‘A Spectacularly Amazing Life’: Jim Lampley, Broadcast Legend and WCHL Alum

This year, WCHL is celebrating its 70th anniversary of being on the air. Our history began on January 25, 1953 – and it’s been an eventful 70 years, from ice storms to national championships to social movements that shook the world.

We’re also proud of all the folks who passed through our doors along the way – including some major figures who got their start right here on our airwaves.

I recently had a chance to chat with one of those major figures: sports broadcasting legend Jim Lampley.

‘The Station Was the Town’

“I probably first appeared on the station in 1970 or ’71,” he tells me, in that same voice I recognize from the Tyson-Douglas fight back in 1990. It’s the same voice you may remember from ABC’s Wide World of Sports, or Wimbledon – or any of 14 Olympic games, still an all-time broadcasting record.

But once upon a time, Jim Lampley was just an undergrad at UNC, a dropout who had dropped back in and was working toward his English degree – when one day, he had a chance meeting.

“In Swain Hall, I bumped into a guy named Bob Holliday,” he says. Holliday’s now best known for his long stint at WRAL – but he too had gotten his start at WCHL radio, and he saw a great deal of promise in Lampley.

“He said, ‘You know a lot about sports and you speak the language well,’” Lampley says, “‘and I think that there are probably some things you could do to help us out at the radio station.’”

Lampley’s first job was a pretty good one, all things considered: regular post-game interviews with Bill Dooley, UNC’s head football coach.

“I was making $25 a show,” he said, “which in those days was significant money for me.”

Eventually, he added basketball coverage to his repertoire, staying with the station even after getting his bachelor’s degree and moving on to grad school.

And while he was also working with WUNC-TV, Lampley says it was WCHL where he first really made his name.

“WCHL was the primary idea motivator and cultural identifier in Chapel Hill,” he says. “The station was the town. If you wanted to know what was important in Chapel Hill, you turned on 1360 (AM).

“So if you were working here, it was an amazing privilege. You were where it was. And after a few years – to the degree that someone could be a star in Chapel Hill, I was a star.”

But even so, Lampley suspected that stardom was only the beginning, and so did the people around him.

“Both Bob Holliday and Jim Heavner were very assertive about saying to me, ‘you know, you should seek a career in broadcasting,’” he says. “I was just sort of drifting toward whatever opportunity arose, waiting to see what would happen.

“And – eventually something extremely significant did happen.”

‘Over Metal Walls’

Strangely, it all began with a tragedy: the terrorist attack at the 1972 Munich Olympics that led to the deaths of 11 Israeli athletes. In their efforts to cover the story as it unfolded, ABC-TV reporters developed new techniques and discovered new methods for live broadcasting that had previously been thought impossible.

“The network discovered that radio frequency microphones and cameras would do things that they hadn’t previously known they would do,” Lampley says. “They discovered that signals would go around concrete barriers (and) over metal walls, and they’d previously been of the opinion that such a thing couldn’t possibly happen.”

Those methods turned out to have many applications – including giving ABC the chance to have a sideline reporter at college football games.

A total of 432 young journalists from around the country interviewed for that job – but it was Jim Lampley who got the call.

‘I Want to Warn You in Advance’

“It’s very funny,” Lampley says now, “because if I had given in and listened to Jim Heavner, I would’ve learned something very specific that would have disqualified me from almost everything that came later.”

It happened, as so many great American stories do, on the road.

“We were driving somewhere one night,” Lampley says, “and Heavner, who was brilliant, said to me: ‘Jim, you know, you’re really good on the air, and who knows, someday you could be a major network television sportscaster. But I want to warn you in advance: if you fall in love with that idea of yourself as talent, and you commit to the idea of being on the air, you could very easily wind up carrying equipment in New Bern at age 46.’”

Lampley had been in New Bern in 1972, working on a Senate campaign for then-Congressman Nick Galifianakis. The prospect was unappealing.

“And 46 sounded like a million,” he says. “So I listened. But – I did not allow that to stop me from getting in front of a microphone when people asked me to do so.”

