At the Ancient Olympics in 396 BCE, the ceremonies commenced with a musical competition. The cornets competed for the prize of being chosen the best heralders, and thus entitled to signal events, such as leading the processions of the best athletes and the best coaches into and out of the games. Similarly, in so many ways during the summer and early fall of 1972, many came to Germany to compete as the best announcer and storyteller. Yet one clarion voice -- and character -- stood out.

The 50th anniversary of the Munich Games -- including, horribly, the terrorist massacre of 11 Israeli team members -- is less than five months away. Regrettably today, because of those colleagues since deceased, I find myself among a dwindling and rarer crowd of those who were actually a living part of both those events. Yet, conversely, the Games of the XX Olympiad also meant a first of many opportunities to meet and work with some of the best sports-to-news-to-sports journalists -- while also being just good, decent people -- the world has ever known.

“Sports” Personalities

These include ABC Sports characters and personalities like the late Roone Arledge. Arledge was the president of ABC Sports, whose leadership inside that Olympiapark broadcast center known as Barnathan’s Bungalow, lead five years later to his concurrent appointment by parent ABC Network as the broadcaster’s news president, as well. Another was John Wilcox, who, to this day, I am proud to say is still a close friend and one I reach out to fairly regularly for advice. John was a multi-decade ABC producer and one of the directors of ABC Sports' films unit that third quarter of 1972, using his exploits there to catapult up the executive ladder, at one point becoming Roone’s executive assistant. Yet another was one of the first people to qualify for the moniker I learned from my German-born father, Willy Schaeffler, that of a “mensch,” this one in the form of ABC’s Munich operations planning head, the late and beloved Marvin Bader. Plus, for her work ethic, due diligence, wisdom, and kindness, I became one of thousands who met and respected her from that point on. She was Antoinette “Toni” Brown, the manager for ABC Sports' films unit in Munich. These were my all-time favorites.

Nonetheless, two people stood out for me even above those four. That is because those two had more reasons to not focus on me and instead stay laser-focused on themselves and their sole duties. Yet, both still focused on me. One was the late Peter Jennings, the then head of Middle East reporting for ABC News. Jennings was instead “borrowed” by Arledge to serve for sports in Bavaria, traveling that central European region with a film crew to complete ABC’s iconic “Up Close and Personal” (UC & P) vignettes. I worked for Jennings in Munich for 5-6 weeks as a “production assistant,” which meant I did everything from order beers, sandwiches, and coffee for the crew, to actually direct a film segment in the Munich town center, and later described and arranged footage together with the film editors back in “The Bungalow,” as each piece got rushed to air. I had the good fortune to be able to tell some of that remarkable story of working with Jennings in these columns almost 10 years ago, titled "Peter Jennings’ First Olympics" and "Olympics, Munich '72, Jennings: Post-Script # 1"

McKay the Man

The other iconic personage who excelled because of who -- in his heart -- he was, and the way he displayed his amazing character, was the late James McManus, also known by his stage name Jim McKay. Not long after I first accidentally helped him in the main ABC Munich studio in August and September 1972, he coined a nickname for me, “Shamus,” which matched his Irish roots, but was actually quite a Leprechaun’s leap away from my combined English and German DNA. My father had a saying about someone who “had time for the little people,” and I will always admire Jim’s skill in this area, which most around him were often not very good at. Why, until now, I have not written about Jim McKay and my admiration for him as both a professional and a human being, I do not know. Yet, as the five-decade anniversary of that convergence arrives in the next several months, I know now that if I was ever going to write this tribute, this is the time. And I got some help…

McKay Junior, Mary

In the late summer of 1972, Jim and Margaret McManus’ daughter, known by her married name today as Mary McManus-Guba, was a 19-year-old soon-to-be college sophomore in New York State. She already had a solid friendship with ABC Sports announcer Frank Gifford’s daughter, Vicki, and together they reveled in the relative freedom to move around what the Germans called the Olympiagelande for all the time up until the late, late night of Tuesday, September 5. That even meant near “walk-through” access to the athletes’ Olympic Village, just to the east of Barnathan’s Bungalow… as long as they wore one of the team jackets they were lent by some energetic young members of the Canadian Olympic swim team. 

