Bob Roll reflects on cycling career and transition to broadcasting | Off Script Pt. 2 | NBC Sports

I'd love to hear more about the 1988 team at the Giro that won the role you played and what it was like to be a part of a winning team well they were not thrilled that we were in the 85 Giro they were way less thrilled that we were about to win the 88 year and the Italian peloton haven't evolved in you know our to purchase the patient's much to my chagrin the main thing is we had the race the whole peloton by ourselves they were like okay these dudes are losing that's it everybody was against you these guys are gonna lose that's what they decided and we decided no we're not gonna lose we're gonna win so it was us guys our little group our little family roll Alcala dadada Lauritzen en swagger beat Roy nickman Ron Kiefel Jeff Pierce Davis Feeney Andy Hampsten and myself it was us against the world and so every day every single day they tested us you know they pushed us they attacked us in the feed zone when we stopped to take a nature break when the weather is bad when we went to get a rain jacket they just in mask would attack does that still go on no I haven't seen that it's too international now because the level is so much more important and worldwide and well known the struggles are the same but riders go for not to race against somebody as much as they used to Greg LeMond faced this a lot you know he took on the whole peloton by himself for a long time even his own teammates raced against him sometimes did you find yourself even though you weren't on his team fellow American in the peloton helping him oh yeah absolutely how I helped him all the time as much as I could mostly it was just encouragement from from the cheap seats tactically though like strategically do you remember one one time we have one time in the tour I'll tell you I and Davis fini saved his Tour de France because he got the same bug I got a few days later this amoebic dysentery where your your bowels just let loose you know and that happened in the middle of a race for T case to go and we're going flat out for the stage win and his bowels just exploded and he you know fever you know like you can only imagine you're on your deathbed except you're in the middle of the Tour de France so he started drifting back through the field and he couldn't sit on the wheel I went off the back when he went off the back and it was one time when they were flat out lined out in the gutter and he got dropped and I went back and Davis went back and we came back to the back of the field with Greg on our wheel his teammates that they were doing the attacking you know I did a little bit then Davis did the rest to get Greg back into the field and that was just like it was a tiny little effort but if he had been cast adrift off the back of the peloton he might not have been able to make it has he ever expressed gratitude for that you know he I'm sure he remembers the episode of becoming unwell in the middle of a tour de france stage but how it played out from that point in all honesty he had a moment that lasted you know maybe through four or five kilometers out of 4000 kilometers that was really tough the rest of the stage believe me he was in the front duking it out right you know he was right there but that one moment and he wasn't on our team wouldn't have to do that but you know I just felt for the guy right 1986 start of the tour you have this famous line you said were cavemen oh yeah bad to the bone we're bad to the bone at least the first day we'll see the rest of the race how it goes at that time there hadn't been you know for many many decades of famous American cyclists at the turn of the century we had a lot of famous cyclists we had the best cyclists in the world major Taylor probably the best cyclist in the world in the years just before the Tour de France got started so then there was this long interval where there was almost no information about cycling and so in 86 all of a sudden we had a guy that could win the Tour Greg LeMond who had been third in 84 and second in 85 and his battle with Bernard Ino in the 85 tour was very gripping so it had gotten a lot of attention in the United States so in 86 I wanted to just say in a way my own way that there's more than one American in the tour that you're gonna be hearing from us you know I was right about that and that we that Davis Finney won the second third stage actually and we had gotten the yellow jersey with Alex Tita on the first day of the race and they were like what in the hell that interview was before the team time trial when we completely fell apart the problem was Alex got the jersey in the morning and the team time trial ATK's was in the afternoon which they don't do that anymore there's not split stages in Grand Tours and we're just were you know you can only you can't imagine how bad you feel to have to race flat out in the morning and then do another race we were not ready for that so the team time trial was bad next day Davis won the stage so I was like I told you right we are cavemen and it's something that our team doctor had told us Massimo testa he said you guys and he's from Italy you know had a real thick Italian accent in those days you're like at the cro-magnons you can walk across looking for food all day you don't even get tired you're like in the cavemen I used that from massive on France you know it well because of riding in the tour but as I got to know you was interesting to find out that you were familiar with that country from childhood trips before you became an international cyclist yeah my my parents were intellectual Bohemians and and my dad loved France loved French culture but mostly love French wine so we would take trips the lowest budget trips I mean there was a series of books and dey's France on $5 a day we were France family of six on 37 cents per day that was really they were so monumental like believe me nobody was going taking the whole family for summer vacation to Europe and just going crazy and when they went to Bordeaux and Champaign and burgundy and wrote their own and you know just we just hung out in the vineyards we ate the grapes mmm that weren't ripe yet so we all got sick as dogs you know what a sickness in France for you okay I'm allergic to France apparently are those trips is that where you started to know you were younger but you're your love of wine right now I think so even though I was resistant because whatever your parents are interested in I think is stupid right you know your parents owned a wine shop correct my dad opened a wine shop in like 1973 okay just as a side back home with the bay area yeah in the dive Lavallee maybe the first