SALT LAKE CITY — Unless maybe it’s talking about how close they used to cut it and still make their airline flights — a vanishing art form in the post 9-11 days — the war stories veteran sportscasters most love to talk about are the precarious places from which they’ve broadcast sporting events.
Craig Bolerjack, the longtime Jazz announcer, remembers his first gig doing play-by-play for high school football games in Kansas almost 40 years ago, perched in a 5-foot-wide crow’s nest atop a swaying 30-foot telephone pole; he remembers the 32 days he spent in Norway covering the Lillehammer Olympics back when he was the KSL sports anchor, doing his daily live reports in 18-below weather — at 3 in the morning; he remembers when the Rodney King riots didn’t let the Jazz go on the court, or him on the air, for five days as they all stayed sequestered in an L.A. hotel.
But he can’t remember anything quite as strange as what he’s doing in the summer of 2020.
For one thing, the NBA shouldn’t be playing basketball in August. For another, he shouldn’t be calling the action 2,200 miles from courtside.
“Crazy, bizarre, most unbelievable undertaking I’ve ever been involved in,” says a man renowned for never being at a loss for words.
Don’t get him wrong. He’s not complaining. He was there four months ago, on March 11 in Oklahoma City, when Rudy Gobert and Donovan Mitchell tested positive for the coronavirus, shutting down that night’s game with the Thunder, the NBA season in general, and launching a domino effect that soon shut down most of the free world.
Like the rest of us, he wasn’t sure if the season would be able to resume at all.
But here we are, four months later, and the NBA has created an alternate universe in Orlando, Florida, recreating what Stephen King did in “Under the Dome,” only this isn’t fiction, this is reality, allowing the Jazz and 21 other playoff contenders to reside in a bubble and pick up more or less where they left off.
Although without any fans in the stands, or local play-by-play announcers sitting courtside.
This is how Bolerjack used to do play-by-play:
Arrive at the arena, park in his assigned space, enjoy a bite to eat in the press room, talk to media, scouts, analysts, do the pregame interview with Jazz coach Quin Snyder, watch the “house that Larry built” fill up with fans, soak up their energy, sit down next to his color analyst, put on his headset, call the game unfolding right there in front of him on the court.
This is how he does it now:
Arrive at the arena, park anywhere he wants in an empty lot, get his temperature taken at the door by a face scanner that makes sure it’s normal, make his way up to the third level, sit 20 feet away from his analyst, put on his headset, call the game from the Jumbotron as the Jazz play in an empty arena two time zones away.
Welcome to social distancing play-by-play.
The only other people in Vivint Arena are radio broadcasters David Locke and Ron Boone, Bolerjack’s analyst Thurl “Big T” Bailey (his other analyst, Matt Harpring, chimes in from his home in Atlanta), his stat guy, Tyson Ewing; sideline reporter Kristen Kenney and pre- and post-game host Alema Harrington — all in different corners of the building. Two producer-directors, Travis Henderson and Jeremy Brunner, are in a truck in the loading dock connecting with the Jazz’s vice president of broadcasting, Jeremy Castro, and the NBA people in Orlando, “making it all happen.”
“There’s eight to 10 people in a 19,000 seat arena, all spread out,” says Bolerjack. “It’s the most bizarre feeling. That building almost yells at me sometimes, ‘Please bring them back!’”
When the game is over, “I put my stuff away, pack up my microphone, pick up my bag and leave. I look around to say ‘thank-you,’ but there’s nobody to say thank-you to.”
Bolerjack does see a bright spot in the downside.
“The NBA has been very innovative through all this,” he says. “They have installed 50 some-odd microphones underneath the playing floor and they also have a remote controlled camera, the rail camera, that lets you kinda run alongside the players. It’s a beautiful invention. I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of these things are brought into the broadcasts from here on out because they’ve been so inventive.”
Still, after 39 years in the business of announcing sporting events, he can’t wait for a return to normalcy — to be able to describe the scene for his viewers as if he’s right on top of the action because he is right on top of the action.
There was one time, back in Kansas when he was starting out, that he covered a football game from a press box built on top of a little wooden concession stand.
“There was a huge hole in the roof and we could look right down into the snack shack,” remembers Bolerjack. “They’d shout up and ask, ‘Hey, do you want a Coke or a hot dog?’ During a break they’d hand it up to us. We got a Coke and a hot dog, but we always wondered if the roof was going to cave in.”
Ah. The good old days.