Reflecting ever-so-fondly on her late dad, she gives great credit for his successes to her late mom, Margaret McManus, who was ever-so-strongly supportive of and tuned into her husband, for 60 years of marriage. “She was his greatest cheerleader. Together, they practiced a humbleness, a humility and a groundedness, that kept them from getting into that stratosphere of conceit,” said Mary. 

Moving to Jim McKay’s on-air performance that day, Mary concluded, “He was there to tell, not be, the story, unlike too many announcers today. He was especially reflective of the thought that he might actually be the one to tell the Berger Family, in Shaker Heights, Ohio, that their son, David, was not coming home.” "He once told me," she explained of her dad, "'I thought all day that day, How might I tell these parents their son is dead?'" 

Taking that one step further into her own experience that day, Mary remembers vividly watching in the early evening hours of what some call the “Hostage Day,” the departure of the two helicopters just above her head to the south turning west toward the military airport 10 or so miles away in Furstenfeldbruck. “Today you couldn’t get within a mile of a spot like that, because of security, but I was at the Village Gate, right there with hundreds of others. It still haunts me: I could see their faces, prisoners in those helicopters! They were right there! We all felt so helpless!” 

"The Germans tried so hard to offer a different Olympics, to erase the stain of 1936 and Nazi Berlin. They didn’t want a military presence, instead we were enveloped by an upbeat, celebratory, spirit of a safe, welcome, hospitality, and the Hofbräuhaus," she said. "It was a really good time, until it wasn’t. With Munich, security globally, but especially the Olympics, became a whole new game. I especially remember how serious and focused the ABC Sports team instantly became. How hyper-focused."

Summarizing the dual topics of her dad's character and how he best displayed them that Tuesday, September 5, 1972, Mary gathered these words: "He didn’t have to be, but he still was: James McManus really was a genuinely good man. He studied his subjects and knew his audiences. And he treated both with great compassion. The fact that people still seem interested in dad at all is a tribute to him and all those qualities."

McKay Junior, Sean

Sean McManus, Mary’s younger brother, was also interviewed for this article. He was a 17-year-old joining his family in Europe when they accompanied their father to his job as the lead announcer for, first, swimming, then track and field, during those Munich 1972 Games in August and September. Today, Sean is 67, chairman of the sports division at CBS, and certainly still deeply involved in rights and other pivotal business affairs for the network. From more than one recent interview, Sean poignantly reminded me of his father’s overall gravitas. 

“As we drove back in the car so late that night, after the tragedy, dad’s thoughts were on the effect the killings would have, not on him or his career, rather on the good that the Olympics might always achieve. The Olympics of Germany’s revival was now the Olympics of the massacre,” Sean said.

“So much of what that day became was because of Roone Arledge,” Sean said. “Roone knew in his gut, that because of dad’s background in news at CBS, his storytelling, and his journalism, his calmness and relatability, that he would be the best in-studio anchor that day.” And, that would be instead of the impressive talents of both ABC Sports’ assigned studio announcer, Chris Schenkel, and ABC News’ Middle East Correspondent, Peter Jennings. Yet, at the break of the news, Arledge instinctively selected his new live, on-air talent for the next 16 hours, before the latter even got out of the sauna at the Sheraton Hotel that morning, around 8 a.m. local time. Featuring a rare all-day trip with Margaret to nearby Salzburg, Austria, September 5 was to be Jim McKay’s one “vacation” day of the entire Munich Olympics.

"In a few hours, we went from the wins and losses of the various teams, to life and death, and from captivating sports to tragically important news, almost miraculously," Sean continued. "Dad got progressively more emotionally and physically drained, and yet he got better in the last hour of his work that day and night, than he was in the first."

