NBC focuses on New York for Belmont Stakes narrative
Horses participating in the 152nd running of the Belmont Stakes enter the track past empty grandstands at Belmont Park in Elmont, Saturday, June 20, 2020. Credit: Newsday/Steve Pfost
NBC struck the central theme of its Belmont Stakes coverage early on in a 3 ¼ -hour program on Saturday. Two words: New York.
“It’s one of the great New York sports days, and man, does New York deserve one,” host Mike Tirico, who grew up in Queens, said near the top of the show.
Not that there was anything wrong with that, given the three months during which New York City and the state were at the front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The narrative strategy would pay off in a big way when Tiz the Law won the race comfortably, minutes after a miserable spring turned mercifully to summer.
As Tiz the Law approached the finish line, race announcer Larry Collmus spiritedly said, “It is the New York hero, Tiz the Law and Manny Franco to win the Belmont Stakes!”
Seconds later, Tirico was saying, “Tiz the Law, in a year that New York needs something to celebrate, brings home the Belmont Stakes.”
He became the first New York bred since in 1882 to win the Belmont and completed a Triple Crown of sorts for the ownership group and 82-year-old trainer Barclay Tagg.
In 2003, they won the Kentucky Derby and Preakness with New York-bred Funny Cide before losing the Belmont.
NBC promoted the Belmont as the biggest sports event in the country since the Daytona 500 and NBA All-Star Game on Feb. 16. But it also marked a return to major sports in New York.
And NBC never let us forget that, with a series of aerial shots of the skyline. But the network did not shy away from the weirdness of it all.
Even as the horses walked onto the track to a recording of Frank Sinatra singing “New York, New York,” NBC cut to a live shot of an eerily empty Times Square and panned the emptiness of the vast grounds and grandstand in Elmont.
“It’s a little strange, but it is still a Belmont Saturday with Sinatra,” Tirico said, hopefully.
He added, “It’s a big-time moment without the big-time feel to it that usually the fans provide.”
NBC seamlessly met the technical challenge of having its on-air talent spread widely.
Tirico and analyst Randy Moss were in a studio in Stamford, Connecticut, analyst Jerry Bailey at his home in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, handicapper Ed Olczyk in his home in Chicago and reporters Britney Eurton and Kenny Rice on site with Collmus.
Eurton and Rice interviewed people from six feet away with a boom microphone — the phlegmatic Tagg was a particular challenge — while Bailey spoke to Franco, the winning jockey, via a radio attached to the outrider who met him after the race.
NBC’s production was helped immensely by the New York Racing Association, which supplemented the network’s much-lower-than-usual complement of seven cameras.
Olczyk aced his handicapping job by correctly picking an exacta of Tiz the Law and Dr Post.
NBC supplemented its coverage with a feature on Tiz the Law owner Jack Knowlton by Tim Layden, who also contributed an essay on the strange circumstances.
Layden called it “a small step on the journey to normal,” and said of this year’s classic races, “perhaps not THE Triple Crown, but A Triple Crown just the same.”
After promoting the return of hockey to the network later this summer, NBC briefly featured the construction site in the Belmont parking lot where a new Islanders arena is rising.
As race time neared, just before Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said, “Riders up!” NBC offered yet another shot of the skyline as Tirico said, “You know if any city can come back, it’s that one.”
Neil Best first worked at Newsday in 1982, returned in 1985 after a detour to Alaska and has been here since, specializing in high schools, college basketball, the NFL and most recently sports media and business.
