Jim O’Donnell: Greg Gumbel’s greatest feat might have been surviving Chicago TV

WHEN GREG GUMBEL DIED AT AGE 78 two days after Christmas, the national tributes rightfully cascaded.

His broadcasting bona fides was impressive if not downright historic. It was also as steeped in Chicago as Buddy Guy and Blues Monday at the old Checkerboard Lounge on East 43rd.

He called Super Bowls (XXXV in 2000 and XXXVIII in 2004), served as prime-time host of Olympics and achieved renewable annual fame as a key anchor of CBS Sports coverage of the NCAA men's basketball tournament.

GUMBEL MIGHT NEVER HAVE GENERATED the full-frontal electricity of center-seat Bob Costas or Brent Musburger. But few could match the length and recurring big-time profile of his career.

He achieved critical network ascent in 1990. That was when Musburger and CBS stumbled into a stunning divorce. Gumbel was perfectly positioned to help pick up the pieces for powerful sports division president Neal Pilson.

By that time, Gumbel was 17 years into his 51-year shimmy up the sportscasting vertical. The last 34 were comparatively easy before he his cancer diagnosis became known in 2023.

THE FIRST SEGMENT WAS the hardest part. He never had to navigate as adroitly as he did during a fragile seven-year apprenticeship at Our Town's very own WMAQ-Channel 5 (1973-80).

His family background hinted at the resourcefulness that was to come:

His parents were Louisiana natives who arrived in Chicago during the third wave of The Great Migration. Father Richard Gumbel worked for both the U.S. Postal Service and at a South Side delicatessen. But he kept his eye on bigger prizes.

So he supplemented his bread gigs with political work. He began as a precinct captain in the Fourth Ward, a complex, changing mix that ranged economically from Hyde Park and Kenwood on down to some of the city's poorer quarters.

MR. GUMBEL HITCHED HIS POLITICAL WAGON to the rising star of Claude Holman. When Richard J. Daley was making his first run for mayor of Chicago in 1955, he quite shrewdly read the new Black majority in the Fourth Ward and slated Holman for alderman.

Holman won. Richard Gumbel had backed a winner. By 1964, he was a magistrate in Cook County circuit court and in 1971 was made an associate judge in the probate division.

(Judge Gumbel, 52, died suddenly en route to chambers one year later.)

BUT HIS TWO SONS — Greg and younger brother Bryant — benefited from their father's ambitions. Both were admitted to the gabled De La Salle Institute, an imposing Catholic high school on the eastern edge of Bridgeport.

De La Salle had long been a launching ground for so many of the area's lace-curtain Irish, including Daley and later his sons. Black students in the hallways were a very new and rare phenomenon during the JFK-LBJ years.

AFTER GRADUATION IN 1963, Greg Gumbel attended Loras College, a respected Catholic institution in Dubuque, Iowa. Any vision of a career in broadcasting was far from the frame.

Brother Bryant got first run on that in Los Angeles at KNBC-TV. In 1973, he tipped his brother about a weekend opening in sports at Chicago's Channel 5.

Armed primarily with a salesman's confidence and natural political instincts, Gumbel went in for a cold audition and was hired.

THE SHOP HE WALKED INTO in the autumn of 1973 was upstreaming. WLS-Channel 7 — with its classic “happy talk” foursome of Fahey Flynn, John Drury, John Coleman and sportsman Bill Frink — was an unquestioned number one in the market.

WBBM-Channel 2 had repatriated Bill Kurtis from a stretch in Los Angeles and was trying to stitch together a winner. It would succeed before the decade was out with the pairing of Kurtis and Walter Jacobson on top.

Channel 5 still had “The Big Tuna” Floyd Kalber — but approaching the end of his first great run — with young Johnny Morris as No. 1 man in sports (and the extraordinarily talented Jeannie Morris never far away).

“I can remember Greg coming in but I don't remember much beyond that,” Morris told The Daily Herald this week. “There was no fanfare about his arrival. He seemed eager to learn the business.”

GUMBEL'S LEARNING CURVE was uneven. He was weekend sports anchor along with reporting assignments in the field three weekdays. He even called play-by-play on a series of random prep basketball games that WMAQ aired on Saturday afternoons.

(One included fiery redhead Terry Keehan, Tony Thompson and Steve Antrim's St. Viator vs. Ridgewood. Father Terry Keehan is now the pastor of Holy Family Parish in Inverness.)

The Morrises threw a pipe dream into the works in 1974 when they announced they were taking their four kids to Europe for a year's sabbatical. The colorful breakaway would be chronicled in Jeannie Morris's second book, “Adventures in the Blue Beast” (1975).

GUMBEL WAS NEVER A CANDIDATE to bookmark for Morris. First in was a footnote named John O'Reilly. Next came 30-year-old Tim Weigel, then a Chicago Daily News sports writer who was doubling with sports reports on sister station WMAQ-AM (670).

Shortly after their extended European vacation ended, the Morrises let it be known they were moving to Channel 2. A management change at Channel 5 led to Weigel's departure for Channel 7, where the “happy talk” needed freshening.

GUMBEL WAS DEMOTED to field-reporting duties only. An “Easterner” — thank you Gary Deeb — named Al Meltzer was brought in for a failed run as lead sports guy.

So Channel 7 was reloading at the top. Channel 2 was in a well-plotted ascent. And Channel 5 was adrift with Gumbel a player closer to the bench than the starting lineup.

He was finally anointed No. 1 in 1979 after Meltzer was cut. But it was a tepid decision at best. Because of his resourcefulness, likability and carefully managed reputation as “a team player,” Gumbel somehow made it through.

BY 1980, IT BECAME KNOWN that Channel 5 management was casting a net for a more enduring answer in Sports. In January 1981, that answer — who would prove to be the biggest question mark of all — became Chet Coppock, in industry projection a “maturing” 32-year-old from Northfield via Indianapolis TV.

Gumbel was allowed to make a graceful departure. His first stop was the nascent ESPN. That triggered a steady run of moving up which crescendoed in 1988 with his hiring at CBS.

TWO YEARS LATER, when the Musburger-CBS breakup became public knowledge during the 1990 men's Final Four, Greg Gumbel was at a golden juncture that seemed an extreme improbability a decade before.

From there, through runs at CBS to NBC (1994-98) and back to CBS, the determined lad never really fumbled.

FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF a voice in the sports-and-media column crowd. Gumbel returned phone calls, was unfailingly affable and was about as edgy as one of the lions outside of Chicago's Art Institute.

But he was a survivor and a deceptive battler and in the end, he won.

Once Greg Gumbel waded through the startup tumult of the 1970s at WMAQ-Channel 5, his Blues Mondays were undoubtedly few.

Jim O'Donnell's Sports and Media column appears each week on Sunday and Wednesday. Reach him at jimodonnelldh@yahoo.com. All communications may be considered for publication.