Yes, that was Mark Gross sitting in ESPN’s producer’s chair last Wednesday night during a Memphis Grizzlies-Oklahoma City Thunder game.
Gross has been with ESPN since 1988, but he had never produced a game — any game — for the network. Now ESPN’s senior vice president of production and remote events, Gross decided to swap jobs with senior coordinating producer Tim Corrigan for one night.
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Mark Gross, with experience in studio shows, wanted to handle a live event.
Photo by: ESPN IMAGES
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“I’ve always wanted to do this, but I’ve never been able to commit the kind of time it takes to prepare for the game,” Gross said by phone on the day before he was scheduled to handle the telecast. “Tim and I have talked about this together, and we both felt like the time was right.”
This does not appear to be an ego-driven vanity stunt. Gross began overseeing remote productions in January 2014, when he became Corrigan’s boss. For the past several years they had been talking about having Gross produce a live game to help him get a better sense of what goes into it.
“I’m expecting this to give me a better sense of what goes into game productions,” said Gross, whose background is more focused on studio shows.
Gross remarked at the amount of preparation that goes into a regular-season NBA telecast in the middle of January. He initially had been studying the Washington Wizards and Boston Celtics but had to switch gears on Dec. 28 when ESPN swapped out of that game to the Grizzlies-Thunder.
“I dove into anything I could get my hands on — newspaper articles, blog posts — about both of these teams,” Gross said. “I am amazed at the volume of paperwork that gets used for just one game.”
In producing the game, Gross said he planned to keep reminding himself that his job is to document the game. Corrigan told him to be flexible and not over-use technologies like replays. “If the replay doesn’t add something or show anything new, why use it,” Gross said.
“I’d like people to walk away from the game with a better sense of who Russell Westbrook is. But I have to remember to be flexible. Anything can happen.”
