By David Geffner

"It was a high-risk fire drill," chuckles Andy Rosenberg, directing his 11th NBA finals, "and the kind of pressure we thrive on. I had ten different cameras on the floor looking for close-ups, ten separate tape rolls laid in three minutes, and Carlos literally counting down to the teaser as we grabbed our shots. You always want to start the broadcast clean, because how you open up sets the tone for the rest of the game."

Game producer Ed Feibischoff, who has won five Emmys with NBC Sports, including coverage of the Atlanta, Sydney and Barcelona Olympics, works so closely with Rosenberg, the pair physically rub shoulders in front of the preview monitors. "For the opening to game five," Feibischoff adds, "we decided we needed to get inside the heads of this Laker team to see if it had the maturity to close out a championship. The way to communicate that visually was with five live cross-rolls and Doug's commentary. But after the anthem ended we had less than a minute before our teaser began. And it's not like we had any time to celebrate after we pulled it off. We had to jump out of our seats for the pre-game team that are high-fiving us on the way out. In moments like that you have to trust your teammates and go on professional instinct, just like those guys out on the court you're covering."

The NBC Crew highlighted from left, front: producer Ed Feibischoff, director Andy Rosenberg. Rear: AD Carlos Demolina, AD Carol Larson, director John Gilmartin. click photo for larger view

Demolina observes that the emotion inside the truck often mirrors what's happening in the game. If the action on court is one-sided, it becomes a challenge for the NBC Sports team to keep the production level up and the viewer interested. "If it's a tight game," the AD adds, "like the opening-game overtime in Los Angeles, then it's just like being out on the court. The energy in the truck gets very high and the coverage is pure basketball. We'll usually slack off the pre-edited footage that often goes in when the game bogs down and just let the energy of the game carry us."

Even though Demolina has worked in the truck with Andy Rosenberg for five years, the AD still finds himself slack-jawed by Rosenberg's directing skills. "Andy has this incredible sixth sense. He can anticipate cutaways of on-court reactions that have so much emotion and drama, you wonder if he knew it was going to happen before the players did," Demolina laughs. "For the NBA finals, Andy has 25 cameras at his disposal. But without that special feel for the flow of the game that he has, the story would not have been told properly and most of those cameras would have gone to waste."

The story, even in a non-scripted live sporting event like the finals, is usually the biggest factor in how a network's coverage will fare. Hardcore Laker and Sixer fans always tune in, but to attract a large TV share, NBC is compelled to rope in the casual viewer as well. Although this year's finals were wrapped up in five games by a Laker team so good they rewrote history — losing only once throughout their entire playoff run — the real story NBC pounded home was the grit of the underdog Sixers. According to finals producer Ed Feibischoff, who covered both the Lakers and the Sixers throughout the season, this year's event came ready-made with interesting story lines.

"You go in with Shaq vs. Iverson and immediately the David vs. Goliath story presents itself," notes Feibischoff, who has worked with Andy Rosenberg since 1991 in various capacities, starting as a PA and rising up to his current spot as game producer. "We'll prepare tape elements about Shaq the superman, about Kobe coming home to Lower Merion High School, about Aaron McKee, on the Sixers, who played college ball at Temple University in Philadelphia. I'll meet with Carlos to discuss all the tape elements we want to have in our hip pocket and Carlos will edit them as well as write the copy for the announcers when they are rolled in. We have more than 100 tape elements prepared for the finals that we may or may not use. We don't force a story if the game doesn't dictate it. But we don't shy away from emphasizing the inherent drama and the off-court stories everyone's talking about."

The current team working with Rosenberg and Feibischoff is considered the very best in the industry. "The DGA members are so solid and their experience is invaluable," Feibischoff adds. "I came up the ranks as a Directors Guild AD (doing the job Demolina does now). That time in the truck watching the directors and producers and figuring out what my niche would be was an experience second-to-none. Carol Larson started as a graphics PA, like Carlos, and Andy worked as a replay director early in his career. There's a continuity inside that truck that definitely contributes to our ability to execute under such intense pressure."

Lest it appear that broadcasting yet another NBA finals for veterans like Rosenberg, Demolina and director John Gilmartin, gets old, consider the additions this year. For the first time ever in an NBA final, NBC added live musical halftime performances. Carol Larson said, "The live music shows were completely beyond anything we've ever done in sports. For me it was the most challenging part of the finals."

The live performances — which received plenty of media attention, both positive and negative — were an attempt by NBC Sports to expand their core basketball audience. Rather than cutting to game analysts for first-half dissections, three different live halftime segments were presented during games one, four and five. In game one, NBC took in a live feed from Boston's Fleet Center, where rock group U2 was performing. As the first half of game one concluded, John Gilmartin and his team came out of a commercial and immediately "threw it live" to a remote truck in Boston just as U2 was beginning a song. "They had their own tour crew," Carol Larson recalls, "so the Boston truck just had to cut in the live feed. The tricky part was the timing: we came out of a commercial right as U2 was starting a song. We'd never done anything like that during an NBA game, and the timing had to be perfect."

