Roland Williams stands near the corner of a green room at the NFL Films headquarters in Mount Laurel, NJ.
The following will amaze you. A month before we invaded Iraq there was a former weapons inspector on television giving an interview in which he spoke in an explosive voice. He was ranting and raving that "There are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and we aren't going to find any." I thought he was crazy, but I also said to myself, this is former weapons inspector who was THERE. He's not a recently released patient from an insane asylum.JET MAGAZINE'I don't know anything, ' Roberto wails at one stage, frustrated by a particular scene.Ray Smaltz, a panelist at one of the workshops who has produced football games at FOX for 10 years, has seen the rocky transition players make into television and believes the Boot Camp will help make it smoother.And yet -- upstairs. Frears is back in the editing suite today not to work on a film of his own, but to oversee the completion of Gods, the second feature by a 31-year-old Peruvian film-maker called Josué Mendez.The Boot Camp was hosted by TV veteran James Brown of "CBS Sports," with several other well-known producers, anchors and reporters. Divided into four groups and rotated through four 45-minute sessions during Day One, the players learned how to prepare for a show, how to articulate thoughts and interpret game film for fans, study tape and breakdown plays, the basics of radio and the importance of editing plays in illustrating a viewpoint.Williams and 19 other football players, current and recently retired, took part in the NFL's first-ever Broadcast Boot Camp. During the three-day "training camp," players who want to become sports broadcasters after their playing career were exposed to extensive training in radio and television, including reporting, hosting, studio work and game analysis.The 6-foot-5 tight end comfortably dressed in a suit and tie whispers into a ballpoint pen, stammers, and then shakes his head. Williams is not learning a new play for the upcoming season, but instead, a 30-second script he wrote for a mock studio session.On Day Two of camp, the players viewed the segments they taped the previous day. Producers critiqued their tapes and provided feedback. This session wasn't easy for San Diego Chargers' Roman Oben.Granted there is tremendous noise on the Internet, meaning that there is an abundance of useless information, but in the universe there are many gems, and they are on the Internet as well. Think about what has happened in just a few short years? It wasn't so long ago, that mainstream media had a 100% liberal bias. Clearly, an objective look at ABC, NBC, and CBS would reveal their liberal orientation. From their origins to their story topics, the media always played it to the left of center. Richard Nixon would NEVER have had to resign from office if the either the Senate or the House was Republican and the media was neutral.First DownRecoveryWere it not for the fact that we have just emerged from an editing suite upstairs, where I have seen what can only be described as a master at work, I would have walked past without noticing him -- as indeed, hordes do during the course of his precious cigarette."People are talking football now 12 months a year, so I think there's a lot of opportunities in the media. It's about players taking advantage of those opportunities and making sure they're prepared when those opportunities arise," Katz stresses.The Internet is leveling the playing field. If you want to know why John Kerry lost the national election, look to the Internet. The guy was being defined by the Internet before he could define himself. I know Governor Pataki was making a joke when he said that "John Kerry has to Google himself every morning to see where he stands on the issues," but he wasn't so far off the truth in retrospect.Goodbye and Good LuckWith the growing trend of ex-football players joining the ranks of sports journalism-most recently NY Giants' Tiki Barber working as a correspondent for NBC's "Today" and receiver Keyshawn Johnson as an analyst for ESPN-the NFL sought to prepare players who want to get into this field. "It's about trends. If you look at the number of former players who are working in media, it's grown exponentially. I think this [Boot Camp] is a response to that," notes Howard Katz, the NFL Senior VP of Broadcasting & Media Operations and COO of NFL Films.Finally we all participated in a quiet revolution when Communism fell to its knees a little more than a decade ago, and went out with a WHIMPER. It didn't have to be that way. Millions could have died in Eastern Europe and in the USSR itself. Very quietly, this brutal totalitarian dictatorship that sought to enslave the planet quietly disappeared, and more remarkably, they all became capitalists. What a wild world we live in.Today, with the Internet and Cable television, the tide has certainly evened up, and maybe swung to the other side. Dan Rather of CBS broadcast a disparaging story on George Bush and the National Guard which may have been correct, but Rather knew he couldn't prove it. In an attempt to influence the election two weeks before the election, he broadcasted it anyway. The Internet blows up his 40 year career and forced his resignation. The bloggers were relentless in attacking Rather and it resulted in the disgraceful behind the scenes, to date never revealed story of the firing of Dan Rather. Without the Internet and Cable television, Dan Rather would still be representing his liberal bias on prime time television every night.He has directed six women to Best Actress Oscars, himself been nominated for Best Director twice, and has won or been nominated for a further 65 international awards. But here he is, standing on a street corner in Soho dressed in a scruffy T-shirt and trousers, puffing on a roll-up and grumbling about the UK's newly imposed smoking ban."It was a humbling experience," said Buffalo Bills' Mario Haggan. "We think it's easy; we look at the guys on TV and think they just walked into the studio and do it, but everything is under such a structure and time management that you have to prepare for and be excellent at what you do. I take my hat off to those guys; it is definitely something you have to work at.""I'm glad the NFL did it because I think a lot of these guys need it. It's very difficult just to go in cold and say, 'Hire me because I used to play,'" Smaltz says.Today, then, he is giving back. Before Mendez even started filming Gods, a strikingly shot probe into the life of Lima's idle rich and their spoilt, beautiful children, Frears was on a plane out to Peru to discuss various aspects of the script with the young director, flagging up potential beartraps he might fall into. 'Of course, he still had to make those mistakes, ' he smiles. 'You have to learn the hard way.' Back in the booth, Mendez and his editor Roberto are discovering the hard way that the editing process is about control of information; about the million tiny decisions you can make about how you feed the audience; about how you change infinitesimally what you want it to know, to see, to understand -- or indeed, not understand."I was impressed with these guys. They are so accustomed to being leaders and fearless and the intimidator and the whole nine yards that they didn't want to show their nerves, but I know they were feeling it on the inside," he says."I've been a fan of broadcasting ever since I've watched Howard Cosell," says Williams, who is making his transition to a second career after eight years in the NFL. "It's just something that I've always wanted to do, so this is a tremendous opportunity to learn about the inner workings of the best networks in the world. It's exciting, it's fun, I'm learning so much."By Melody K. Hoffman
JET MAGAZINE
Author: Melody K. Hoffman
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