By Angela Barbuti

Warner Wolf

For over 50 years, Warner Wolf has been eyewitness to the world’s greatest athletes and seen some sporting events that have gone down in the annals of human history. His line, “Let’s go to the videotape,” which began as a practical cue to roll a clip, is one of the most recognized catchphrases in sports history. Wolf still entertains and educates audiences on Imus in the Morning, one of the most popular daytime broadcasts in New York City.

When he’s not giving play-by-plays, he’s at home on the Upper West Side, watching highlights on ESPN.com or his game of choice, pro football.

Did you always want to work in sports?

I knew when I was 7 years old, believe it or not. There was no question in my mind. My father used to buy me Ring, a boxing magazine. There was no television, so we used to hear Friday night fights on the radio. I used to listen to every sporting event.

What qualities do you need to be a sportscaster?

This sound obvious, but you have to know sports. Not just the rules, but the history, so you can relate the importance of what has happened. Otherwise, you might think, “This is the greatest play of all time,” when it has been done five times before. You also have to be fair and can’t have an objective before you go in.

What was your big break?

In 1976, I got an offer from ABC to come to New York and do the local news, Wide World of Sports and Monday Night Baseball. That was huge. The funny thing is, my dad showed me an article that said it takes 15 years from wherever you’re working to get to New York. I always carried that around with me. I started April Fool’s Day 1961 in Pikeville, Ky. The amazing part is it was 1976 [when I got the offer], exactly 15 years later.

How did you make the transition from radio to television?

I had been on the radio eight years before I was ever on television. In 1965, I was hired by WTOP, a huge radio station in Washington, D.C. They also owned a TV station, and the TV guy left. The president of the station said—it’s going to sound funny now—“Do you think you could talk to people about sports?” At that time, I think we were the second station to do this, aside from one in New York.

What’s the most significant thing you ever reported on?

9/11. My wife and I lived in Tribeca and the World Trade Center was 10 blocks south of our bedroom window. I saw it all, so I called in to Imus to tell him what was happening and he kept me on the air.

What is one major change you’ve seen in the sports industry?

Before 1975, a player belonged to a team forever. Ninety-eight percent of players did not have multiyear guaranteed contracts, which they all have today, so the incentive to play well was huge. They had a good concept, better than today. But the owners took advantage of it and didn’t pay what they should have. Mickey Mantle, the highest-paid player, made $100,000 once. The minimum today is almost $500,000. Mantle would have been a $30 million-a-year ballplayer today.

Who do you consider the greatest athletes of all time? 

Babe Ruth, Jackie Robinson, Jim Thorpe, Jim Brown. They were great because they played more than one sport well. I always thought the most domineering player in basketball was Wilt Chamberlain.

What was your most memorable interview with a player?

Joe DiMaggio. It was a real thrill, because I had grown up watching him play. He was a great interview. But just before it, he had a PR man come over to me and say, “If you talk about Marilyn Monroe, the interview is over.” I wasn’t going to talk about Marilyn Monroe.

Do you root for certain teams?

No, because I want to be able to report objectively. That’s why I think it’s advisable for young fellows to avoid strong friendships with ballplayers, because there comes a time when you have to say something unfavorable about them. If you hesitate, your listeners or viewers are going to realize it. You absolutely have to be honest with your audience, because they’ll know if you’re not.

What’s it like to work with Imus?

Oh, it’s fun. You never know what’s going to happen. Each day is different.

How did you come up with your catchphrase? 

I was working in Washington and videotape had just started out. Before that, we used film or still pictures. We had some videotape of a basketball game. I would give the director a normal cue. Like, “In the third quarter, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar scored,” and they’re supposed to roll the tape. He didn’t roll the tape. So I said it again, and he still didn’t. Then, right on the air, I finally said to the director, “Hey Ernie, let’s go to the videotape!” And the play came up. Later, he said to me, “Do that again tomorrow, because I’m very busy in the control room.”

Do you recite the phrase for your fans?

Sure I do. I’m glad they remember. You can’t say it on the radio.

Listen to Wolf on Imus in the Morning, Monday-Friday from 6-10 a.m. on 77WABC.  The show is simulcast on Fox Business Network.

