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Mitch Albom: Bernie Smilovitz, after a career of highlights and hard work, signs off

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He’s had highlights. Lots of them. In fact, from the outside, it might seem that Bernie Smilovitz has led a charmed life. He wears nice suits, has good hair, talks about sports for three or four minutes on TV, does a cute shtick at the end, and calls it a night, right?

But nothing is as easy as it looks, and no life is as simple as a single sentence. This Monday, Smilovitz will do his final broadcast from the WDIV studios on Lafayette in downtown Detroit. For nearly 40 years, he’s has been a fixture on local television, delivering sports news, breaking sports stories, and making viewers smile with a unique irreverence that straddles silly but never reaches snarky. He’s been so wildly and consistently popular you can forget that, when he arrived in 1986, local journalists were yelling for his hide.

“During that first year, my wife, Donna, had to be hospitalized for seven weeks while she was pregnant,” Smilovitz recalls. “One day I was sitting in the hospital room and I opened the Free Press and there’s an article that says, ‘Get Smilovitz out of town! He’s one of the worst things that’s ever happened to us.’

“My wife looked over and said, ‘Is there anything new in the paper?’ And I closed it and said, ‘No, no, nothing.”

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Here is the first thing you should know about Smilovitz: He rolls with the punches. It’s in his DNA. His parents were both Holocaust survivors. His mother, Rita, as Bernie puts it, “walked out of Auschwitz.” Over a million people there were gassed, shot or starved to death. But Rita was one of 1,200 still alive when the camp was liberated.

Bernie inherited his mother’s fierce belief that, having survived the ultimate horror, anything in life was possible. Which explains a certain bravado he’s had his whole career, beginning when he was a pup.

Getting his start

Bernie came out of college in the mid-1970s and took a job answering phones at a Washington, D.C. radio station. One morning, he read a story in the New York Times about Albert King, then the top-rated high school basketball player in the country. King was considering attending the University of Maryland, which would have been big news in D.C..

“The story said Albert had moved out of his parents’ house and was living with a friend in Brooklyn named Winston Karim. So I found Winston’s phone number through information, called him up, told him I was with the CBS TV affiliate in Washington and we were very interested in doing a story on Albert. Winston said, ‘No problem, when?’ ” And I said, ‘How about Monday at noon?’ And he said, ‘See you then.’ ”

Now, mind you, Smilovitz at the time did NOT work for a TV station, was NOT a reporter, and had NO ONE telling him to do this. But his moxie led him quickly upstairs to the local TV news director, Jim Snyder, whom he’d NEVER MET.

“What do you want?”  Snyder barked.

Bernie said he had this exclusive story.

“And who are you?”

“I answer phones for the radio downstairs,” Smilovitz replied.

That should have been enough to get him tossed. But for some reason, the news director studied the lanky kid, then told his secretary to order two tickets on the shuttle to New York.

Needless to say, Bernie went to Brooklyn, not only got a story, but got King to tell him, on camera, what school he was choosing (Maryland.) He raced back to Washington, got the footage on the air that night, and the next day, walked into the newsroom and received a standing ovation.

Two weeks later, he had his own sports radio show.

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A great leap forward

From there, Bernie’s career was like a series of Super Mario Bros. jumps. He parlayed that radio job into a five-day-a-week TV slot in Washington. He parlayed that TV slot into the lead sports anchor job at WDIV-TV in Detroit, sitting alongside Mort Crim and Carmen Harlan.

By that point, he’d already been honing an irreverent approach to sports.

“I was told at the time that only 5% percent of people watching the news really cared about sports, and the other 95% did not. I figured, what would be the best side to try to pull people from, the 5% or the 95?”

Which meant more general stuff, more humor, and less X’s and O’s. At the time, WDIV was accustomed to serious, straightforward sports segments, with two minutes worth of highlights from a game narrated by a reporter.

Bernie quickly did the math. If he only got four minutes total on air, two minutes was a huge chunk of real estate to surrender. So he began doing the highlights himself. And a new approach was born.

“I always felt no matter where I was, I was running for public office. I needed to keep them interested. People want to laugh. They want to laugh more than they want to do anything else.

“I also got good advice from a mentor once. He said, ‘If you’re having a good time, people will have a good time watching.’ ’’

You can’t deny it always looks like Bernie is having a good time, even if it rankles critics and competitors. Early on, to court that 95% audience, Bernie began inserting accessible mini-features to end his segments. Videos of a squirrel running across a baseball field. Or a guy asleep in the stands. Or players colliding and flipping over each other.

He added carnival music, created cute names like “Weekend at Bernie’s” or “Bernie’s Bloopers” and built a loyal following that made him, if not the darling of humorless critics, the clear favorite of the viewers. Smilovitz and his co-anchors at WDIV have dominated the ratings for most of his career. And when you consider three broadcasts a day (the 5 p.m., 6 p.m.and 11 p.m.) five days a week, he has now done, by rough estimate, around 26,000 sportscasts.

That’s a lot of real estate.

By the way, his signature phrase, “We’ve got highlights”? It wasn’t shtick. It was simply his way of signaling the director that it was time to roll tape. Yet it became a mantra. The station used it as his calling card in promotions. People shout it at him when he passes.