When McKay arrived back at his hotel room at 4 a.m. Munich time September 6, Margaret woke and mentioned her relief that the hostages had survived. Jim’s lament, however, was enhanced, because he now had to tell his wife that the German TV she watched when she went to sleep had not yet revealed: that all the hostages were dead. As McKay had had to infamously fashion a couple of hours before for a late-night U.S TV audience of many scores of millions -- and which Margaret could not witness at her hotel in Bavaria -- in his inimical wording laced with such stunning grace, he again paraphrased, “They’re all gone.” It was at that point, late night on Wednesday 19 hours after leaving the Sheraton Tuesday morning, that McKay finally had a chance to absorb the fact that he was still wearing his damp swimsuit from the morning before in the pool.

The Games’ Impact

Back at Barnathan’s Bungalow Wednesday daytime, with 3-4 hours of sleep, McKay pulled a telegram envelope from his Bungalow letter box. Inside was a congratulatory message from his own news idol, CBS News’ Walter Cronkite.

Jim and Margaret McManus waited months before they were able to witness the on-air telecasts of the Munich Games, and specifically September 5. Moreover, it took the many, many bags of mail McKay received after those competitions, to start to develop a decent understanding of the impact his work had on the American public, on his own career, and on ABC. McKay, personally, won two TV Emmy Awards for 1972, one for sports announcing and one for news. And because of their foundational work in Munich, Arledge a half decade later added head of ABC News to his resume. Plus, as Arledge himself later explained decades later during a tribute to him at Central Park’s Tavern On The Green, the risk taken by bidding a then-astronomical $25 million for the Munich TV rights, backed by the actual performance of the producers and announcers and other talent in Munich, had finally put ABC on the map as a telecaster of national status. ABC’s founder Leonard Goldenson would perhaps one day compete admirably with his counterparts, William Paley and the CBS he founded, as well as the NBC David Sarnoff created.

“Whenever someone came up to him at an airport or a sports event, they would always say, ‘I’ll never forget you at Munich.’ Not another Olympics or the Indy 500. Munich had such an incredible impact,” Sean said.

ABC Sports in Munich’s Producers and Directors

Five key production people are alive today and made time to speak with me about our idol McKay. He is one of those rare people who very few in life speak ill of, so the remainder of this project remained a joy. Those producers and directors are Jim Jennett, Jim Spence, Doug Wilson, Dennis Lewin, and Howard Katz.

Jim Jennett was inside the Bungalow for much of September 5, 1972, serving as sports’ control room associate director. His job was to be a “traffic cop,” as he words it, coordinating all the video and live elements, and the timing -- especially with the main studio at ABC HQ in New York City -- for the two weeks’ worth of Olympic telecasts. The rather tall -- even by today’s standards -- 1966 graduate of University of Missouri’s school of journalism, remembers Munich much for his work directly with Arledge. Subtly merging this article’s subject matter with himself and Arledge in the earliest morning of September 5, 1972, upon word of the terrorist attack, Jennett said, “When the story broke, Roone knew he needed someone with real chops, someone with the most heart, and he had to step on some toes to get there.” Of course, Arledge chose McKay. “What a brilliant and gutsy thing to do,” said Jennett.  

Jennett’s memory of the day of the Munich Massacre was seeing his colleagues lift and place a huge studio live telecast camera on top of the 15-foot-high berm just east of Barnathan’s Bungalow. It faced the Israeli delegation’s rooms that had been attacked on Connally Strasse. He said, “That was the first time I realized the true significance of what was happening. Before that, it was just ‘get to the studio on time and coordinate the feeds and timings.’”

Of McKay’s character, Jennett most remembers McKay’s “love of what he was doing…he so admired the sports, the athletes, and just the storytelling of it all.” Not surprisingly, when asked about what made Jim McKay’s soul click, what made him work so well as a human being, he insisted, unprompted, “Margaret was the answer. She was a spouse like none other, they were so close and perfect for each other, the way they treated one another, that affection, the admiration. Whenever you saw them together, it brought a smile to your face.”