you know French wine shop in that part of the country but somewhere along the line whether it was those trips when you were a kid or the fact that you're dead tried to start that business you developed a love of it and a real knowledge Amitabh's the kind of guy if you're lucky enough like you go to dinner you don't have to worry about ordering the wine cuz Bob knows what the best one is on the list so for the money exactly what's the wine sale at your house look like ah man I have some of the best wine ever made in my wine cellar and it's my house and Durango's cut into the hill behind it in the garage is under the house and it's just a nice you know natural stays cool all summer nice natural cellar so I have champagne a lot of Burgundy I started getting into white wines more so a lot of California big cabs that I have on hold i just opened a 97 Opus good year from California and now just starting to get ready to drink I had bought some knowing it was a good year but I was like oh my god I only have to wait a while between all those trips as a kid to France between riding internationally when you were competitive and covering the tour as a commentator huh how many times you been to France oh my god I mean every year since I mean sometimes two or three times per year for 40 years so hundreds of times okay so working on the language you're pretty good at it to me I can get by I can give I but I'm still working on it this transition when a professional athlete knows he or she is near the end and they're looking for the next challenge maybe they're looking for a soft place to land many of them end up in broadcasting and I think a lot of them realize this is a lot harder than I thought it's gonna take a lot more prep than I thought how did the transition happen for you well the stories that I wrote you know because of what we mentioned before like not having any internet you know just you're over there at a vacuum doing something spectacular nobody back home ever hears about I started to write stories and send them to Vela News which was covering the sport like you're the only publication OLN had gotten the rights to the tour and they were looking for a commentator they and Phil and Paul obviously had been doing the heavy lifting for many years and they're like well let's get it let's get an American guy in there you know get the American perspective it was Susan D matei actually who was working for them who had gotten a bronze medal in the first mountain bike Olympics in Atlanta and was commentating on the mountain bike races for OLN and she said if you guys want somebody to talk about the sport you got to go and meet Bob roll of what year was this 98 98 and I was starting to wind down my racing career planning the next phase which was working at the lumber mill in Durango it really was my plan and my daughter was you know a baby mm-hm and and I'm like no this is great no problem I can pay my mortgage and Durango is not you know it's a working-class place there's there's you know if you dress up you feel bad because what was your first on-air assignment first on-air assignment world championships 38 hours live in in Simone st. and Canada did you in Susan DeMuth a and Davis Vinny did you enjoy it I loved it are you good at it well the I was good at telling stories and I would do a whole segment and the producer would be like I'm talking you're not talking I'm talking it's my turn to talk we're going to commercial bloggers break I would just bleed right into the commercial break do the commercials they come back I'm still telling the same story commercial and the guy was like commercial break I'm like you can have a commercial I'm telling the story yeah and Davis Finney and Susan D matei were sitting next to me and Peter Young was a host and we had the best time I just couldn't the technical part of it how long did moments like that go on three or four years at what point did you figure out okay I'm gonna play ball with the truck I'm gonna stop talking when they want me to but yeah I mean is still gonna be me and tell my stories how long did it take to get to they fired me for the term yeah really because of what I was just like I was like I know this sport I want to tell the sport how I want to tell it and I hadn't understood that I need to fit it in to the medium to the vernacular and so they're like this dude's got to cool his Jets for a year he's totally out of control would you do that year well no I just I don't know I was shell-shocked because the tour is going on and I wasn't there it was heartbreaking yeah yeah did you watch a lot of that tour I did I did watch as much as I could you find yourself paying really close attention to the announcers yeah I was listening to how they transition to the commercial breaks and how they come out of them who they're engaging with what they're talking about that was actually very instructive so when I came back it was a totally different level and so the challenge of the tour is to constantly for everybody not just the riders but for everybody in a professional bike race you're constantly solving problems this rider is moving up these guys have just attacked there's a hill coming up the wind's coming from here so you just develop this ability to solve problems I don't know if there's anything else like it in in sports television big change for you this year huge change for all of us the first time you're gonna be over there without Paul Sherwin tragically passed away in early December we've talked about it a number of ways number of times since let's back up and let everybody know when you two became close when you really became buddies with Paul yeah I started working with Paul right after that first event 400 Lannon and we had known each other racing against each other I met him in 1987 at the Tour of Britain the first thing I said to him I said you are an incendiary device and if you say that to him why yeah I'll get to that in a second and he said that's a pretty big word for a SEPA and I knew what a sepal was right what is it it's it's rhyming slang for a septic tank that rhymes with yank so it's an American is a cepo a septic tank Wow so he came back with a response I was like that's a pretty good response I thought I was the most lucid person in this event so I was like this is a dude to be reckoned with but he was attacking at the worst possible moment the whole week of racing and I just got tired of it who's this dude I didn't even know what he was wearing you know that that I had to ask Sean Kelley the great Irish me I'm like who's this guy he's like that's Karma and that was Paul Sherman's nickname I'm a climber because he couldn't climb so they called him