HBO's 'Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel' remains strong and relevant as 300th episode arrives
Bryant Gumbel attends the "Big Little Lies" Season 2 Premiere at Jazz at Lincoln Center on May 29, 2019. Credit: Getty Images/Dia Dipasupil
"Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel" will debut its 300th episode on HBO on Tuesday night, but the more telling note is when the show premiered: In April of 1995, in a media world barely recognizable in 2022 terms.
The internet was just reaching widespread use, the news cycle usually was measured in weeks or days rather than seconds, and sports celebrities generally relied on journalists rather than social media or league-controlled sites and networks to tell their stories.
And yet here Gumbel and his colleagues are, still at it, in a forum that by all logic should be a relic of a bygone era.
“It’s been a wonderful run,” Gumbel told Newsday. “HBO is a place that justifiably prides itself on being cutting edge, and we are easily their longest running broadcast.”
Asked what he would have said 27 years ago had he been told the show would last this long, he responded, “I’d have said, ‘Well, Chief, I thought I’d be retired and long gone by then.
"I guess I have retired a couple of times, but I keep doing this because I enjoy it, and because I’ve got good people, and it’s a broadcast that makes me proud. It is, in my opinion, the best show with which I’ve ever been associated.”
For Gumbel, 73, that includes extensive work in sports media and most famously his 15 years as a host of NBC’s “Today” show from 1982 to 1997.
Doing serious sports journalism always has been a challenge on television, with notable exceptions such as Howard Cosell’s groundbreaking “ABC SportsBeat” in the early 1980s and ESPN’s “Outside the Lines,” which premiered in 1990.
But “Real Sports” has been a pillar of the genre, helped by the fact HBO is not tied to journalistic complications such as ratings, advertising and rights deals. Still, the show is not immune to the realities of modern media.
There are some topics it does not pursue because as a monthly program, fast-developing stories are impractical. And often, subjects prefer to speak in friendlier settings such as conference, team or personal sites.
“There are many stories that we conceive that we can’t execute, because people just won’t play ball there,” Gumbel said. “They don’t see any upside for them. They realize they’re going to be put in the crosshairs. They realize I’m not going to sit there and spoon-feed them questions about how good their uniform looks.
“So there are a lot of things that we have to do without, and that’s just the reality of the world we live in.”
Gumbel said his favorite segments are those that have changed lives, such as a 2004 story on young boys being used in the Middle East as jockeys to race camels — a report that helped lead to the banning of that practice.
Over the decades, the show has deployed a broad array of correspondents, a diversity that Gumbel called “something of which I’m very, very proud.”
“Hell, we had Spike Lee as a correspondent and David Frost as correspondent,” he said.
Gumbel has 1 ½ years left on this contract and is unsure what will happen after that.
“I never want to be a guy who’s sitting there who used to be Bryant Gumbel,” he said. “I don’t want to be a chore for the viewer. I don’t want to hang on because I’ve been here [on television] 50 years.”
He added, “I’m still trying to learn something new each day. I’m still engaged as much as I ever was, and I’m still proud of the product. So I guess for right now, it’s full speed ahead.”
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.