Jim Spence, the No. 2 executive at ABC Sports for eight years, also recently shared a tale or two about Munich 1972 and the diminutive announcer (in height only) from Maryland. Approaching Barnathan's Bungalow that fateful midday after a luncheon meeting where he discussed the forthcoming Montreal Summer Games with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 1972's sports VP of program planning asked his driver to let him out at the entrance to an adjacent indoor arena. Already having learned about the terrorist attack from a very troubling phone call that morning with the aforementioned Marvin Bader, Jim Spence, Arledge's "right and left hand man" is, to this day, captured by the contrast of the fans still cheering the ongoing Games that day. Meanwhile, several hundred yards away, two Israelis had already been murdered and some of the worst of human evil was rushing forward like a badly oiled Frankensteinian timepiece. "In front of me was a friendly volleyball competition; a short walk to the east, the worst in the way of hate and terror, and a horror," Spence. The reflection was amplified when Spence reflected back: he -- accompanied by McKay and others -- had six or seven hours earlier exited the broadcast studio and control room in the dark at 6 a.m. local time, to head back to the hotel, very likely having been noticed by the terrorists themselves, as they were staging nearby to break into the Olympic athletes' village, and then to attack the Israeli delegation.

As for his views of McKay, "He was the face and voice of ABC's Wide World of Sports", Spence said. "He really did get to the substance of an event, making the competitions feel important to the audience and causing the viewer to care about the participants -- not only through his delivery and articulation, but so importantly through his writing, Spence said. "Jim McKay was just brilliant in capturing the essence and excitement of the events he covered, with the words he wrote and spoke on the air."

Being admittedly rather television-geekie, Spence concluded his admiration of the man from Baltimore, extolling his on-air ability to both listen to producers via an ear-piece, while concurrently reading from a script or printed announcement or speaking to an audience of millions while looking directly into a huge metal box that was the camera. "It was seamless, he was amazing the way he could do that," said Spence. “He had great respect for athletes -- both the stars and the unknowns. He had absolute integrity. I have often said he was the Walter Cronkite of sports television."

Doug Wilson, yet another icon of ABC Sports from the earliest to most of its later days was, in 1972, working as a 30-something producer/director, who would by most accounts eventually become one of McKay’s best friends. Wilson had started at ABC in 1958, a college graduate of Colgate University in upstate New York. He likes telling sports stories of his Garden City High School in Long Island beating Arledge’s Mepham High School in Merrick, Long Island during the 1940s-1960s. Mepham was known nationally as a wrestling powerhouse, and Arledge managed its wrestling teams.

Wilson’s fondest and strongest memory of McKay in Munich was his reliance on A.E. Houseman and the poet’s iconic poem, “To An Athlete Dying Young”, to summarize the tragedy of Munich during the nighttime funeral and tribute held by the IOC on Thursday, September 7, 1972. McKay even being familiar with the magic words was indicative of his love for knowledge, and to almost always, ahead of time, research the people, places, and event and sports he was covering.

Yet, likely my favorite was Wilson’s tale of McKay characteristically placing his first and middle fingers together by his eye and nose, which the few who really knew him meant he was really angry. The cause of his ire that day? It was his WWOS producer/director colleague, Doug Wilson, very late at night, who tried relentlessly to identify the perfect woodwind music to accompany a voice-over, making a tired and restless McKay redo the piece over and over, at which point McKay complained to Arledge, “What’s with Wilson and his damned flutes?” 

“Whether it was grand prix auto racing, barrel racing, or the Olympics, Jim McKay never took the event nor the people for granted. He was always grateful for the role he played, which is why so many people say the Olympics coverage -- the history and what it was like to be there -- will always have something missing, even today,” Wilson said as only a good friend can.

Dennis Lewin grew up in a sports-centric family in New York City, went as a 16-year-old to Michigan State University, and started as a 21-year-old production assistant for ABC’s WWOS and ABC’s other sports programming in August 1966. He arrived for ABC Sports’ Olympic coverage in Munich, six years later, as a full-fledged producer. Among his responsibilities by then was coordinating the production of WWOS and producing Monday Night Football. Lewin had a ton of both accurate and fond recollections of McKay, who was the on-air host of WWOS. “He became a great friend, I would do anything for him,” said Lewin.

