In early November Prost Amerika editor Sean Maslin had the chance to speak with sports broadcasting legend Derek Rae.
Derek is one of the top sports broadcasters across the world. During his lengthy career he has covered the UEFA Champions, the English Premier League, the Bundesliga, La Liga, Serie A, Major League Soccer, and eight World Cups. Last year, he joined Amazon’s coverage of the National Football League working Thursday night matches with Tommy Smyth.
It was a wide-ranging interview so we have broken it into two pages. The first page, which is below, will focus mostly on Rae’s experience covering the National Football League for Amazon UK and his experience breaking into broadcast journalism. Page two will focus solely on soccer and his experiences covering the beautiful game.
Sean Maslin: What made you decide to take on the challenge of covering the NFL for Amazon?
Derek Rae: It has been an exciting experience. What happened is over a year ago my wife and I moved back to the United States after several wonderful years in the UK where I was working for BT Sport and several other broadcasters. One of the things that I resolved to do upon returning was to do some new things and this was one of the first new projects that came across my way just prior to us coming back. Sadly I wasn’t able to do the first four games of the season last year just because of the other commitments that I had in Europe. But I was very keen to try something that would be a challenge for me in a good way. We are on our second year now and they [Amazon and the NFL] are great people to work with.
I think that the exciting part lies in the fact that it is a new way of broadcasting because if you go to Amazon feed for the Thursday night games you have the choice of any number of different commentary teams and we are one of them. But yeah it has been something that I didn’t ever expect to be asked to do but everything I do I throw my heart and soul into it.
SM: What was your knowledge and experience in the NFL coming into this opportunity? Were you always a fan? I know you have lived in the United States for quite awhile?
DR: Well it is a bit more complicated than that. I first moved to the States in 1991 and then we stayed all the way through 2010 so I was away from it for about seven years. So that was my one concern. While my historical knowledge of the NFL goes all the way back to the mid-1980s when it was very popular in the UK and it was on over-the-air TV during that spell. I came to my first NFL game back nearly 30 years ago between the New England Patriots and the Cincinnati Bengals in another glorious archetypal New England fall day.
So when I lived here I always knew what was going on with the league. Who was playing well, who was going to the playoffs, that sort of thing. But I wasn’t watching it week in, week out, because I couldn’t because I was covering the sport that is dearest to my heart which is of course international soccer. But having lived here for most of my adult life I have a good working knowledge of it. I am not Al Michaels and I am not Joe Buck in terms of presenting the game but Amazon doesn’t want that. They want Derek Rae. I was very flattered to be offered it and so far I have enjoyed it.
SM: In terms of your preparation and your style does it change when you are covering an NFL match versus an international soccer match?
DR: This is the interesting thing: Not really because the preparation is the same for everything. It involves a lot of writing things down, committing things to memory, and obviously in the NFL’s case you have a lot of numbers that you have to remember and you don’t have the same players on the field at any particular time. But it is background on players, it is stories, it is all of those things that we do with any sport that I cover. So I wouldn’t say that the preparation has been the most arduous part of it. With the NFL it is almost the opposite of when I began covering soccer in the early days because trying to find information back then was quite challenging. With the NFL you almost have too much information where you have to sort through what is relevant versus what is window dressing. So that is a big part of the week-going through and finding what is the key information and avoid being swamped by the 143 media releases and guides that come from the various teams.
SM: Growing up did you always want to be a broadcaster and what appealed to you about the job?
DR: I pretty much decided from an early age that I wanted to be a broadcaster.The evidence of that is the 1974 World Cup where I made cassette tapes of that World Cup with my cassette recorder and I would make commentary high-pitch recordings of what I saw and made impersonations of the various pundits.
From that point on I was encouraged to take my cassette recorder to reserve league games of my local team Aberdeen who were about to managed by a man by the name of Alex Ferguson. They were about to go on to be the best club in Europe in 1983, winning the Cup Winners Cup and the Super Cup. By then I was 16 and I was broadcasting for the local hospital radio station. Hospital radio is a concept most Americans do not understand but it is a way for a young broadcaster to get experience and it is a great service for people in hospitals because it gives people the opportunity to listen to their team’s matches.
From there I worked my way up and I always kept into contact with my broadcasting hero David Francey. To use an American analogy David was sort of the Vin Scully of Scotland, a well-known radio voice in Scotland. I had been communicating with David since I was 13 and I would send him my tapes and he would give me feedback. Eventually by the time I was at the University in Aberdeen at about the age of 19 and I thought ‘I am going to send another tape to David because I think my work has gotten better and I would love to know what he thinks about this latest batch of work.’ This time though he didn’t actually send me his own review but he did pass it along to Charles Runcie, his producer at the BBC. He invited me down to the headquarters and they basically offered me a gig. My first game was at Kilmarnock in April 1986 and that went pretty well. He offered me my second game which was going to be about four days later and would be England versus Scotland at Wembley Stadium. [Laughs] That was my second game on the air.
So things went from strength-to-strength for me on the air and I was with BBC Scotland for five years. I got the chance to cover games in 19 different countries because those were the days that Scottish teams were at the forefront of football and were going far in European competitions. I was with Dundee United when they made it all the way to the final of the UEFA Cup and I covered the 1990 World Cup for the BBC Radio Network. So yeah it was five really good years and shortly after that I was off to America.
