Brent Musburger returning to CBS for ‘NFL Today’ 50th anniversary show
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TV viewers haven’t looked live at Brent Musburger on CBS since April 2, 1990.
That’s when the legendary sportscaster called UNLV’s win over Duke in the NCAA men’s basketball national championship game in his final assignment for the network.
Musburger, 86, will return to CBS on “The NFL Today” on Sept. 21 as part of a 50th anniversary throwback edition of the groundbreaking pregame show he hosted from 1975 to 1990.
“I’m going to be perfectly honest,” Musburger told the Las Vegas Review-Journal. “When I left CBS after the UNLV victory over Duke in 1990, if you said to me, ‘Brent, someday you’re going to go back and say, ‘You are looking live’ on CBS, I’d say ‘Forget about it. Not gonna happen.’
“But here it is and I’m so happy to go back and say it again. It’s a thrill to go back there, and I just want to stay out of everybody’s way. I do want to say, ‘You are looking live.’ I guess on my tombstone I’ll have, ‘You
were looking live.’ ”
Musburger rose to fame and set the standard for studio hosts on “The NFL Today,” which became the prototype for all sports studio shows. It broke ground as the first live pregame show and featured the first female co-host in Phyllis George, the first Black co-host in Irv Cross, the first Black female co-host in Jayne Kennedy and the first sports betting analyst in Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder.
It also innovated with live shots of NFL stadiums to open the show to better inform over-under bets, which is how Musburger came up with his signature catchphrase.
Hall of Fame honor
Musburger, who moved to Las Vegas from his native Montana in 2017 to launch VSiN, the first sports betting network, recently received the Pete Rozelle Radio-Television Award from the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
“It was unexpected and I’m so appreciative of people like (sportscasters) Jim Nantz and Dan Patrick and (Hall of Fame coach) Dick Vermeil,” he said. “I don’t think it would’ve happened without their help.”
Musburger was presented with the prestigious award by Kennedy during the Enshrinees’ Gold Jacket Dinner in Canton, Ohio, attended by more than 100 Hall of Famers.
“I was like a little kid surrounded by all these guys I’d covered back in the day. Then going through the Hall with my son Scott. It was really a very special week,” he said. “The only sad part for me was that Phyllis George and Irv Cross and Jimmy ‘The Greek’ weren’t there with me, because it was a team effort.”
Brent-Greek brawl
Musburger and Snyder teamed up to help introduce sports betting to a national audience long before it was legalized across the country. But they didn’t always get along.
In fact, Snyder threw a punch at Musburger on a Sunday night in 1980 at a Manhattan bar named Peartrees. Musburger said Snyder, upset over not getting enough air time during that day’s show, confronted him as he sat in a booth with his brother Todd.
“We were sitting there and there were two people at the bar. In strolls ‘The Greek.’ This was certainly not the first pub he had visited on Sunday and he was aggravated because he thought that I had shortchanged him on time and given too much to Miss Phyllis,” he said. “Kind of out of the blue — I might have said something, ‘Oh, forget about it, Greek,’ something like that — and he sucker punched me. It wasn’t a very hard punch.
“My brother dove across the table to get at him. The smartest guy in the room was the bartender. He turned the lights off. By the time the lights were turned back on, all of us were up and we had Todd and ‘The Greek’ under control. Things had calmed down.”
The altercation made headlines on the cover of the next day’s New York Post.
“One of the guys at the bar worked at the city desk at the Post and he had come in on a break. He went back to the office and told them about the fight between Brent and Jimmy ‘The Greek,’” he said. “I got a call from the head of CBS Sports and he was furious. He said, ‘I’m going to fire the Greek.’ And I was shocked. I talked to Arlene, my wife, and said ‘I don’t want that to be something they fire the Greek over.’ I called him back at CBS and said, ‘Listen, a couple brothers had a moment in time where they didn’t get along. Let me work this out, but please don’t fire him.’
“Bob Arum was another good friend of mine, the boxing promoter. He provided me with some boxing gloves and we got a bell and we opened the show the next week wearing gloves and hitting the bell. It was a couple brothers making light of what happened the previous week.”