In Munich 50 years ago, the 27-year-old who grew up in Queens was the ABC Sports producer for the dominant trio of water sports during the Games’ first week: swimming, diving, and water polo. That meant that even though McKay had been assigned to gymnastics, the two still had many interactions inside “The Bungalow.” On that Tuesday, those sports had ended, thus during the intensity of the day, Lewin sat in the control room next to ABC’s Games’ coordinating producer, Geoff Mason. Lewin recalls at that point his contributions were minimal. He was always there to help, but there was “not much” he could add. Others inside and outside that control room had the storytelling well in hand.

Lewin’s main memory of time with McKay, comes from Thursday, September 7, the day after the actual shootout at the Furstenfeldbruck airport. He remembers them both being so troubled by the insensitive, shallow, and inappropriate words of the then-president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), Avery Brundage, at the public “memorial” inside the main Olympic Stadium.

As for McKay, Lewin said, “Jim McKay was the best, both as a friend and a talent. I always looked forward to that production schedule with his name on the same line as mine. His humanity, knowledge of the world, history, his way of communicating. He never talked down to you. You would want him to be both your best friend, and your favorite uncle. One of a kind…” were his words as they trailed off into a mutual, respectful silence.

Howard Katz was, like me, one of the youngest among the several hundred shown in the “ABC At The 1972 Summer Olympics, Munich” photo below. Katz was the Olympic film unit’s lead production assistant coming into and during those Munich Games. His was a position I later assumed after graduating from Cal Berkeley in 1975 with an undergraduate degree in communications & public policy. I am honored to say we have stayed friends since.

McKay memories abound for the now 72-year-old former president of ABC Sports and NFL senior VP for scheduling. They start with the voice-over narrations McKay did for most of the UC & P athlete vignettes ABC Sports prepared leading up to the Munich Games. Katz helped Jim prepare, gathering research, taking notes during global filming expeditions, and other aides. Katz vividly remembers, too, being, coincidentally, in the same passenger van that fateful September 5, 1972 morning, as a last-minute passenger with a wet swimsuit on under his slacks hailed the driver. That extra rider was, of course, McKay. They were headed to the broadcast center.

As McKay was to me, so was he to Katz: “A special person who cared about people,” are his quite-ample words. “P.A.s [production assistants] were treated like dirt. Jim was kind, decent, and understanding to the P.A.s. That did a ton for morale. He was amazingly approachable. A man of conscience, decency, in a business that was all-consuming and demanding, he still managed to make his family a priority. He understood folks, what made the world tick. He understood the human spirit.”

“And then, as a professional, he could look into a camera and see millions of people, yet he saw them one at a time, you thought he was talking directly only to you and your family. He had this incredible knack to say and do the right things at the right time,” Katz said. As president of ABC Sports during the Salt Lake Winter Olympics timeframe, Katz broke all the rules of fierce internecine network rivalry by granting NBC Sports Chairman Dick Ebersol’s wish to employ McKay as “ABC Sports’ Jim McKay, Special On-Camera Contributor.” Katz sums up, “After gaining Margaret’s blessing, it was just the right thing to do.” Like me, Katz didn’t just admire McKay, he learned from him.

A final thought from Katz: “I had planned to visit the German concentration camp near Munich, Dachau, but after the tragedy, I could not. Conversely, 30 years after, when it came time to authorize and support a 'Munich 1972 Commemoration Co-Narrated by Peter Jennings and Jim McKay’ -- which was awarded an Academy of TV Arts & Sciences Emmy Award for 'Best Edited Special' -– that was the award that made me proudest! We told the best story!”

For the record, efforts were made to reach out to former ABC Sports operations or production leaders Bob Iger, Roger Goodman, and Jack Gallivan. For various reasons, each was unavailable at press time.

Summing Up McKay, Munich, and 1972…

Where was the world in 1972? For context, The Godfather was released by Paramount Pictures and popular songs included Elton John’s “Rocket Man,” Roberta Fleck’s “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” Johnny Nash’s “I Can See Clearly Now,” Bill Withers’ “Lean On Me,” and Looking Glass’s “Brandy.” President Richard Nixon visited and began opening the U.S. to China; the Committee to Re-Elect the (that same) President (CREEP) broke into the Democratic National HQ in Washington, DC; the U.S.’s Bobby Fisher defeated chess master Boris Spassky; and the Dow Jones Industrial Average first went above 1,000.

