Mike Tirico
speaker
1,317 appearances
6 recordings
5 series
first heard Jul 2024
last heard 16 Jul
Mike Tirico’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 2.
Appearances
Yeah, that's where we met. So we have a dogs. There are five of us in the house. I'm the fifth athlete in the house. You know, I play golf. It's not pretty. I love it. I feel like I'm this close. I'm the king of the range. I've won more titles on the range than maybe any golfer alive. And I feel really good in the short game area. And then for some stupid reason, it doesn't translate.
So I got to figure that out.
Yeah, I was. COVID, I was 10.2. And I was feeling pretty good about life. And I said, here we go. We're going. We're going to get to single digits. Life's going to be good. And that hasn't happened.
I did during COVID. I was playing every day, and I kind of knew what I was doing.
Wouldn't you find it as a release? Just get away for a little bit. Stop your mind. That's what I find.
You're right. You nailed it. I'm paranoid that one day I'm going to wake up and we'll have Katie Ledecky riding one of the horses in the Kentucky Derby. Circuits have crossed. No, no, no. Stop. Right. We have unbelievable research teams. The story like of the Olympics on TV in America, it has the research department for the Olympics.
has been kind of the training ground for a lot of executives in TV. Wow. Over like 30, 40 years. So a bunch of the people who were Olympic researchers in the 70s and 80s and 90s now run sports divisions at CBS and at NBC.
They're super smart people and they give you more than you can read. And you just got to figure out how to shorten the stack. And how to keep it organized, right? Because I'm not going to learn the rules for 30 sports and all the names of the 10,000 athletes for the Summer Olympics. That's my job. Thank you. Somebody's helping me out.
Yeah, going back to when ABC had the Olympics. And remember Wide World of Sports when it started?
Yes, it was the ski jumper falling off the side of the hill.
The guy's name is Venko Bogatai. That was his name.
Explains why he took the exit ramp to the left.
Yeah, but it was the thrill of victory, the agony of defeat. But it was up close and personal. That was their tagline for the profiles. And one of the great executives in the history of television, not just sports television, Dick Ebersole, because he was involved with Lorne Michaels with Saturday Night Live and all that stuff. Yeah.
Dick really brought – he was working with Rune at ABC as a researcher in the 70s, and he brought that sensibility and that storytelling to NBC way before I got there when NBC got the Olympics. And that has kind of defined our division since Dick was there and all the people who learned from him who are now in charge. Tell a story. Make me care about the people. Yeah.
Because now you're invested. Yeah. And you guys are storytellers in your own way, so you get it. Here's the difference now. You don't have five minutes. People aren't going to sit around for your story in five minutes. So our adjustment has become make it bite-sized, make you care about somebody, and then show me their event.
Or even the night before, hey, here is this athlete's story, and tomorrow night they go for gold. Right.
Throwing headshots out the window. Let me in. No, seriously, when I was a little kid, you asked my mom, this is what I wanted to do. I wanted to be a sportscaster from being a little kid. I'm really, I am 55 years later living my dream still every day.
I do love work. Where was that? Queens. Queens, New York. So when I grew up, I was listening to Marv Albert broadcast the Knicks and the Rangers and work at NBC.
Extensive garbage time. Marv did everything, right? He did boxing, football, the local news, the Rangers, the Knicks. And so I always thought, you know what? Do everything. Just figure out a way to become proficient at every sport that you can be invited to do. And Jim McKay, who somebody mentioned before, Jim McKay was the same thing.
And those two guys were the models for me to, hey, go figure it out. Went to college at Syracuse, interned at a TV station. They went through three weekend sportscasters in seven weeks. The GM said, I'm going to hire somebody young and cheap. I was interning there. I was young and I was cheap. Yeah. And I got a tryout.
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