After Rocky Times, Roggin Is on a Roll

Life for Fred Roggin, it would appear, has been one good break after another.

He was working in Los Angeles as a weekend sports anchor at Channel 4 when he was only 23. He was 26 when he moved to weeknights and he was 29 when he replaced Stu Nahan as the station’s primary sports announcer a year and a half ago.

He and his wife Eileen, an independent screenwriter and a former casting director for the NBC soap opera, “Santa Barbara,” found out this week that they will become parents of twins, a boy and a girl, about May 6, which will be Fred’s 31st birthday.

Earlier this week, in a poll conducted by the Herald Examiner, Roggin was voted best local sports anchor.

And Roggin and his staff have just completed work on an excellent year-end special, “Fred Roggin’s Sports Bowl ‘87,” which Channel 4 will televise Sunday night at 11:15.

The half-hour-plus show is vintage Roggin, complete with Roggin’s Heroes and the Hall of Shame. It’s all great stuff. You’ll laugh, you’ll ooh, you’ll ah, you’ll be amazed. Don’t miss it.

You might say, good things are happening for Roggin.

But it hasn’t always been like this. When Roggin was 13, his father, Hy, died of a heart attack.

When Roggin was 26, his mother, Irene, died of cancer. A year and a half later, his stepfather, Bill Katanick, whom Fred had grown very fond of, also died of cancer.

Roggin’s family, besides his wife, now includes only his brother Eric, 26, who works for an airline in Phoenix, and his grandmother, Betty Saltz, who lives in Phoenix with her live-in friend of 40 years, known to the Roggin boys as Uncle Louie.

Roggin was born in Detroit and lived there until he was 10. Then his father’s pharmacy was burned during the civil rights riots in 1967.

Hy Roggin moved his family to Phoenix, mainly because the warm climate would help ease some of the arthritic pain his wife Irene was suffering.

Phoenix was an unusual place for a young Jewish boy to grow up.

“I had a bar mitzvah, and I went to Hebrew school, but none of the friends that I remember are Jewish,” Roggin said.

“My mother wanted me to go to college and marry a nice Jewish girl. I quit college during my freshman year of JC, and Eileen is Catholic.

“I quit school to take a $400-a-month job at a radio station in Globe, Ariz. It wasn’t what my mother envisioned her son doing. But I said, ‘Trust me on this one, Mom.’

“And she did. I couldn’t make it on $400 a month in 1976, so she would send me money even though, since my father was dead, she didn’t have much.”

In April 1983, Roggin was promoted from weekends to weeknights and given a nice raise.

He called his brother in Phoenix and found out his mother and Katanick, her husband, were in Las Vegas.

“So I went over there to surprise her and tell her my news,” Roggin said.

“My mother loved playing the slots. When we went to a casino, I went and bought her a roll of 50 silver dollars and handed it to her.

“ ‘Son,’ she said, ‘You can’t afford this.’ I said, ‘Yes I can,’ and I told her about my promotion and raise.

“She was in a wheelchair and she was extremely weak. But she managed to raise her arms and give me a hug.”

Roggin, getting a little misty-eyed, said: “When we left Vegas that Sunday night, I said to myself that I was never going to see my mother alive again.

“By that night, she was in the hospital. By the next day, she was dead.

“I loved my mother very much. She meant a lot to me.”

Sunday night’s special, which will be repeated in prime time on New Year’s Day after NBC’s coverage of the Orange Bowl, is produced and written by Roggin and John Varvi.

Varvi was working in the promotion department at Channel 4 when the NBC technicians went on strike in June and he got the call to fill in as the producer of Roggin’s nightly sports spots.

When the three-month strike ended, Roggin’s regular producers, Sol Steinberg, Kevin LaBeach and Mike Cunningham, returned.

Although they all helped put together the year-end special, Varvi was the one Roggin selected as co-producer.

“It was a tough call, but John had been through so much with me and done such a super job, I felt he deserved the shot,” Roggin said.

“John gets along fine with the other guys. I had them all up to my house for a barbecue during the strike.

“John is a very talented producer. I hope this show helps his career.”

TV-Radio Notes The Rams will play Dallas Monday night at Anaheim, and the game is close to selling out. The deadline for lifting the TV blackout is 6 tonight. . . . There will be National Football League action on Saturday the next two weekends. This Saturday’s games are duds, Green Bay vs. the New York Giants on CBS at 9:30 a.m. and Kansas City vs. Denver on NBC at 1 p.m. . . . NBC’s “NFL Live” show Saturday will be televised at 12:30 p.m. During the show, viewers will be asked to select the best current NFL quarterback. Those on the ballot are Dan Marino, Joe Montana, Jim Kelly, John Elway and Jim McMahon. An obvious omission is Dan Fouts, who has slipped a little.

Sunday’s NFL games televised in Los Angeles: Minnesota vs. Detroit on Channel 2 at 10 a.m., with Jack Buck and Will McDonough announcing, and Indianapolis vs. San Diego on Channel 4 at 1 p.m., with Don Criqui and Paul Maguire. Bob Trumpy, Criqui’s regular partner, has the day off. . . . Originally, CBS planned to show Atlanta-San Francisco at 1 p.m., but switched to the earlier Minnesota-Detroit game to avoid going head-to-head with the Colt-Charger game on NBC. . . . It’s NBC’s doubleheader weekend, but the network is restricted to one telecast in Los Angeles because the Raiders are home, playing Cleveland. So because of that, L.A. viewers are deprived of seeing Seattle vs. Chicago, as well as the Mike Ditka sideshow.

Dallas President Tex Schramm will be asked about the demise of the Cowboys on “NFL Live” Sunday at 9:30 a.m. On the same show, quarterback Mark Malone will talk with Bob Costas about how he handles the criticism directed at him in Pittsburgh, and Walter Payton, playing what is supposed to be his final season, will be featured. . . . The ESPN game Sunday at 5 p.m. will be Washington at Miami. The guest commentator will be Larry Csonka.

The college football bowl season is under way, and Saturday’s Independence Bowl at Shreveport, La., with Washington (6-4-1) facing Tulane (6-5) will be televised by both Channel 11 and the USA cable network. It is the first of six bowl games to be televised by Channel 11. . . . Tonight’s City 4-A football championship game between Carson High and Granada Hills will be shown by Prime Ticket Sunday night at 7:30. . . . Channel 2’s Jim Lampley will do a four-part series on the decline of high school sports participation in L.A. inner-city schools, beginning Sunday night on the “Sports Final” show at 11:25. The remaining segments will be shown during the 5 o’clock news, Monday through Wednesday.

Last year, CNN Sports brought together the commissioners of the four major professional sports, the NFL’s Pete Rozelle, baseball’s Peter Ueberroth, the National Basketball Assn.’s David Stern and the National Hockey League’s John Ziegler, for a round-table discussion appropriately called “The Commissioners.” A half-hour sequel to last year’s show will be televised on CNN Saturday at 4 p.m. and repeated at 8 p.m. In this year’s show, sports stars such as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Wayne Gretzky and Andre Dawson also will participate.

The year’s top sports events will be reviewed in a special on Channel 2 Saturday at about 3 p.m. The show, produced by ProServ Television, will follow the North Carolina-Illinois basketball game, beginning at 12:45 p.m. . . . Another year-in-review show, “Wilson’s Sports Year in Review,” will be televised from 1:30 to 3 p.m. on CBS Sunday. Tim Ryan is the host. . . . CBS will televise the Jan. 2 Michael Nunn-Kevin Watts fight at the Country Club in Reseda live at 2 p.m.