No doubt -- and always a great loss to the world -- history and legacy will forever first associate those XX Summer Olympic Games with the Israeli Massacre. I cannot help but to image the huge pool of blood beneath one of the helicopters, their terrified faces, and the dozens of grandchildren of those 11 Israelis and one German police officer who will never be.

Yet, in the end after Munich, there was some victory. The Olympics survived. Many athletes excelled there, as they always do, and their careers took off. When I try to balance, and think of the positives of what Peter Jennings said remained, “a successful experiment in human relations,” I think of those who seized the moment and showed what they were made of. Those men and women became the future foundation of the American Broadcasting Corporation, and of many more entities, included among those many CBS, NBC, ESPN and the NFL. Among the top two or three was one James McManus, AKA Jim McKay.

Indeed, in the battle among thousands or more to be that lead clarion, none will ever doubt for Munich 1972, it was McKay. As well, when it came to his own and others’ character development, toward a man of character and worth, Munich, ABC and McKay are synonymous. 

McKay and I once talked between U C & P takes and voice-overs, oddly perhaps, about William Shakespeare. Along with A.E. Houseman, the bard from Stratford-on-Avon was another one of McKay’s favorite literary heroes. We talked specifically about Hamlet, Polonius, Act 1, Scene III, and McKay pointed me to these words, which he took to heart ever so well, indeed, mostly just by sharing that balance with the others who filled the world around him.

“This Above All:/To Thine Own Self Be True/And It Must Follow/As The Night The Day/Thou Canst Not Then/Be False To Any Man!”

Nor, did I ever see, was he, Jim McKay. ■

Jimmy Schaeffler (AKA “Shamus Schaeffler”) is chairman and CSO of The Carmel Group, a west coast-based telecom consultancy founded in 1995. He can be reached at jimmy@carmelgroup.com.

A good storyteller can capture and enthrall audiences of all ages and video platforms, and in the sports arena no one does it better than Ross Greenburg.

The 61-year-old producer and executive has reinvented the sports documentary genre during his career of more than three decades by creating informative, drama-filled emotional documentaries and movies for a bevy of networks and virtually all of the major pro sports leagues and organizations.

“I’d argue, and I don’t think I would get much resistance, that Ross Greenburg is really the pre-eminent sports documentary producer active today,” said Showtime Sports executive vice president and general manager Stephen Espinoza, with whom Greenburg has collaborated on several documentary series, including the current series A Season With Florida State Football.

Greenburg redefined the sports documentary category, from his work with HBO creating the reality sports documentary franchise Hard Knocks: Training Camp With The Baltimore Ravens in 2001 to his production partnership with the National Hockey League that has iced documentaries with networks like Showtime and EPIX. His efforts have yielded him an impressive 54 Sports Emmy Awards.

During a 33-year career at HBO — he served as HBO Sports president for 11 of those years — Greenburg helped spark boxing’s resurgence on cable and pay-per-view during the 2000s and cerated the prototype for the all-access reality genre in the network’s 24/7 franchise, created to hype the 2007 Floyd Mayweather- Oscar De La Hoya mega PPV fight.

More recently, under the Ross Greenburg Productions umbrella he has produced a lineup of award-winning sports documentaries for several networks including Against the Tide (Showtime), Forgotten Four: The Integration of Pro Football (EPIX) and Jack Nicklaus: The Making of a Champion (Fox).

And the self-proclaimed sports fan and native New Yorker says the best is yet to come, as Greenburg delves into other forms of content development that will extend his reach into the emerging digital world.

Multichannel News is recognizing Greenburg, one of cable’s most successful storytellers, with its Sports Production Legacy/ Excellence Award. Greenburg recently sat down with MCN programming editor R. Thomas Umstead to discuss his extensive career and t hear his thoughts on how the sports documentary genre continues to evolve. Here’s an edited transcript of their conversation.

MCN: Growing up, did you see yourself as becoming a prolific sports producer?

