PAT O’ BRIEN : ‘I Can Say What I Want; It’s Heaven’

He’s like the critical sixth man on an NBA team, as valuable to his CBS television associates as Michael Cooper is to the Lakers. He adds that intangible something extra. He adds style.

A specialist in versatility, Pat O’Brien is best known for his “At the Half” features during NBA games. But players and coaches around basketball know he is more than just a fast-talking TV face.

“What he’s done at the half--the things he thinks of--is some of the best work ever done covering basketball,” Lakers Coach Pat Riley said. “I’ve gotten to know Pat well since he started covering basketball three, four years ago. He’s really a comedian, a funny guy as a broadcaster. And he’s a Jack-of-all-trades, very creative.”

CBS thinks so, too. Not about to let him get away, the network recently signed the 38-year-old resident of North Hollywood to a multiyear contract. His duties include “CBS Sports Saturday/Sunday,” the network’s sports anthology program, his radio show, “Sportsbreak,” and miscellaneous features.

“I don’t do play-by-play,” O’Brien said. “My background is all in news, and my strength is in reporting.”

For broadcasts of NBA games, sometimes that means following up on the fates of injured players and ejected coaches. During the pivotal fifth game of this year’s championship series between Los Angeles and Boston, for instance, O’Brien shadowed K. C. Jones to the room for exiled coaches. Standing before a closed door, O’Brien addressed his television audience:

“The door says, ‘Visitors.’ It should say, ‘No Visitors.’ K. C.’s locked us out. I know you have a TV in there, K. C., so if you’re

watching, come on out and talk about it.”

These days, his off-season, O’Brien spends most of his time in Los Angeles working on his show for the CBS Radio Radio network. Two-hundred and eighty-nine stations across the country air the 90-second spots Monday through Friday. It is not broadcast here.

“The radio show is my favorite,” he said, “because you can say more on radio than on TV, and it forces me to do research when I have to--it keeps me on top of the game.

“And I love to write, I always have. It’s great to get up in the morning and have someone to write to. I have no editor, I can say what I want, and they trust me. It’s heaven.”

He gets to call it as he sees it, and intelligent insights blend engagingly with his rapid-fire delivery. One broadcast in May went like this:

“The fallout from the first-ever NBA lottery for the rights to the No. 1 pick in the June draft is beginning to settle, making this year’s postseason infinitely more interesting. In New York, Knick fans are suddenly the most loyal fans in America. Ticket sales are booming, inquiries are skyrocketing. And Madison Avenue just can’t wait to get its hands on Patrick Ewing. The Knicks, the team that has been the doormat for New York sports fans for years now, are suddenly the darlings of the Apple’s sports eye . ... Good or bad, the lottery aftermath has generated a healthy interest in the NBA, something Madison Avenue never could accomplish. For ‘Sportsbreak,’ I’m Pat O’Brien.”

O’Brien does all his own reporting. “If I don’t write my own stuff, I start sounding like everyone else. I have a distinct writing style, which I really work at, and a distinct delivery to make it sound like I’m not writing. And the combination of the two sets me apart from others.”

The research, according to O’Brien, primarily is just reading--a matter of scrutinizing newspapers and magazines every day. So when called upon by the network to report on a fast-breaking story, he appears cool and self-assured. All grace under pressure.

O’Brien contends, however, that he does not know as much about sports and sports history as his colleagues. He did not grow up dreaming of becoming a TV sports reporter. He wasn’t even a sports fan.

“I grew up in Sioux Falls, S.D.--I had no reason to be. The only professional sports team I ever saw was the Harlem Globetrotters.”

O’Brien graduated at the bottom of his class at Washington Senior High, he said, “a juvenile delinquent playing in a rock ‘n’ roll band. I went on to the University of South Dakota because I had nothing else to do.”

He said he finished with a 3.9 grade-point average, then went to Washington, D.C., to the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies to study economics.

“In the course of being in Washington and broke, I got a job as a copy boy at NBC,” O’Brien said. “My third day there, David Brinkley walked in and said, ‘Can someone answer my phone?’ I did and ended up being a copy boy and researcher and gofer for him for three years.”

From there, it was on to Chicago, where O’Brien rose through the ranks at NBC-affiliate WMAQ--writer, assignment editor, documentary producer and finally show producer. And it was there, by accident, that he found his calling, in front of the cameras.

“I was working as a producer and there was this snowstorm in April, which in Chicago is news enough. I had hair down to my shoulders, was wearing a T-shirt, basically a hippie--but a great producer. There was this town outside Chicago called Berwin that needed to get plowed, but the street crews were on strike. I figured it would be a great story, but had nobody to cover it. So I said the hell with it, I’ll do it myself.

“I never wanted to be on the air. Maybe subconsciously I must have,” he admitted. “Anyway, then they said I had a future in front of the camera. And I said, ‘Does this mean I have to wear a tie and cut my hair?’ They said yes. So I cut my hair and grew a mustache.”

According to O’Brien, shortly after realizing that he could produce his own pieces (“I hate having bosses”), he got too big for his britches and needed a new contract. In 1977 he quit and moved West.

With KNXT (now KCBS) in Los Angeles, he filled the weekend anchorman slot and was an Emmy-winning investigative reporter. He was awarded one Emmy for his piece on male hustlers and street teen-agers, and another for a special on PCP. He also won a Golden Mike for a busing special and an Emmy for his six-hour coverage of a hostage situation in Chicago.