For games four and five, Destiny's Child and Sugar Ray performed live inside Philly's First Union Center. Larson notes that she numbered each of Gilmartin's camera angles in synchronization with the performers' moves onstage. Larson counted off each angle for Gilmartin before they occurred so courtside camera operators would be on target. In preparation for Destiny's Child, Gilmartin and Larson went to see the group taping The Rosie O'Donnell Show in Manhattan. They had Rosie's audio person tape the mikes to get a sense of how the performance would go.

"John repositioned game cameras on the floor," Larson adds, "and used approximately ten cameras, including our normal pre-game Steadicam. Our main goal was to be sure the audio quality was high, the cameras were all up and running, and that we were on certain singers or dancers when they were doing their solos. It was so different than a game, where you go wherever the action takes you. These performances were rehearsed with lighting and sound cues. And we had to work closely with the NBA to ensure the groups were off the court before the players returned for their warm-ups."

When it comes to championship sporting events, there are few directors more experienced or passionate about their work than Andy Rosenberg. Beginning his career at WBZ in Boston, Rosenberg worked as a local producer/director for seven years, before taking over as lead director of NBC Golf for Don Ohlmeyer in 1980. Ten years later, in the 1990/1991 season, NBC secured the contract to broadcast the NBA and Rosenberg has been leading the network's telecasts ever since. The director has garnered 11 Emmys for his work, including the 1991 and 1996 NBA finals.

"I think there's two key aspects to directing live sports," Rosenberg reflects from his Connecticut home, only days before leaving to direct NBC's broadcast of Wimbledon. "The first is that you have to document the game, which is the basic nuts and bolts of the job. But what really makes you a director is getting involved in the storytelling and emotion of the game. That can mean focusing on an individual player who is having a superlative night, as Allen Iverson did in game one; or highlighting the tension between players — Shaq and Kobe for example; or showing off-the-ball work, as when Dikembe Mutumbo was taken out of the game for too many fouls and had to sit helplessly on the bench while Shaq stuffed three straight dunks against his replacement. There are emotional aspects to these games that TV cameras with close-ups can capture to enhance the story."

The preparation before each game of the NBA finals is as thorough as any military campaign. Rosenberg, Feibischoff, and announcers Doug Collins and Marv Albert meet with players and coaches from both teams. The main goal is to flush out current stories and themes for Collins and Albert, but the visits also help Rosenberg to anticipate game-day events.

"Doug Collins noticed early on in one of the games," Rosenberg explains, "that Iverson had happy feet at the free-throw line — his percentage in the finals was down significantly from during the season. So I isolated a camera just on Allen's feet at the free-throw line. We're really the third team out there, along with the Lakers and Sixers, and I'm like the coach with my camera and tape team. We all come in with game plans and just as the coaches of the Sixers and Lakers have to make their adjustments, we do the same in our broadcast."

Rosenberg has created a booklet for each of his camera operators clarifying their assignments in every potential game situation the director has seen in his 11 NBA finals. But he's careful to never micromanage his crew. "With more than 2,000 camera cuts in a typical NBA game," Rosenberg notes, "I am responsible for every single shot that goes out on-air. But if I see a camera operator going out of pattern during the finals then I know that person is showing me something that he or she thinks is essential to our coverage, and I give it serious consideration. The level of trust is very high because it really is like being in a battle. I don't think it's too sentimental to say this crew has a very special bond."

Going to battle, which is how the NBA finals have often been described in their winner-take-all intensity, is an apt metaphor for the NBC Sports team. They travel together from Christmas through June, and often see each other more than their own families, just like the men they are covering. Andy Rosenberg even read aloud to his crew during the finals, just as Phil Jackson does with his players.

"I'm a die-hard Boston Celtics fan," the director laughs, "and there are several die-hard Laker fans on the crew. Over the course of each game I read from Bill Russell's new book Russell Rules: 11 Lessons on Leadership from the Twentieth Century's Greatest Winner. Doing that in the heart of the Staples Center is a little gutsy. But when the Lakers guys on the crew complain I just tell them to go and count the banners."

At the championship level, pro basketball may be the most fluid and exciting spectator sport television can offer. And if the NBA finals are "a series of great snapshots from an all-out test of wills," as Carlos Demolina offers, then like all great battles, the memories that linger the longest are often gleaned from the eyes of the combatants. As Andy Rosenberg concludes: "If a director of live sports can have a signature style, then I'd like to think mine is lingering on a telling emotional shot. Trying to find just that right angle to convey the drama that's so present in these young men's eyes. What I'll remember most from this year's finals were two images that were a study in contrast. The disappointment and sheer exhaustion of Allen Iverson when he knew the series was lost and Larry Brown had taken him out with a minute left in the game. And Kobe and Shaq embracing moments after the championship was theirs. Those were two story lines that we had followed from the outset and it was so gratifying to convey with our cameras the emotion that poured out from these warriors when the series came to an end."

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