As it happens, Heavner hadn’t been the only one who encouraged Lampley to consider other options. There was also a memorable encounter in Miami a few years earlier.

“I’d tried very hard as an undergraduate to flunk out,” Lampley says, “and I wound up spending a year and a half in Miami between the first and second halves of my undergraduate career, working in the file room of the First National Bank of Miami’s mortgage department.”

It didn’t take him long to realize he wanted to return to Chapel Hill and finish school – but the bank managers had other plans for him.

“I got called into the senior vice president’s office,” Lampley says. “He looked across the table at me and said, ‘I understand you’re planning to go back to college.’ I said, ‘yes, I’m going back to Chapel Hill.’ He said, ‘Why would you do that? You’re doing so well here. You’ve only been here 13 months, and I see that your salary has gone from $350 a month to $425. You’re off to a terrific start, you should stay here. You could have a great career in the First National Bank of Miami mortgage department.’

“And I sat there and looked at him, and I thought to myself, oh my gosh, he thinks this is the best I can do. He thinks I need to spend my life worrying about whether I’m going to make assistant cashier or assistant vice president, and (whether) I’ll be able to buy a house with one of those mortgage loan packages that I deal with back at my desk. And all I could think is: I want to get out of here as rapidly as I possibly can. And I did.”

‘I Was in Another World’

On September 7, 1974, Jim Lampley made his national broadcasting debut as TV’s first-ever college football sideline reporter – one of two, to be precise, along with Stanford’s Don Tollefson.

It wasn’t a job he was meant to have.

“(ABC wanted to) find a college-age reporter,” he says. “Somebody who was 18 to 22, somebody who is essentially an undergraduate in terms of experience, somebody who has never previously been on the air.”

By then, Lampley was long past his undergrad days, so he wasn’t a top candidate – not at first.

But it wasn’t long before ABC executives had second thoughts.

“The boss of the network sports division, a very famous executive named Roone Arledge, began asking, ‘is there anybody that we’ve spoken to who has been on the air?’” Lampley says. “‘Is there anybody that we’ve spoken to, who we know is not going to embarrass us in front of a camera or a microphone?’ And that led back to me.”

How did ABC executives know Jim Lampley would be successful in the spotlight? What made him stand out above the rest?

It had a lot to do, he says, with his experience at WCHL.

“I was interviewing Coach Smith when he was reaching the apex of his career,” Lampley says. “I actually personally knew Coach Dooley and Coach Smith – and every once in a while, (I) might sit down and have a beer with them, in some away-game Holiday Inn bar. I mean, I felt like I was privileged beyond all description. I was in another world. If nothing else ever happened in my life, this had happened…

“(But) I’d had the privilege of having dealt with those two guys. So now in the first year of sidelines of college football at ABC Sports, I’m having dinner or beers with Bear Bryant at Alabama, Darrell Royal at Texas, Bo Schembechler at Michigan. I rubbed shoulders with them. And my formative experience, to get me ready for rubbing shoulders with those people, was rubbing shoulders with Coach Smith and Coach Dooley.”

‘I’m Still Blown Away’

Now, after a globetrotting career, Jim Lampley is back in Chapel Hill, teaching a course on the Evolution of Storytelling in American Electronic News Media at UNC.

“I have some really fantastic students who help to advance and elevate my own thinking,” he says. “I learn a lot every week, and I’m still blown away – in the same way that I was shocked, to a certain degree, that I became a presence in network television and was nominated for Emmys – in the same way that all of that blows me away, it blows me away that I (can) walk into a classroom at UNC and teach a course.”

It’s been a long and winding road for Jim Lampley, and a legendary one too – and it all began right here, at this station, in this community.

“It was fun, you know,” he says. “It was very meaningful to be able to work at WCHL, at a moment when the town and the station were somewhat indistinguishable from each other. Working at WCHL helped to reinforce and magnify the love affair I had always had with Chapel Hill…

“And I have had a spectacularly amazing life. And all of it is so counterintuitive and so contradictory to logic that – you know, if I told you in 1972 or ’73, this is what’s going to happen to me, you would’ve laughed your butt off. But it did happen.”

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