The teletype runs all night. It is July 6, 1985, and I am nineteen, an intern at KAHI in Auburn, and I sit in the booth from eight to five on the weekends and read the news two and a half minutes past the hour, after the AP feed clears. Tonight I go to the track of my almer mater, Placer High School. The Western States Endurance Run starts at dawn up at Squaw Valley and the runners come a hundred miles through the canyons in the heat and finish on the track starting just before dawn and I am thrilled to deliver updates through the night, running back and forth every hour from the track to the station and back.
I stand in the announcer’s booth and the announcer says he’s relying on what he’s hearing on the radio, and I say, that’s me.
While we wait for the first runners, I see a network man standing at the edge of it in a good blazer. Jim Lampley (b. April 8, 1949). He is with ABC, and he has covered the Super Bowl that year and he will cover the New York Marathon that fall, and he is here for the run. I know his face from the television. I ask him for a few minutes for an interview. He gives them. He talks to me as though I work somewhere that counts, and I do not.
After my all-nighter, news director Pete DuFour begins paying me for sixteen hours a week at $3.50 an hour, and the money thrills me. I have an open mike to the world and I am only 19. I keep the job until I leave for UCLA in August of 1988.
Jim King wins in sixteen hours, two minutes, forty-four seconds. The runners come off the trail with their faces gone slack and their crews holding them by the elbows, and the men who started at dawn finish in the dark, and some of them weep, and a doctor checks their feet.
There’s a scrum of reporters around King, and Sacramento Bee sports editor Joe Hamelin, my friend, tells me to use my elbows to fight my way to the story. “Journalism is a young man’s game,” he says.
At five am, I try to get some sleep on the floor of the news room. I get up about 7 am, and check the Auburn Journal. A missing woman has been found dead. I give the news live. I record bulletins for the rest of the day. I go home and watch Boris Becker win Wimbledon and fall asleep.
Ernest Becker (1924-1974) wrote The Denial of Death about men like the ones I watched finish, and about the man in the blazer, and about the boy at the AP teletype. Becker says a culture is a hero system. It hands its members a set of routes by which a man may feel he counts in the order of things, may feel he is more than meat that rots, may earn a place that outlasts the body. The runner takes one route. He buys his significance with his legs. A hundred miles of granite and heat is a bid, scored in hours and minutes, visible to all, and at the finish the bid is paid or it is not. Jim King pays his in sixteen hours. The man who quits at mile eighty pays nothing and goes home with his feet wrapped and his bid refused. The arena is honest that way. The body either does the thing or it does not.
The announcer takes a different route, and his is the route I have spent my life near, so I should say what it costs and what it buys.
Lampley does not run. He stands at the finish in the blazer and he names what the runners did. The feat is fast and it is gone. King crosses the line and the moment dies the instant it happens, the way all moments die, and the announcer’s work is to catch it in the half second of its dying and fix it in words so that it survives. He is the witness. He confers permanence. The runner makes the moment with his body and the announcer makes it last with his voice, and of the two, the voice travels farther and lives longer. King’s run lives in his own legs for a season. It lives in the broadcast for as long as men keep the tape. This is the announcer’s immortality project, in Becker’s phrase. He earns his place in the order of things by standing at the edge of other men’s feats and giving them a voice. Years later Lampley will stand over a knocked-out fighter and shout that it happened, and the shout will outlive the punch, and men who never saw the fight will know the call.
The word at the center of his hero system is live. He works live. The whole worth of the man lies in being present at the moment of consequence and speaking into it while it is still warm, before it cools into history. A recording is not the thing. The thing is the live moment, witnessed and named, unrepeatable, gone if you miss it. So I want to hold that word up, because a sacred word means one thing inside one hero system and another thing inside the next, and the men who use it think they are speaking the same language.
To Lampley, live is the unrepeatable instant he is paid to catch. To the smokejumper stepping out the door of the plane over a ridge in flame, live is the fire that breathes and runs and will kill him if he reads the wind wrong. To the labor and delivery nurse at three in the morning, live is the thing that comes out blue and silent and then, if God is good and her hands are quick, cries. To the bomb technician kneeling over the device, live means the charge is hot and one wrong move ends the conversation. To the Carmelite behind the grille who has not left the enclosure in thirty years, live names the only thing she trusts, the presence she gives her hours to, the One she calls the Living God, and the runners and the fire and the wire are to her a noise outside the wall. To the session bassist laying down a take with the tape rolling and no fixing it after, live is the one pass that has the feel, the pass you cannot get back. Each man kneels to the word. Each man means a different god by it. Lampley’s god is the moment that will not wait, and he has built a whole life on being there for it, microphone in hand, while the rest of us hear about it later.
Now the scene at the finish, told again, because Becker explains the thing I felt and could not name at nineteen. A boy at the bottom of a hero system meets a man near the top of it, and the man blesses him. Becker calls this transference. We take our sense of worth from the figures who seem to hold the power to grant it. The father holds it first. After the father, the culture hands the power to its heroes, and the young man scans the room for whoever carries it now. I scanned the finish at Placer High and there he was in the blazer, the man from the television, the man who got to be live for a living, and he turned and spoke to me as though I belonged in the work. He did not have to. The secure man can afford the gift. He had his place in the order of things and could spare a piece of it for a stranger, and the piece he spared is the reason I remember the night forty years on and have told it more than once. The three fifty an hour bought groceries. The blessing bought something a teenager wants more than groceries, which is the sense that the thing he loves will have him.
Here is the part the other ten essays leave out, and I want it in because truth comes before comfort. The announcer’s route has a hole at the center of it. He is never the man who does the deed. He stands at the finish and never runs the canyons. His immortality is borrowed, every grain of it, from the bodies of other men. King’s legs earn the run and Lampley earns the words about the run, and the words last longer, and still the words are about a thing the speaker did not do. The witness lives inside other men’s moments and owns none of them. Lampley spent thirty years at ringside calling the courage of men who got hit in the face for money, and his voice is famous and their faces are wrecked, and that is the trade the witness makes. He keeps his teeth. He keeps the call. He does not keep a single punch as his own.
I do not think this makes the route a low one. The priest never dies for the sins of the world and still he stands at the altar and says the words that make the bread holy, and the words are not a fraud because his own body stayed whole. The announcer is the priest of the secular arena. He consecrates. He stands where the deed happens and he says what it was, and by saying it he lets the men who were not there share in it, which is most of us, which is the whole point of a hero system, that it gives the ordinary man a way to touch significance he could not reach alone. Becker would say the runner and the announcer and the boy at the teletype are all running the same race by different roads, all of them trying to count, all of them refusing to be only meat.
The winner came in at two minutes past four in the morning by the official clock, sixteen hours and change after the gun. I read it on the air at two and a half minutes past the hour, after the AP cleared, the way I read everything for the next two years. A man I had watched on television stood at the line and gave a nineteen-year-old his time. I have been trying to be live ever since, present at the moment and able to say what it was, and I have never once been sorry, and the pay has rarely been better.
