To Lampley, Covering Sports in Los Angeles Is No Game

The handsome, respected network sportscaster relinquished his office on 6th Avenue in Manhattan and his weekly exposure to sports fans all across the country and ventured out West to anchor the daily sportscasts of a Los Angeles television station. His challenge: to compete for local viewers with several popular sports reporters who succeed at least in part by turning the wide world of sports into an adjunct of P. T. Barnum’s big top.

Many of his friends in network television wondered why he would stoop so low.

But Jim Lampley, one of ABC Sports’ most visible personalities for 13 years and KCBS Channel 2’s sports director and on-air reporter since mid-September, is holding his stylishly coiffed head high. Not only is he being paid more now than he was at the network, his daily grind, he insists, is far more satisfying than it ever was before.

“The whole perception that this was a step down is utterly laughable,” Lampley says. “It’s harder work, it’s better work and in a lot of ways it’s more fun. I used to go crazy three days a week doing nothing in New York. I’d go into the office and just make phone calls or schmooze with other people because I had too much energy for what I was doing.”

Today, Lampley, 38, is lucky if he has time to test the car alarm on his new Porsche. He reads and writes the sports on Channel 2’s 5, 6, 7 and 11 o’clock newscasts, hosts two hours of sports talk on New York radio station WFAN weekday mornings, anchors the “Sunday Sports Final,” chats with Los Angeles Rams coach John Robinson on their weekly half-hour promo show, and every Friday flies off somewhere to announce the play-by-play on one of CBS’ regional NFL games.

And, when the revamped CBS morning news program hits the air Nov. 30, Lampley will also appear nationwide with a breakfast-time sports report.

Throughout his daily sports odysseys, Lampley says he continually maintains the perspective that “sports is the toy department--where people play games instead of playing real life.” But he also believes that, at its best, sports journalism can present some valuable lessons about human behavior in society today.

“Sports fans don’t have a strong desire to open the crime section of the newspaper to read about this society’s problems with drugs,” Lampley says. “But if they read the headlines in the sports section about athletes and their problems with drugs, they’re getting information that they might not otherwise get.

“So I try to approach this arena with an awareness of the stories that aren’t just fantasy mechanisms, but which are also illustrative of something important to this society.”

During his tenure at ABC Sports, documenting the salient relationship between sports and society included once producing a story on student activism in the 1960s that aired during halftime of a UC Berkeley football game.

At KCBS, Lampley insists, that approach means avoiding “joke sports” at all costs, even though one of this city’s most popular sportscasters, KNBC’s Fred Roggin, lures a large audience nightly with his more playful view of sports.

“I doubt I would ever use a piece of video solely because it is funny or might attract an audience,” Lampley says. “People jumping into Jell-O is not a sports event and my job is to report on legitimate, competitive sports events.”

(His record is not perfect, however. Lampley recently made KCBS anchorman John Schubeck blush with a piece of video that featured a barely clothed, buxom woman parading around a boxing ring, competing in a fight-night beauty contest--a clip seemingly more appropriate to KABC’s “Eye on L.A.” than to the Channel 2 news.)

Before leaving ABC Sports, Lampley, who was probably best known for his work at the 1984 Olympics and as host of the “College Football Scoreboard,” aspired to be the network’s primary in-studio host--a position equal in stature to that of Brent Musburger at CBS. But after the acquisition of ABC by Capital Cities in 1985, Lampley says he realized that such a promotion would not be forthcoming.

He also disagreed vehemently with the new management about a strict fiscal policy that, Lampley complains, evaluated each sports segment on whether it made money. Coverage of the bicycle “Race Across America,” for example, which won two Emmys and a Cine Golden Eagle during the five years he covered it, was scrapped, he claims, because it didn’t satisfy that criterion.

“The image of ‘Wide World of Sports’ was built through 20 years of realizing that while it’s important to make money, it’s also crucial to create a sense in the viewer’s mind that this is meaningful and entertaining and relevant to my life right now,” Lampley says. “That attitude has been completely lost at ABC Sports, and that was a large part of what I couldn’t agree with.”

With 17 months remaining on his contract, Lampley left ABC and set out to pursue a television career outside of sports.

But when KCBS lost Jim Hill to KABC last summer, CBS--despite some studies that indicate that sports is the least important segment in terms of drawing viewers to a newscast--offered Lampley a combined station and network deal (reportedly paying him about $700,000 a year) that encouraged him to overlook any qualms about devoting his life to society’s “toy department.”

“There’s no question it’s a lot of money,” says Erik Sorenson, KCBS news director, who maintains that he hired Lampley because his “no nonsense” approach to sports “fits in with Channel 2’s overall image.”

“But if he wasn’t worth it, he wouldn’t get it. Are quarterbacks worth $2 million? I happen to think that teachers provide a more valuable service than quarterbacks. Some people just command that kind of money.”

But are the money, the fame and the ego gratification enough to keep a man who hints that he might be more fulfilled dealing with real social and political problems on a daily basis reading ball scores for the rest of his life?

“If you had told me 13 years ago that I would still be doing this now, I would have called you a liar,” Lampley says. “Now, I’m not going to tell you--as I would have done two years ago--that there’s no way I’m going to do this forever. Maybe I will.”