By Allen Houston

To talk with West Sider Kevin Baker is to glimpse the New York City of the past, before glass towers and high-rise condos threatened to swallow the island.

Best-selling author of the City of Fire trilogy, Baker writes mesmerizing prose about the city during pivotal moments in its history. Dreamland focuses on Coney Island and the infamous Triangle Fire of 1911. Paradise Alley takes place during the draft riots of the 1850s and Striver’s Row is set in the Harlem riot of 1943.

Kevin Baker.

Baker grew up in New Jersey and Massachusetts and started his career as a teen, covering sports for The Gloucester Times. By the time he moved to New York in the mid-1970s to attend Columbia University, he had decided to become a fiction writer.

The author has lived in the same apartment since 1980 and has seen the Upper West Side undergo several metamorphoses.

“Cities are all about loss and change, unless it’s a place like Venice that’s trapped in amber,” he said.

He recalls a more dangerous Upper West Side in the early 1980s, one packed with cheap Chinese restaurants, transvestites and Bowery-style dive bars, which featured “real hardcore drunks, drinking real rot gut whiskey.”

One of his favorite places was a club on 105th and Broadway that was owned by a woman whose elderly mother would greet people from a hospital bed next to the stage as “some rock band blared away.”

Given that he’s an historical fiction writer, he can dish a lot of nuggets on the past of the West Side.

“Apparently, the Metro Dinner on 100th Street is the oldest building around here,” he said. “It was a stagecoach stop in the 1850s on the road to Boston.”

St. Michael’s Church on 99th Street was one of the first churches that supported the black churches in the old Seneca Village in Central Park. Seneca Village was Manhattan’s first major African-American community.

He also bemoans some of the recent historical losses that have taken place in the Upper West Side, such as the Metro Theater being replaced by an Urban Outfitters.

“It’s a shame that it’s gone. That theater was the last of its kind here. In 1934 there were 18 silver screen movie theaters on the West Side, and that was the last one.”

The author worked multiple jobs after graduation to keep his head above water, including a stint writing letters for Mayor Ed Koch.

“I met Koch, twice. The first time, he came into the office and started telling us all of the people that he was going to get,” Baker said laughing.

After years of struggle, his first novel, Sometimes You See it Coming, loosely based on the life of baseball player Ty Cobb, was published in 1993.

A major turning point in the creation of his City of Fire trilogy happened when he landed a job as chief historical researcher on Harry Evans’ book The American Century.

It was during this period that he discovered no one had written the great novel about Coney Island, particularly the old Dreamland Amusement Park of Coney Island circa 1911, before it burned. The same year, the infamous Triangle fire took place, killing 146 garment workers and also became a pivotal plot element in the first part of his series. It took him three years to write Dreamland. He found himself dawn back to the amusement park for his most recent work, a graphic novel entitled Luna Park that came out last year.

“Coney is this sort of outlaw place that’s a little crazy, and that’s what attracted me to it,” he said. “It’s this place at the end of the city where everyone mixes in.”

Talking about the old Coney Island, he becomes animated and describes a place packed with hazardous rides and oddities that would never be permitted in today’s society.

“The rides were dangerous and humiliating,” he said. “There was the Laughing Gallery, where a dwarf who would hit you with a cattle prod for the amusement of your fellow New Yorkers. The benches were electrified so that if they felt if you weren’t getting up and spending money fast enough they would give you a zip. It’s almost to a mad point.”

Also on view in the old Coney Island was an entire city that was composed of midgets and dwarfs, with everything built to scale.

“They even had their own fire department and own little police department,” he said.

Another strange exhibit included the incubator baby attraction by Dr. Martin Courney, who invented incubators but couldn’t get hospitals to take a chance
on them.

“You could come in and see the struggle between life and death,” he said.

Baker’s currently working on a book about the history of New York City baseball, and is penning another historical novel, this one about a mobster, Abe Reles, aka the second Kid Twist, and the events surrounding his death.

He also sees more change in store for his beloved Upper West Side.

“I think that what’s interesting now is all of the towers going up in the area and the huge number of wealthy people moving into these multi-million dollar condos and co-ops,” he said, “And what that’s going to mean for the identity of our neighborhood.”