It’s Been Quite a Run for Tompkins

When you ask sportscaster Barry Tompkins about his career, the question isn’t: “What sports have you announced?” It’s: “What sports haven’t you announced?”

He’ll be working his seventh Los Angeles Marathon for Channel 13 on Sunday, co-anchoring the five hours of coverage.

He did boxing, Wimbledon tennis, figure skating and gymnastics for HBO from 1979-88. He currently does basketball for ESPN and Prime Sports, including some recent UCLA games. He has done Stanford football on radio the last three seasons, and at one time he did Cal football and basketball on radio. He has worked for NBC, he ventured into baseball in 1993, doing 50 San Francisco Giant games on radio, and he has been a fill-in for Roy Firestone on “Up Close.”

He’s also a top candidate to do play-by-play on Liberty sports’ Pacific 10 Conference football and basketball packages that will be carried by Prime Sports next season.

Tompkins’ career began in 1965 at radio station KCBS in San Francisco, his hometown.

The presumption is that he had pretty good credentials coming out of college--Syracuse, maybe? Or Cal? Stanford?

Nope. He didn’t go to college.

“I used to pretend that I did,” he said. “I’d name a school as far away as possible, hoping no one would check it out. If I was on the West Coast, I’d say NYU. If I was on the East Coast, I’d say Cal.”

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After graduating from San Francisco’s Washington High, Tompkins tried to become a rock star. He and his buddies formed a group called the Ambers, which included Richard Mathis, brother of Johnny.

“We weren’t very good, to be honest about it,” Tompkins said.

He picked up odd jobs where he could, such as selling seat cushions at Candlestick Park, and wound up working at an advertising agency that had KCBS as a client, where he met Don Klein, then the station’s sports director.

Klein hired Tompkins to do some writing for the station, and after plenty of tutoring and using him as a producer on Stanford football broadcasts, Klein had him doing some on-air reporting.

After two years of that, Tompkins auditioned for a sportscasting job at KPIX-TV, Channel 5, the Bay Area’s CBS station, and was hired.

“I’d never been inside a television station before I did that audition,” Tompkins said.

Tompkins, 54, lives in the Bay Area with his wife, San Francisco Chronicle sports columnist Joan Ryan, and their 4-year-old son. He conducts a sportscasting camp in the area each summer.

He candidly tells prospective sportscasters how he got started, sans college.

“I tell them there’s no way they could do it today the way I did it back then,” he said.

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Channel 13’s marathon day Sunday begins at 8 a.m. with a pre-race show. At 8:30 will be a special 3 1/2-minute segment, touted by producer Frank Belmont, that will serve as the opening for the race coverage.

Belmont said the piece looks back at the previous nine L.A. Marathons and some of news events that surrounded them. Channel 13 has televised the L.A. Marathon since its inception in 1986.

Belmont, who is working his fourth L.A. Marathon, said broadcast officials for the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, impressed with the job Channel 13 has done, have talked to him about producing the Games’ world-feed marathon coverage.

“That bodes well for our entire crew,” Belmont said.

The on-air crew again this year includes Tompkins and Larry Rawson as co-anchors, plus Katherine Switzer, Channel 13 sportscaster Tony Hernandez and most of the station’s news staffers, and KIIS radio sportscaster Vic (the Brick) Jacobs, who used to work for Channel 13.

TV-Radio Notes

This may be hard to believe, but boxing might have hit a new low last Saturday night. Although the Nigel Benn-Gerald McClellan fight in London was action-packed, it exemplified everything that is wrong with boxing. McClellan, in as badly officiated a fight as there could be, took numerous illegal rabbit punches from Benn and was accidentally head-butted in the ninth round. In the 10th, he went down on one knee and was counted out, even though he appeared to be winning the fight. McClellan then walked to his corner, slumped down and lost consciousness.

As ringside doctors worked to save McClellan’s life, giving him drugs intravenously and oxygen, Showtime commentator Ferdie Pacheco made a fool of himself. With McClellan lingering near death, Pacheco, on the other side of the ring, interviewed Benn and tried to play matchmaker by setting the stage for a Benn-Roy Jones fight, to be televised by Showtime, of course. Then Pacheco, who bills himself as “the Fight Doctor,” began speculating what might have happened to the fallen McClellan. “Maybe he’s got a heart problem--he quit with his heart,” Pacheco said at one point. Pacheco is the one who should have quit--quit talking. At least until the seriousness of McClellan’s condition could be determined.

Joe McDonnell and Doug Krikorian have done some good things and had an impressive list of guests on their talk show during their first week on KMAX (107.1, right at the end of the FM dial). But detracting from that was McDonnell’s insistence on trashing his competitors at XTRA. It was unprofessional. Said McDonnell, dubbed “the Big Nasty” by Krikorian: “When I was (out of a broadcast job), they took some shots at me. I had to get back at them. It was retribution, revenge. But it’s over.” Let’s hope so.

“Ringside With Johnny Ortiz” makes its KMAX debut today at 3 during the “McDonnell Douglas Show.” . . . Mike Willman and Kurt Hoover have taken their “Thoroughbred Los Angeles” show from KIEV to KMAX. It will be heard Sundays, 9-10 a.m. Willman recently won two Eclipse Award honorable mentions. . . . Hoover will be part of Channel 56’s live coverage of the San Rafael Stakes Saturday, joining Trevor Denman and Bill Seward. . . . CBS has hired former USC coach George Raveling to work as a commentator on at least two NCAA tournament games. . . . Olympic filmmaker Bud Greenspan will receive the fourth Directors Guild of America Sports Award for outstanding lifetime achievements March 11.