Bill Weir gets his game face on for TV’s big leagues
He has covered the London bombings and Paris riots for ABC News, reported on globalization from China and India.
Now Bill Weir is poised for an even greater role on ABC’s “Good Morning America” as it takes a renewed run at NBC’s perennial breakfast leader “Today” in the post-Katie Couric era.
Not bad for a guy hired almost 11 years ago from Green Bay, Wis., to be a third-string sportscaster for Chicago’s WGN-TV Channel 9.
“I am more aware than anyone of my unconventional career path to this chair now,” said Weir, 38, co-host of the weekend edition of “GMA,” from New York. “There are second acts in American lives, despite what you’ve heard.”
Charles Gibson, installed as anchor of “World News Tonight,” is set to leave behind “GMA” co-hosts Diane Sawyer and Robin Roberts at the end of this month. So Weir has been getting plenty of airtime on the weekday program and is going to get even more, according to both Gibson and ABC News President David Westin.
Gibson noted “one of the reasons for the development of weekend ‘GMA’ [was] to use it as a laboratory for talent,” specifically citing Weir.
Westin added that his division’s top revenue producer would be looking for ways to support Sawyer and Roberts this summer because “you cannot take Charlie Gibson away from a program without really losing something.” And this summer is critical with Couric out and successor Meredith Vieira not joining NBC until September.
“I don’t have any empirical evidence that there are executives who sit in rooms like Patton with a stick pushing around miniature anchors on a board,” Weir said. “That’s probably not how it works. But both shows, whether it’s ‘World News Tonight’ or ‘GMA,’ are the source of amazing amounts of revenue, so no decision is made in haste.”
In three years at WGN, Weir parlayed his sharp instincts and quick wit into an anchor gig on the station’s popular morning show. He left in 1998 for a sportscasting gig at Los Angeles’ KABC-TV Channel 7, lured mostly by the promise of developing other TV projects. It didn’t pan out.
“I went to L.A. with grand ambitions,” he said. “What an ice bath of reality.”
Even more bracing were the Sept. 11 attacks. Here was the transcendent news story of a generation, and sportscaster Weir got benched by KABC.
“That stung a little bit and it made me resentful of the local news paradigm,” Weir said. “So I was anxious to get out of that.... I hated being pigeonholed that way.”
When his contract ran out, he flirted with scripted projects. Then out of the blue, ABC News, which had quietly kept track of him since his WGN days, called. Soon he found himself in Diane Sawyer’s home, being pitched on the merits of the morning shift at ABC.
“She said, ‘Look, around here you can’t help but get smarter every day,’ and it was a very seductive idea,” he said. “She was absolutely right.... You’re backstage with U2 one week and live on an oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico the next.” Then there was that memorable food segment that turned into a food fight.
“There’s that moment of truth few people ever have to face: Do I actually spray Diane Sawyer with a can of whipped cream,” Weir said. “Me and Mike [Nichols, Sawyer’s husband] are probably the only two people who have experienced that.” For the record, Weir went for it and was relieved to find that he was still employed the next day.
“For me there were muscles that I hadn’t used in a few years since I anchored the WGN show and I found it exhilarating,” Weir said. “I suppose the biggest hitch is my own neuroses about people feeling I’m unworthy to do these great stories.”
The third-string sports guy is on the varsity team now, and he might wind up as the starting quarterback before he’s done.