Jim Lampley: Back in Play With Sports : The Former KCBS Anchor Returns to the Press Box With a Renewed and Irreverent Vision

For most of his broadcasting career, Jim Lampley was driven to prove that he was more than just another jock. He postured himself as a serious sports reporter, angling for the money scandals and criminal cases that he believed served as metaphors for what goes on in the real world. And when given the opportunity to dump the fantasy land of wins and losses to become a news anchor at KCBS-TV Channel 2, Lampley didn’t hesitate.

But after KCBS dumped him early this year, Lampley dived back into sports with a vengeance, having “outgrown,” he said, the need to prove anything to anyone. He now has sports jobs at NBC, HBO and KMPC-AM (710) that together pay him about $1.3 million a year.

“It’s true I always wanted to err more toward Howard Cosell than the host of play-by-play men who would rather slam their hand in a car door than have to deal with a serious issue,” said Lampley, who hosts a sports talk show on KMPC weekdays from 6 to 10 a.m.

“But to a certain degree, having spent four years as a newscaster has given me more freedom to go ahead and mine the vicarious thrill-fantasy-world value of sport and participate in people’s desire to feel that part of it and to escape. I feel looser now as a sportscaster, more spontaneous, and I’m not nearly as self-conscious about demonstrating my own personal relationship with serious content.”

Lampley, 43, hadn’t been hankering to leave news for sports. But for the second time in his career, which began in 1974 when ABC hired him away from graduate school at the University of North Carolina as a college football reporter, his plans and ambitions simply went awry.

He was anchoring the news at Channel 2 with his wife, Bree Walker, when the management team that believed he could make the transition from sports to news was replaced by a team that balked at the idea, he said.

Stepping down wasn’t so bad. Performing as a local news anchor was disappointing in many ways, he found.

“It’s an extremely intense occupation in the sense that you are constantly treated like a guinea pig,” Lampley said. “You’re the subject of daily research of all kinds--people grabbing people in shopping centers and pulling them over and showing them your picture and saying, ‘Do you like him? What don’t you like?’ And, let’s face it, after a while sitting in front of a camera--where the most important thing is cosmetics and presentation, and you’re reading someone else’s words off the prompter--it can get to be a grinding routine.

“And then, what’s really perverse about it is that, after a while, you recognize that the time you have the most fun is when something terrible happens. The only time you get a chance to go on the air and deal extemporaneously with information and use what I call real broadcasting talents is when dozens of people have died in a plane crash or the entire community is threatened by an earthquake or a guy with a gun is holding a school yard hostage.”

But worse than the guilt over his response to public disasters was coping with his private life being played out in a very public way. Lampley and Walker had been married to other people when they fell in love at KCBS, eventually marrying in 1990. But rumors began to fly about relationship problems, which Lampley attributed to jealousy and scheming among colleagues who wanted their jobs. There were reports that the couple had split, that Lampley was seeing other women, that Walker had tried to run him down with her car in the KCBS parking lot.

“It just isn’t true,” Lampley said. He said that he and Walker have never been separated and live together in Hollywood with their infant son and Walker’s 4-year-old daughter from a previous marriage.

“She never tried to run me down in the parking lot with a car. I’ve never gone out publicly with other women here in town. Some of the stuff I read and heard was just ludicrous. But it was this uncontrollable rat’s nest that went on day after day. More than once, Bree and I would be driving to work together and we would turn on the radio and hear that we were separated. It was crazy.”

In a separate interview, Walker also denied the rumors and said that she suspected either ambitious colleagues or personnel at competing stations as their source.

“I have always ignored professional jealousies in the past, but this time I left myself wide open to them because I happened to fall in love with my co-anchor,” she said. “Jim would try to get me to stay calm about it by reminding me that we asked for it. But it still hurt.”

After being removed as anchor, Lampley went to France to cover the Winter Olympics for KCBS. It was there that NBC approached him about a network sports job that would include hosting the late-night show during the Barcelona Summer Games. He jumped at the chance and now does football and golf telecasts for NBC on weekends. His HBO gig, which he has done since 1988, requires him to work Wimbledon and major boxing matches, such as the Nov. 13 bout between Evander Holyfield and Riddick Bowe.

Meanwhile, KMPC, which needed a big name to help it launch a new all-sports format, gave Lampley about $800,000 over two years to host an afternoon talk show. When longtime KMPC morning deejay Robert W. Morgan left, Lampley moved to the 6-10 a.m. spot in August (where, thus far, his ratings trail those of rival sports-talk station XTRA-AM (690) in the demographics of men 25-54).

The radio show, Lampley said, is both a serious delivery of the sports talk format and a spoof of it at the same time. He interviews second basemen and outside linebackers, but he also has talked to a minor-league groundskeeper who had to cope with an infestation of worms in the field.

Every week, Lampley dutifully chats with Chuck Knox, the no-nonsense and humorless head coach of the Los Angeles Rams, and then juxtaposes it with an interview of Monte Pudge Larribee, the fictional coach of the Sara Lee Poly Unsaturated Tech Homicidal Pyromaniacs.

“First and foremost, we try to hit all the main stories, the breaking stories, if someone gets fired or, God forbid, someone dies, but we also try to get at the wacky side a little bit,” said Todd Fritz, Lampley’s 23-year-old producer, who arrives at 3:30 a.m. each weekday to scrounge up interview subjects from all over the country. “It is the morning show, and any radio morning show needs to have a little bit of humor.”

Besides, Lampley notes, KMPC’s format notwithstanding, the idea that games are something to be taken seriously 24 hours a day “is a little bit absurd on its face, so you have to poke a little fun at yourself and at the people who call in.”