The Bard and the Bassmasters

SELF

PORTRAIT Date and place of birth: April 20, 1954, Magnolia Occupation: host of Bassmaster If I wasn’t in broadcasting, I’d be an unemployed stage actor.

The last good play I saw: Jerusalem by Jaz Butterworth My idea of a perfect day: Walking around, exploring a place I’ve never been.

The best advice I ever received: My father told me to never consider making a career out of something you’re not keenly interested in.

I get tongue-tied when I think I’m running out of time.

My wife thinks I’m too much of a worrier.

Last place I visited: Zion National Park (Utah) Place I’d most like to visit: Finland I relax by hitting golf balls.

Guests at my fantasy dinner party: Mark Twain, George Bernard Shaw, Michael Palin (although comic geniuses are famously miserable to be around) One word to describe me: LuckyThere’s a direct line running from Shakespeare to smallmouth bass in Tommy Sanders’ life.

Sanders, the host of Bassmaster and other TV outdoors shows that air across the country, says he never thought about a career in broadcasting while growing up in Magnolia.

Then he enrolled in Hendrix College, caught a student production of As You Like It and got hooked on the idea of performing.

“It was a flash of inspiration for sure,” Sanders says. “I was keen to learn and didn’t even know what I wanted to learn.”

Sanders, 59, has hosted shows on ESPN and other national networks for nearly a quarter-century.

He has been nominated for Emmys and inducted into the Arkansas Outdoors Hall of Fame. His other career, as a TV and radio pitchman, has made his voice and face among the most recognizable in Arkansas, even if people don’t always connect them with his name.

“We call him ‘The Golden Warbler,’” jokes Danny Grace, a friend since childhood and member of the theater faculty at Hendrix. More seriously, Grace and others praise Sanders as the consummate pro. “He’s a great actor,” Grace says. “Tommy should have just been an actor. He’s the best voice talent anywhere around here. If you have Tommy coming to read for you, it’s going to be terrific. And it’s usually right the first time.”

For all of the thousands of hours he has logged on TV, Sanders lives life off the air in Little Rock in relative anonymity, which is obviously how he prefers it.

“Sometimes someone will see me at the airportor the grocery store and go, ‘You’re that guy,’” he says.

He’s a gourmet cook (according to his wife, Casey) who can’t think of a better meal than the purple hull peas and cornbread he grew up on. He has pulled a 250-pound sturgeon out of the Columbia River, but is more likely to curl up with a good play than a fishing magazine at night. He possesses a wicked sense of humor but is “ego-less” when working on broadcasts, according to co-workers.

If all the world’s a stage, as the Bard would have it, the man plays several parts.

CURTAIN OPENS ON A BOY

Sanders grew up in Magnolia, the oldest of four children. He describes it as “an idyllic sort of ’60s small-town existence, normal in almost every way.”

Boy Scouting was a passion. He became an Eagle Scout and worked at Camp DeSoto during the summers of his sophomore and junior years of high school, living in a tent and tepee and showing younger Scouts how to tie knots and build campfires.

“It was a great way to get outside, which I love,” he says. “It was kind of a service organization. It made you feel like you were part of a community in a way that public school did not get to. You were given a plan to achieve what you wanted to achieve.”

He hadn’t decided on a major when he enrolled at Hendrix, but if he had, it wouldn’t have been theater. His father was a geologist working in the oil industry, the same field his two younger brotherswould eventually follow.

Sanders says he’d never seen a live theatrical performance before that first experience in Conway.

“Growing up in a small town, about the only entertainment was TV,” he says. “But to see something on stage is a completely different animal. It was just a lot more real and living and breathing.

You could see the actual skills and challenges involved in it.”

Sanders got his first role the next semester, a secondary part in Playboy of the Western World. He became a theater major and from then on he acted in virtually everything the department staged, from Chekov’s Uncle Vanya and the musical The Fantasticks to Tom Stoppard’s Enter a Free Man.

“He was a really first-rate actor, wonderful student, and just has this wonderful speaking voice,” says Rosemary Henenberg, former chairman of the Hendrix theater department, who taught Sanders.

“You can’t give people talent. You can perfect it.

He always had the talent, and he certainly took to instruction.”

Sanders, who also loves music, helped start the college radio station, KHDX, at Hendrix and also landed a summer job as a morning disc jockey at Little Rock’s KLAZ-FM in 1974.

“That was the first hippie station in Little Rock, what they called free-form album rock,” he says.

Asked if he fit into the “hippie” mode, Sanders says, “Well, that was the culture we worked in. All the advertisers were your incense shops and places that sold bell-bottom jeans.”

Sanders remembers two moments well fromthat summer. One was an interview with Frank Zappa, who was in town for a show. “He was a delight. He was hilarious.”

The other was when he missed the “record” button and failed to capture a public affairs program on tape, leading to repeated on-air apologies for technical difficulties and a female co-worker flinging an ashtray at his head.

It’s the single worst gaffe he can remember in a nearly 40-year career.

NO SMALL PARTS

One obstacle that might have popped up - in, say, a play by Chekov - never materialized.

“When you become a theater major, obviously you assume that your parents don’t think you have super unlimited prospects at that point,” Sanders says. “My dad never did anything like that. He actually told me examples of people he knew that went into professions where they thought they could make a good living and were miserable. And mom was the same way.”