climber and he had a white jersey with the red and blue stripe and on the back it said banana that was his team sponsor Raleigh banana and he was the National Road racing champion at the time of England which so his jersey was different from everybody else's but I couldn't put two and two together I thought he was just some highball you know some privateer mmm-hmm some sort of swashbuckling lunatic that attacked at the wrong time every time and so just and then when he said that that's a big word for a setback I'm like I didn't have anything so I'm like I'm gonna show you the wrong time to attack so the next day I went bananas shredded the field pulled my foot out of the pedal with fifteen years ago when I was in front of the race about the wind role is lost the stage by his pulled his foot off the pedal cried honestly laughs tell me he's absolutely fuming and I'm not surprised the only guy in the field that could stay on my wheel was Paul Hagedorn he passed me when my chain came off so I I threw my bike up there and I just like yet this blood-curdling scream across the empty pitch into the grandstands where the Royals were and they had stopped the bagpipe music for a moment live the first day of live TV for a race in England in the history of British TV and that's the first word they hear at the finish line what a personal this hosta you had that race won yeah that's the way it goes sometimes and so Paul was like I told you he he fell in love with me right at that moment and he told me all of the implications for years and years and years after that and so that's when we met yeah so the next time I saw him he was the press agent for the Motorola cycling team so he's like oh now this isn't gonna be a challenge guy Bob roll through the labyrinth of political correctness you know and which he did do very well and he explained to me these are the stakes this is what's important and then I understood okay could be an adult about all this and still have fun I got a phone call from Steve talking to you at work with the years before that he worked for channel 4 and he said well what about this Bob roll character I said welp Steven I mean that's what you get when you work with somebody who's got a personality his response was the personality he said everybody's got roles is defective then we started working together on TV and it was absolutely awesome yeah you know we both tried to tear every city down we were in brick by brick and every speakeasy every honky-tonk every after-hours play we just he was so good at telling stories the best yeah and so it was a real shock when and I'm still starting to realize you know what it's and it it's been very challenging to move forward without him really hard there was a time I probably it was in between when Paul died in early December and Christmas you and I talked oh man that was you you vote for my safety I think which I apologize oh no no it's what friends do and I that I hung up the phone because you would you had said so I was thinking Bob might not go back yeah I don't know if you're gonna go back and do this you know I went there and have been there ever since was how strongly I believe in what this event means to people in their day-to-day life and also Paul would be disappointed if I wasn't there he'll be there in spirit so if I'm not there and he's there in spirit there would be an empty place at the table oh there's a nice look at there they shattered the Bovo crayon it's got 365 windows for the days of the year 52 fireplaces for the weeks of the year 12 towers for the months of the year and guess what it's got four bridges for the each different season how about I'm very good I am very impressed one of Paul's special abilities was that when they would show one of the landmarks along the racecourse he would have done the research yeah and be able to share the history of that and how the event is not in a stadium it's out where people live and that's one of the most special parts about Tour de France at all bike races is that you're in the community and for that short brief moment you're a part of the community and the people that live there are sharing that with the world our job is to engage those those Scenic's and what they mean to the people and what they mean to the world Paul was able to integrate those and we've this this tapestry that would just unfold infinitely towards the horizon and he had such a special ability to do that seamlessly smoothly in a way that people would not forget what they're doing they're not forget why they reason but also enjoy the stadium which is the most spectacular you can't deny you know people argue about the merits of sports but the stadium that cycling has is the greatest on the planet there's no no question about that you have an outstanding vocabulary it's got these Bob isms in there heaven forbid you fall on the cobbles it's like a meat grinder being dragged across your body it is sent that's a whole nother kettle of fish every inch of Road is gonna be taken up by bloodthirsty lunatics I try to put words together that mean that don't exist but they encapsulate the meanings of multiple things that's so it infuriates people when you do that yeah because there's no such word so English majors are always writing in like Bob roll is a give me one give me a couple conflagration means a conflagration is is if I'm not mistaken because I've mixed them up so many times is is a like a fire something that is like a catalyst and I and I decided that it should also be a conjugate able verb so I started saying well in order to conflict this situation what you need to do is attack with three KS to go from that and it's not a word no but I thought as you know being an incendiary device myself that would be a good way to explain think that one thing I've learned in my time working in cycling next to you is that cycling as a sport is a very passionate fan base almost a cult-like following and a lot of that applies to you as well because of the way you tell stories because your background it was fun it's been fun for me driving around France listening to them in real time but the last hours been fun listening to you as well so thanks for sharing Bob my pleasure thank you very much Oh

Channel: NBC Sports

Views: 154,131

Keywords: Cycling, NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, PGA, Golf, Athlete, Tennis, Olympics, bob roll, bob roll interview, off script, bob roll highlights, tour de france, tour de france 2019, tour de france 2019 live stream, tour de france 2019 live, tour de france 2019 stage 3, tour de france 2019 highlights

Id: GtduLsJaahg

Length: 22min 8sec (1328 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 08 2019