and thought he could sing. To make extra money, he got work in 1952 as a spear carrier in the chorus. He didn\u2019t have a voice after all. (\u201cGreenspan,\u201d the choirmaster said to him one day, \u201cI don\u2019t even want you to \u2018mouth.\u2019\u201c)<\/p>\n

While in the chorus, he met John Davis, an African-American baritone, who was, despite having won Olympic gold medals in 1948 and \u201952 as a heavyweight weightlifter, was unknown to most sports fans. Greenspan was astonished. And that led to his first documentary, The Strongest Man in the World<\/em>, made with a borrowed $5,000.<\/p>\n

He couldn\u2019t sell it, though. He was in a panic, he recalled later when he received his Peabody Award for lifetime achievement.<\/p>\n

Luckily, he learned that the State Department was looking for something to show at consulates to counteract Soviet propaganda about U.S. treatment of black athletes. But, they said, they could offer \u201conly\u201d $50,000.<\/p>\n

\u201cI said, \u2018This is a good business,\u2019\u201d he told the awards luncheon crowd. And a business was born.<\/p>\n

Financing Greenspan\u2019s documentaries took a lot of angel investors and shrewd negotiations. And the big networks worldwide tried to claim the best camera berths and other perks from Olympics organizers.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs an indie,\u201d Beffa says, \u201cwhen it came to negotiating for camera locations, we were always at the bottom of the food chain. Half the time, we didn\u2019t know what we were going to do.\u201d<\/p>\n

But, she says, Greenspan had made friends around the world by covering athletes from different countries. They tipped him to interesting stories; in fact, that\u2019s how he heard about the marathon runner. When negotiating with host countries, Greenspan reminded them that his film mission was to celebrate, not denigrate. That helped.<\/p>\n

Greenspan was among the first to popularize documentary styles like showing crowd reactions to tell the story. \u201cWhen we lectured filmmakers in other countries,\u201d Beffa recalls, \u201cBud would always tell them, \u2018Let your shot go long.\u2019\u201d It was a technique that he used in more than a few stunning scenes instead of quickly cutting away.<\/p>\n

He died before the ease of creating videos via smartphones reached just about every corner of the world.<\/p>\n

How would he react to that? Beffa says, \u201cI think he would see these short pieces and say they are well-edited. It would be nice. But they would be forgettable. They wouldn\u2019t tell a story.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":903,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"tags":[45],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsbroadcastinghalloffame.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/inductees\/902"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsbroadcastinghalloffame.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/inductees"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsbroadcastinghalloffame.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/inductees"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsbroadcastinghalloffame.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/903"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsbroadcastinghalloffame.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=902"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsbroadcastinghalloffame.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=902"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}