In 1981, when Van Gordon Sauter, then the general manager of KCBS, left to head CBS Sports (he is now the executive vice president of the CBS Broadcast Group), he took O’Brien along. “When he asked me if I wanted to be in sports,” O’Brien said. “I told him I didn’t know much about sports. He said, ‘You’re a good reporter and a story’s a story, and if you’re worth anything, this is great national exposure for you.’

“Unfortunately, when he went back to news and asked me to come back, I didn’t want to go.”

O’Brien, it seems, is smitten with sports. “I think a sports story has more of life’s moments in it--it’s got drama, winning, defeat. It taxes you more as a reporter to cover most sports stories.

“I’m a fan of the scene ,” he said. “Sports is the essence of American capitalism, the essence of Americanism. I’m just amazed. We go to places like Auburn, Tex., these little towns no bigger than this (CBS) parking lot, you turn a corner and there’s a stadium that holds 87,000 people.

“One time up in Alaska, this Eskimo came up to me in the middle of nowhere, I mean about an hour out of Siberia, and asked me if the 76ers would repeat.

“It’s interesting because it’s a great outlet for people. I get on airplanes and people want to talk about the 1973 Knickerbockers.”

But O’Brien has found that in sports, as in hard news, the bad and the ugly go along with the good. He knows the serious side of sports firsthand. The man who Jim Healy once called “the sportscaster that looks like a porno star” was part of the CBS team that broke the story of drug use at the 1983 Pan American Games in Caracas, Venezuela--the biggest drug bust in the history of international amateur sporting competition.

Until that time, athletes were able to stay one step ahead of the drug-detecting technology. But with new, computerized testing procedures introduced at the Games, 14 athletes were disqualified and another dozen American athletes were scared home early.

“We’re real proud of that one. We caught them red-handed leaving,” O’Brien said. “I had gotten a tip that the athletes were leaving. I wasn’t told why. I rushed to the airport and fell asleep on the Tarmac. And that’s when an American pole vaulter tried to take me out with a pole. I said, ‘Well, the story must be true.’

“The athletes were all saying that they were going home for business reasons. I kept saying you must not be very good businessmen if you arrange a business meeting the day before you’re supposed to compete.”

O’Brien holds no lofty aspirations of being the next great one of television sports journalism, the next Howard Cosell, but he pays homage to the roots of his profession. “Muhammad Ali changed sports reporting like Joe Namath changed professional football,” he said. “Howard Cosell came in at a time when Jackie Robinson and the black barrier was breaking, and Muhammad Ali, then Cassius Clay, decided to make Howard his friend. It became great national theater.

“Howard responded to it well, he’s a great reporter. He did a great service for sports. I don’t expect to be like him or be as popular as him. Nor would I want to be as popular as he is, the way he’s popular.”

O’Brien knows where his talents lie--out on the field, covering events, digging for sideline and longer feature stories, getting interviews. Last year he served as the in-studio anchor for college football. Despite the exposure, he didn’t enjoy it. “It was like sitting on an atomic bomb--having 55 scores to do in 30 seconds is not greatly fulfilling,” he said. “You don’t even see an athlete for about eight weeks. I’m not sure I’ll be back this year.”

His work in sports has taken him on journeys and adventures around the globe. Three times, O’Brien has traveled to Alaska to cover the 1,700-mile Iditarod Dog Sled Race for “CBS Sports Saturday/Sunday.”

The 15-day race in March, which crosses Alaska, from Anchorage to Nome, traverses a mountain range, makes its way through the Yukon up along the Bering Sea and into Nome. The CBS team follows the dogs in two planes, a helicopter, a dog sled team, snowmobiles and on foot. And, O’Brien said, “People just go nuts over it.”

Clearly, his temperament, as well as his talents, make O’Brien well suited to this kind of work--all the travel and its accompanying craziness. “I’m like a chameleon,” he said. “I can adjust.”

Says Riley, “Pat has a very open personality. He’s loose on and off the air. He just doesn’t take himself that seriously.”

O’Brien is aware that he’s delegated some of the more “peculiar” assignments because the Powers That Be know he can make the best stories out of them.

“I think quirky assignments are good. You send your best reporters on the quirky assignments--you make them into good assignments,” he said.

“This job has taken on the job of being a war correspondent. It’s all the jobs I’ve ever wanted to do all in one, and have fun and the best seat in the house while I’m doing it.”

With all the travel--some 300,000 miles on an airplane last year--O’Brien worked 140 days. “I see an airplane as a place to be alone, to read and to look at the Grand Canyon, which I must see more than any human being on earth.”

Eight years ago he moved to Los Angeles, and settled into North Hollywood life--”married, no kids, one dog, two cats.” He discovered that L. A. does indeed get a bad rap from strangers. “As one of the few Western national correspondents, I get it all the time when I go East: ‘Oh, L. A.’s so laid back. How can anyone want to live there?’ People actually warned me that my mind would turn to mush. I just show them my tan--in February.

“I love it here. And it’s becoming the No. 1 sports center in the country. How can anyone not want to live here?”

So as the summer wears on, Pat O’Brien will keep himself busy with his radio show, readying himself for the U. S. Open in September and preparing features for the upcoming fall season, content with his ascending career in sports.

“At least now when people recognize me, they’ve stopped saying, ‘Say hello to Brent Musburger.’ ”