OLYMPICS ‘88: A PREVIEW : Announcing Star of Today’s Olympics . . . One Bryant Gumbel

Bryant Gumbel’s Olympic Games, featuring TV studio host Bryant Gumbel himself, are just around the corner. Sixteen days of coverage on NBC, four and a half hours a day, for 180 million viewers. That adds up to almost 13 billion viewer hours of Bryant Gumbel, minus commercial breaks and the obligatory coverage of running and jumping.

You’ll see Carl and Flo-Jo on the big oval, David Robinson and the hoopsters, graceful Greg Louganis, all your favorites. But tying it all together, bringing coherence to a 30-ring circus, lending decorum and style to a crazy quilt sports fortnight, will be the eye of the hurricane, the cool tip of the iceberg, the agile pivot man, the skipper at the helm, the straw that stirs the Seoul drink, wardrobe coach to Pat Riley . . . Heeeere’s Bryant.

Note the monogrammed dress shirt, the cuff links glinting in the studio lights, the mirror-sheen shoes, the beautifully cut suit, the painstakingly coordinated socks-tie-pocket square. No frumpy network sports team blazer for Gumbel, who is taking enough new suits to Seoul that you’ll never see the same one twice.

But Gumbel is more than just a pleasant face atop a million-dollar wardrobe. He has become famous in America for three basic reasons:

1. He is a hip, quick-witted, silver-tongued, hard-working young (he turns 41 during the Games) man who possesses the rare talent, in television and real life, of being able to talk and think at the same time.

2. He is blunt, outspoken and self-confident. Some say arrogant. No pussyfooting or mealy-mouthed fence-sitting for Bryant.

3. He is involved in TV’s hottest and silliest ongoing feud, with David Letterman. This has resulted in the most serious charge that Gumbel’s critics level against Bryant: He can’t take a joke.

How does a kid from Chicago who never intended to become a TV star wind up with the most prestigious part-time job in television, hosting the Olympics? Easy. Just be in the right place (NBC) at the right time (the Bryant Gumbel Era).

Career-wise, Gumbel got on the elevator at the top floor, pushed the “UP” button and shot through the roof.

A couple years out of Bates College in Maine, after selling cardboard cartons and then doing some magazine sportswriting, he was asked to audition for a job at KNBC in Los Angeles. He was hired immediately, not as a gaffer or go-fer but as a weekend sports anchor. Within four years he was the station’s sports director, and soon was promoted to network status, rising quickly to NBC’s national sports anchor desk.

In ’81 NBC asked him to move over to the “Today” show, the early-morning feature-and-interview program. The transition from sports to general news was no big deal, Gumbel says, because “I was never the plaid-jacket, arm-around-the-shoulder, what-pitch-did-you-hit type of sportscaster.”

After some initial rough times with the “Today” ratings and critics, Gumbel and co-host Jane Pauley got the show rolling like a freight train.

When NBC bought the Olympics, Gumbel was the easy choice as prime-time host. Despite his self-admitted tendency to truculence, Gumbel’s TV personality is basically likeable. He looks good, he’s cool under fire, his pants creases and his wits are sharp, and he knows sports.

He had vowed never to return to sportscasting, but hey, this is the Olympics.

“How could I pass up the chance to host the most expensive, lengthy, most elaborate production in the history of TV?” Gumbel asks.

Does Bryant Gumbel think he can handle the job? Does Edwin Moses think he can skim the sticks?

Which brings us to the subject of confidence, or arrogance. The “A” word always seems to pop up in interviews and discussions with Gumbel.

“Arrogance has always meant to me that you had to lord it over somebody, put your thumb print on somebody,” Gumbel said. “I defy you to find someone I worked with who would say something terrible about me.”

That’s not counting the big boys in corporate, with whom Gumbel has had the occasional artistic and financial disagreement.

“I’m nasty up and nice down,” he says.

Gumbel feels there is a racial component to the charges of arrogance.

“If Ted Koppel, Barbara Walters and Bryant Gumbel all interviewed George Schultz,” Gumbel says, “Ted Koppel would be viewed as aggressive, Barbara Walters would be viewed as bitchy and Bryant Gumbel would be viewed as arrogant.

“If you’re going to be successful in network TV, you’ve got to be a take-charge individual, forthright, assertive. In the minds of some Americans it’s still a shock to see a black guy demonstrating those qualities. As a result, I’m perceived as more arrogant than Ted Koppel. . . . Can you name me a black guy who has succeeded in TV who hasn’t been characterized as arrogant?”