Ross Greenburg: It’s funny, I was exposed to sports television in the ’70s through (ABC Sports Monday Night Football announcer) Frank Gifford. His son Kyle and I were best friends who played high school football together at [New York’s] Scarsdale High School. So we were very close and I became close to Frank, who started to engineer a way for the two of us to become runners and production assistants at ABC Sports events. You have to understand, in those days, ABC was what ESPN was for so many years — it was the dominant force — and Frank was kind enough to get us those jobs.

I even played golf once with the great [ABC Sports president] Roone Arledge, who was kind of my hero — he was the ultimate executive producer. He created, in my mind, sports television and what it stands for today. At least he molded the kind of producer I would be in terms of going for the jugular journalistically and also behind the scenes, trying to capture the emotion and the drama of sports and he did it through the mouthpieces of Jim McKay, Frank Gifford and Howard Cosell, among many others.

MCN: At the time, were you a sports fan in general?

RG: Oh, I was a huge sports fan. It was obviously in my bloodstream; my father got season tickets to the New York Jets and early on [Jets quarterback] Joe Willie [Namath] was a childhood hero and I was fortunate enough at age 3 to go to Miami for Super Bowl III. It’s a lasting experience for me. From there, I was a Muhammad Ali watcher; I was a Jim Brown fan, a Willie Mays fan. I was kind of drawn to the Olympics because of the drama and the way Roone produced it. So yes, I was a heartfelt sports fan.

And even though Mom probably wanted me to become a lawyer and go to law school, I’ll never forget my junior year at Brown — I kind of dropped the news on her that I wouldn’t be taking the LSATs and instead would be going to try to become a production assistant. At the time I thought it would be with ABC, but that didn’t work out, so I found this little cable network that only had about 90 employees and 500,000 subs — HBO — and I grew up from there.

MCN: To say the least. Entering HBO as a producer, how did you want to define that network as a producer of sports programming?

RG: It was obvious that HBO was not going to start carrying NFL football or NBA games … that was just too expensive. Even the rights back then comparatively were just too expensive for HBO. So early on I looked at the menu of what ABC Sports started to do with Howard Cosell’s magazine shows and I was very exposed to and kind of enlightened by Bud Greenspan’s work with the Olympics and Steve Sabol’s work at NFL Films.

So when I got there, NFL Films and HBO had already created Inside the NFL. Then, I started thinking to myself, what about this documentary world? Is there some way to take storytelling and place it within HBO and do it outstandingly well and break through that way? I mean I was still a producer and wasn’t running the department at that point, but I was having an impact. I started to generate ideas for documentaries and series and magazine shows. Those were the first Petri dishes for what became Real Sports and the documentary swing that we ran through from 1990 through when I left in 2011, when we produced some 80 projects. And then, of course, 24/7 evolved.

MCN: How has the sports production business changed from when you started to now?

RG: It’s funny — I think, at its core, a great story can generate great interest from viewers younger than the millennials all the way through 80-year-olds. Sports television has changed remarkably in terms of the distribution mechanism, the way everything is shot, technology has blossomed, you’re able to shoot [with] GoPros and put microphones in places that you wouldn’t have ever been able to back when I started in 1978. But at its core, storytelling is still the king.

MCN: You’ve never shied away from controversial topics or subjects. Has there been any project in particular where you took a more cautious approach because of the nature of the topic?

RG: Well, I’m doing a documentary right now on [former NFL player] Lawrence Phillips, which is very difficult because it’s a difficult story. He represents everything that goes wrong with a professional athlete in many ways. From his collegiate days on, he never could escape the demons of his tortured past growing up in the Los Angeles area, never really having a family. A difficult story to tell, but one thing I have always tried to do is just go for the truth. If you go for the truth, some people may not like it, but at least you know you’ve been true to the story and that you’ve told it the best you can. And that’s really, at the core, what a good journalist does … look at both sides, state both sides of a story and then attack it and let other people judge how they view it. That’s being lost on America nowadays across the board. But hopefully anything that I’m putting on the screen will never let that get lost.

MCN: How was the transition for you from sports producer to becoming head of HBO Sports, which you ran for more than a decade?