After college, Sanders says he pestered the Arkansas Educational Television Network, headquartered in Conway, into giving him a job. He painted sets, swept floors and operated a camera, worked his way up to technical director, then finally became a producer and filled on-air roles as needed. He worked on The Minor Key with the late jazz pianist Art Porter, Miss Polly’s art show by Polly Loibner and The Arkansas Continuum with Ray Nielsen, and showsfor numerous nonprofit organizations and government agencies.

“We’d do, like, seven or eight shows a day some days,” he says. “We were a production factory back in those days. Nothing got careful attention, but we did crank it out.”

In 1980, he moved to New York to learn what else he could about the TV production business. He took classes at New York University and worked nights for a post-production house, editing commercials and helping turn advertising agencies’ story boards into test spots.

He returned to Arkansas the next year and landed a job as a copy writer with the Smith and Jennings ad agency, where he worked his way up to creative director by 1985. The agency did a lot of work for small banks and state agencies.

A former colleague, Ed Nicholson, had left the agency to start a recording studio, producing mostly jingles, and Sanders joined him along with a third partner, Steve Patrick. They named it The Works, adding a second studio to handle Sanders’ voice-overs. Sanders did mostly radio ads and soundtracks for TV spots, but also moonlighted as on-camera talent for some TV commercials and appeared in “a lot of industrial work” for clients such as FedEx and John Deere.

“It was a really busy time,” he says, and it was about to get busier.

GETTING THE PART

In 1989, ESPN held a tryout for a host of ESPN Outdoors, a block of programming that was going to air every Saturday morning. Jerry McKinnis, the owner of JM Associates in Little Rock who was helping ESPN develop the project, remembers what happened.

“They brought in two supposedly hotshot, polished guys,” McKinnis says. “I said, ‘Do you mind if I throw a third guy in the mix as well?’ So we put Tommy in there, and he actually blew these guys away. It was embarrassing. These guys were trying to act like they knew something about the outdoors, and they didn’t, and Tommy did.So Tommy got the job.”

Sanders’ take on his audition: “I was lucky.”

Sanders hosted ESPN Outdoors for 15 years, introducing the programs and filling the gaps between with short features. He covered a lot a ground.

“Sometimes we filmed in Arkansas, sometimes it would be Alaska or the [Florida] Keys, the Bahamas or whatever,” he says. “It was fantastic. Of course, you had to work pretty hard once you got there.”

Sanders also started hosting the Stihl Timbersports Series, the FLW Tournament for bass fishing and the Bassmaster Classic tournament series, all airing on ESPN networks. He filmed in Canada, Mexico and every state but Hawaii.

“At one point it was about as much as you could do,” he says. “I was gone something like 160 or 170 days a year. It’s gotten better … now.”

That workhorse attitude might be a throwback to his theater background.

“I have to keep limbered up,” Sanders says. “You don’t know when it’s going to stop. That’s part of the business.” NEVER TAKE A BOW

Colleagues say there’s no one better in the business.

“Tommy is the Al Michaels, he’s the Jim Nantz of the outdoors,” says Mark Zona, his colorful co-host on Bassmaster.

Zona recalls the first time he ever worked with Sanders.

“The producer said, ‘Tommy, I need a minute-and-ninesecond piece about this Bassmaster tournament.’ Tommy put his head down, about 15 seconds later he goes, ‘OK, I’m ready.’ He starts rattling off this stuff; he hit a minute and seven seconds. It was flawless. He say, ‘I would have liked to have two seconds more.’”

“He has the incredible knack of being quick on his feet,” McKinnis adds. “He’s always going to have something to say, and it will bring something to the show, but it won’t be about him. That’s the greatest thing you can say about the host of a show like that.”

Henenberg doesn’t think her former student squandered his talent by concentrating on the outdoors instead of, say, Ibsen.

“I think he loves what he does,” she says. “I think he’s been a great success. The things he’s chosen to advocate - like the outdoors, and AETN - they’re just wonderful.”

In addition to being inducted into the Arkansas Outdoor Hall of Fame (2009), Sanders has been nominated for a Sports Emmy twice. He has received the Arkansas Public Broadcasting Service’s annual outstanding volunteeraward and Hendrix’s Odyssey Medal for outstanding alumni. He has served on the board of the Quapaw Area Council of the Boy Scouts of America and volunteered his skills for United Cerebral Palsy, among many nonprofits.

It was while returning to Conway to help with one of AETN’s fundraising campaigns that Sanders met hiswife, Casey, a producer for the network. They married in 1990. The pair love to head off on trips with a picnic basket in hand. She calls him the most considerate person she knows.

“If he cooks every part of a five-course meal and my little contribution is a salad he will say it’s the best part of the meal,” she says.

Sanders returns to the stage at Hendrix most years to read scripts penned by current and former students. He says he’d like to act again, maybe after his broadcasting career is over.

“I think Tommy’s worried that the phone’s not going to ring,” his old friend Danny Grace says. “Of course, it always does for Tommy. He’s very much in demand.”

Bassmaster runs yearround on Sunday mornings on ESPN2, leading up to the championship that will be held in February in Birmingham, Ala. Sanders also hosts a college version on ESPNU. Stihl Timbersports runs for 13 weeks each spring on the Outdoor Channel, with last year’s championship held in Pigeon Forge, Tenn.

These days Sanders does a lot of work on the bassmaster.com website, and also appears on commercials promoting the Arkansas Scholarship Lottery program.

Despite that schedule, Sanders says, “This is a business that will retire you when you reach a certain age or point. I won’t like it very much. I won’t be very graceful about it.”

And that, friends and colleagues say, will be a first.