Here is the result in plain text:
Even 20 years later, Joe Buck remembers the nerves before the call of Super Bowl XXXIX in Jacksonville. Buck was just 35 years old in February 2005, the youngest broadcaster ever to call the Super Bowl for the lead television rights holder. In fact, the entire Fox Sports broadcast booth that night — Buck, Troy Aikman and Cris Collinsworth — were Super Bowl broadcast rookies. Collinsworth had some experience as a Super Bowl pregame host, but this was fresh (and nerve-wracking) territory for the trio.
To quell his nerves on game day, Buck provided himself a couple of visual cues on his broadcast boards, the cheat sheets broadcasters use to list rosters, notes and stats for all of the participants. There are never many empty spaces on a broadcaster’s board, but in the top-left corner where he had written the defensive starters, Buck provided some inspiration for himself. He wrote, “F— IT.” He also added: “Relax” and “Have Fun.”
Buck, Al Michaels, Boomer Esiason and longtime NFL producer Fred Gaudelli were interviewed about their first Super Bowl experience and the magnitude of the game for broadcasters. Sunday, Tom Brady will stand alongside Kevin Burkhardt for the call of Super Bowl LIX in New Orleans, the capstone to Brady’s first year in the broadcast booth. With a near-ideal matchup between the two-time champion Kansas City Chiefs and Saquon Barkley-led Philadelphia Eagles, the game has a legit chance to set a Super Bowl viewership record, surpassing last year’s record audience of 123.4 million viewers that watched the Chiefs beat the San Francisco 49ers in overtime.
Brady is the sport’s greatest Super Bowl winner, but Super Bowl broadcasting is uncharted territory for him. Sunday’s game will be far and away the biggest of the 21 games he has broadcast this season (44.2 million watched the NFC Championship Game he called), and there will be tens of millions of people tuning in who have never heard Brady call a game until now. The reality for broadcasters is this: The Super Bowl is generally the one game each season in which viewers remember how the broadcasters did.
Source link