If we call it aggressiveness, Gumbel can more than live with it. As he said in a Playboy interview, “I’m a raucous guy who, for better or worse, has this reputation for being a brawler in terms of his personal dealings, who doesn’t mind screaming or telling it like it is. I’m about as subtle as a punch in the face.”

This is a man who does not take back steps. He says precisely what he means, so there is seldom if ever the need for apology and regret. In that same Playboy interview, conducted in his office, Gumbel indulged in some girl watching from his window. The interviewer chose to include several Gumbel sightings (“See her in the white T-shirt, standing by the stairs?”).

Gumbel is married. He might have been angry at Playboy, or embarrassed. Was he?

“Look,” Gumbel says with a who-cares shrug, “I caught crap for it. But I did it.”

How will this stand-up, speak-out style manifest itself during the Olympics? Jim McKay, the TV host of the Games since the days of ancient Greece, was the kindly-uncle type. Will Gumbel be more likely to roil the waters?

“It’s always been very difficult for me not to express my opinions,” he says. “The show is not going to be ’20 Minutes for Bryant Gumbel’s Opinions,’ but if I have an opinion, I’m not going to be reluctant to express it. . . . If Arthur Watson (president of NBC Sports) wanted a traffic cop, there’s a lot of guys he could have asked, and I hope he wouldn’t have asked this guy.”

Not that Gumbel plans to come on too strong, understand.

“My job will be to bring the show from one venue to the next smoothly, to add clarification if it is needed. I wouldn’t feel bad if, when it’s all over, someone says, ‘I really enjoyed watching the Games,’ and someone else says, ‘What did Bryant Gumbel do?’ ‘Gee, I don’t know.’ In a certain sense, I guess you’re like a referee. If nobody notices what you do, you’ve done a good job.”

Network execs are confident. They recently signed Gumbel to a new contract, which was not the highest dollar offer he had, but Bryant is a loyal guy, and no other offer included an Olympics anchor job. Everyone at NBC seems to like Gumbel, with the possible exception of the host of “Late Nite with David Letterman.”

The Bryant-Letterman feud began a couple years ago when the full-’o-fun Letterman interrupted a “Today” show in progress with a little bullhorn silliness. Just a little prank.

Gumbel wasn’t amused, although he likes to think of himself as a good sport--”I enjoy a joke as much as the next guy.”

The joke was OK, but Gumbel was hoping for at least a token apology from Letterman, and it never came, and Gumbel has come to appreciate Letterman less and less. Letterman has shown no contrition. On the contrary, he has on several occasions poked fun at Gumbel on “Late Nite.”

Example: One of Dave’s nightly Top Ten Lists--”Ten Ways David’s Weekend Was Different from Bryant Gumbel’s Weekend” . . . “No. 5: David had to use imagination to see Willard Scott in his underwear.”

Letterman ran into Gumbel once and said, “Bryant, you realize this is all just pro wrestling.”

Not to Gumbel, although he swears he never even thinks of Letterman or the feud unless someone brings up the subject. But because somebody brought it up . . .

“I guess it’s my own simplistic sense of the code of honor among guys,” Gumbel says. “We had a disagreement, and the guys’ thing to do is either confront the other person or apologize. I would’ve thought he would’ve been enough of a man to pick up the phone privately, say, ‘This has all gotten out of hand.’ The fact that he hasn’t tells me a lot about the guy.”

Would Gumbel go on Letterman’s show?

“No.”

Would Gumbel have Letterman on his show?

“No.”

OK, it’s not the Hatfields and McCoys, and the feud will likely fizzle out, unless NBC makes a last-minute decision to have Letterman co-anchor of the Olympics.

The incident does illustrate how seriously Gumbel takes his work, and in a way, how seriously he takes himself. He loves to golf and go to Cubs games and hang out with his buddies and dress like a slob and goof around, but he is also a serious young man going places.

He can even picture himself holding the highest office in the land, Commissioner of Baseball. Before Bart Giamatti was named to replace Peter Ueberroth, someone half-seriously asked Gumbel if he’d be interested in the job, and Gumbel half-seriously said yes, the Gumbel for Commissioner rumors took root.

“I’m egotistical enough to think I could (handle that job),” Gumbel says. “But deep down inside, am I qualified? I have no business expertise, and it’s become a business-oriented job. In the coming years it’s going to be communications oriented, but on the business side of communications.”

For now, Gumbel has a job, bringing the Olympic Games to America. He has been studying, working, planning. He’s even been losing weight, 30 to 40 pounds, because “Everybody reaches that point where you look in the mirror one day and want to barf.”

That’s the human side of Bryant Gumbel, a man who says most people would be surprised to learn “that I’m a lot softer than they think, that I’m shyer than they think.”

Someone should tell Letterman.