RG: From a production standpoint, it didn’t change that much, because I still had the greats like Rick Bernstein, Dave Harmon and others who picked up the ball in production and just ran with it. And I think I had created a vision and an understanding of what the department was looking for in terms of quality and digging [into] its stories and going after journalistic pieces on Real Sports or going after journalistic, hard-hitting commentary on a boxing event. So at its core that vision never changed.

Obviously I had to adapt to running an entire 90-person department and overseeing the wonderful world of boxing. I was donning the hat of being the one to decide whether a boxing event was going to make its way on television. Obviously I didn’t really enjoy that very much as it wound down in 2011 … I got bitten by the sharks in the water at the end and was glad to be rid of that, honestly. But I still enjoyed coming up with documentary ideas, creating 24/7 as a genre, and really seeing Real Sports evolve into the kind of dynamic magazine show that it did. All of that was really heartwarming and I enjoyed the hell out of running the department for 11 years. So it was tough saying goodbye.

And then I had a whole other adjustment. All of a sudden, I was thrust out into the world and had to create Ross Greenburg Productions and start calling on a lot of companies that were my competitors and that was an adjustment, a big adjustment. But I’m proud of the way I engineered that. And it’s been a really enjoyable six years to be able to go back to my producing roots and just deliver the product.

MCN: You mentioned the boxing sharks at HBO bit you right before your departure. Was there any particular fight, promoter or anything that really pushed you over the edge?

RG: Well, I think that my tussles with [boxing promoter] Bob Arum got to the point of ridiculousness. It was very hard for me engineering the inner workings of HBO to try to survive that, then dealing with [boxing champion] Manny Pacquiao fleeing to Showtime and then coming back. I just started to lose my grip on it.

MCN: You’re currently working for a number of other networks including Showtime, EPIX and Fox. Where do you see yourself continuing to expand?

RG: I have had situations where the [United States Golf Association] called me and the product ended up on Golf Channel and then obviously onto Fox when the USGA migrated to Fox Sports. EPIX and Showtime have been wonderful partners. From the day I left [HBO], Showtime took me under their wings with Matt Blank and Steven Espinoza and have afforded me the opportunity to do two or three documentaries and counting. I have two or three more. So that has been a wonderful experience.

NBC was really gracious when I left; they afforded me the opportunity to do a lot of documentaries and some programming with my old friend Bob Costas and others.

Now I’m just looking to kind of continue with those clients, but also growing. I’m doing some non-sports product now but really still concentrating in the sports world. The NHL also has given me great opportunities to do these series that we’re doing, and now I’ll be serving as executive producer for a documentary on the 100 years of NHL hockey — the centennial celebration is in full swing.

MCN: Is there a documentary that you’re dying to do, any subject that you’re dying to work on?

RG: Well there is. I looked at what we did with Miracle and I know that there is a film to be done on the women’s soccer team — Mia Hamm, Julie Foudy, Kristine Lilly, you know, Joy Fawcett and Brandi Chastain, those five core women changed the perception of women’s sports and women in society today. They were the Title IX babies that grew up on the U.S. soccer team and in 1999 had the bold statement that we’re gonna pack every stadium for the World Cup and lo and behold, they did.

And then, in front of millions around the world, they beat China to win that World Cup and made a statement that, “We have arrived as a team and for the first time, we’re taken seriously as athletes.”

That was a movement, that wasn’t just a sports event. And it came at a time of Mia Hamm breaking through and doing Nike commercials with [Michael] Jordan, so it’s such a rich, important story. And they battled adversity because the U.S. Soccer Federation then and even now continues to battle with that team over equal pay.

MCN: Has the expansion of digital formats created a new market for sports documentary producers?

RG: Yes. I think the digital world has opened up a wonderful array of opportunities for producers. I have been talking to [Turner Broadcasting System-owned digital media company] Bleacher Report and would love to work with them. It’s exciting to see that there are so many places you can go now to tell your little stories and they don’t have to be half-hour or hour longforms. They can be five or six minutes — get the point across, make a few dollars, but more importantly, touch people. There are a lot of beautiful stories out there, you know? So I think this new digital distribution system is really going to electrify our world.