“Hey, We Got Highlights guy!”

More than highlights

But reducing Smilovitz’s work to a catchphrase is a disservice. He cultivated excellent personal relationships with many of the biggest names in Detroit sports — Chuck Daly, Sparky Anderson, Joe Dumars, Isiah Thomas, Jacques Demers, Jim Leyland, Matthew Stafford — and when there was news to be made, they often spoke to him first.

That same journalistic instinct that drove him to the Albert King story, for example, was evident in 2000 when Grant Hill was considering leaving the Pistons. Everyone wanted to interview Hill. But nobody knew where he was camping out. One day, Smilovitz caught Hill doing a radio interview and heard children in the background. He deduced that Hill was likely at the home of his wife, Tamia, whose family lived in Windsor. So he grabbed his longtime producer Ro Coppola, and drove with a news truck across the border at 10 p.m., found out where Tamia’s family lived, and knocked on the door.

“Grant came out and said, ‘You got me. You figured it out. What do you need?’ We did a long interview that ran over the next three nights.’’

That’s not shtick. That’s reporting. Smilovitz has done far more of that than people realize.

He’s also endured severe bumps in the road that belie the idea that his life rolls easy.

In 1993, Smilovitz was offered the lead sports anchor job at WCBS in New York. Because his family was on the East Coast — and no doubt lured by the nation’s biggest market — he took the job. It was brutal. The harsh New York critics did not appreciate his lighter style (one nasty New York Times writer actually penned “I would rather watch Storm Field, Frank Fields, Sally Fields or Mrs. Fields deliver the sports.”)

Less than three years into his stay, he received a call from his agent on a Friday night.

“You’ve just done your last broadcast for CBS in New York,” the agent said.

Smilovitz was so blindsided, he says, that at first he thought he was getting a promotion to network news.

He wasn’t. WCBS had abruptly fired him, along with a host of others in a cost-cutting move. Bernie Smilovitz, top of the world guy, was out of a job.

For an hour.

Returning to Detroit

WDIV called immediately and offered him his old job back. And in a matter of weeks, he returned to Detroit. He wasn’t sheepish. He didn’t shy away from what happened.

“My parents showed me what it is to bounce back,” he says.

He took his old seat and picked up where he left off. And for the next few decades, he’s been synonymous with Detroit sports. He’s been celebrated, embraced and appreciated. Not many people can stay on top in a competitive TV market for years, let alone four different decades.

But nothing lasts forever. And the recent years have reminded Smilovitz, sometimes painfully, that work is only a part of your tapestry, often the easiest part. He saw the joy of his two sons graduating from Michigan and becoming successful husbands and parents. But he lost his father and then his mother, who lived to the ripe old age of 97. 

Then, the toughest blow of all. Last October, Bernie’s wife, Donna, a pillar of their family, mother to their two children, and a beloved member of the community, died in his arms at age 66 after a sudden blood clot in the middle of the night.

It was a death that seemed incongruous for a man synonymous with lightheartedness. I personally watched him endure the grief. The sudden emptiness of the house they had shared for decades. The blank stare that comes after the funeral. The voice that silently screams “What do I do now?”

When he finally returned to his duties on WDIV, you could feel the empathy of his co-hosts and his vast audience. Even the usually gruff Lions coach Dan Campbell stopped in the middle of a news conference to say to Bernie: “My heart goes out to you, man. God bless you.”

Now, less than a year after that life-altering event, Smilovitz is leaving WDIV. The station and Bernie himself announced what each side is calling an amicable “buyout.” But you can bet, in today’s corporate world of TV news, this is about saving money as much as anything else. I highly doubt Bernie would have walked away on his own. Not now. Not when the job was an anchor in his recent sea of grief.

But the TV business is still, firstly, a business, and so the man who occupied the seat all these years will vacate it Monday night. He’s not dying. He’s 71 and as vibrant as a man 20 years younger. But something’s lost and something’s gained in living every day. Joni Mitchell wrote that. Bernie Smilovitz is living it.

“Hey, there’s not a place I could have gone that treated me better or treated my family better,” he says of Detroit. “Both my kids were born here. I’ve been here more than half my life. I just appreciate everything I’ve got. Channel 4 gave me everything I have in my life.

“There’s no way you can thank or appreciate everybody the way they deserve, but I do. For watching, for supporting me. I love everybody here. I’ve made lifelong friends. And they’ll continue to be lifelong friends.

“I’m not going anywhere. I’m staying here. I love Michigan. I love Detroit. I may be spending more time at home. But I’ll be doing something.”

I end our conversation with a cliched question. When people remember him, how would he want them to finish the sentence “That Bernie Smilovitz, he was …”

“One lucky (bleep)!” he interjects, cracking up. “Hey, my mother walked out of Auschwitz. What are we talking about here? Of course, I was lucky! I loved what I did. I had passion for what I did. If that’s not lucky, what is?”

Exit, laughing. His name is Bernie Smilovitz and he’s had highlights — more than most of us. In the end, what else can you want from a career?

Contact Mitch Albom: malbom@freepress.com. Check out the latest updates with his charities, books and events at MitchAlbom.com. Follow him @mitchalbom.

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