Gotta be a blast to make a great income doing what he does.
If I worked a TV job like Marty Smith, I think the travel would get tough. It’s got to be hard being away from your family that often.
Yeah it would be fun for about a season and then get really old and lonely, Id imagine
Having hopped on and off airplanes for 30+ years for my career I can attest it gets to be a drag. Since I retired almost 6 years ago the only airplanes I’v been on was to go to Israel. Which was well worth it. But it makes for lots of stories to tell. Some good, many not so good.
Does the ESPN crew fly commercial or private?
The basketball announcers — and almost all others — are flying commercial.
Kirk Herbstreit has a special arrangement where he flies private.
Yeah he does Gameday early in the morning and then jets off to call a game somewhere else. Flying commercial isn’t going to work for that.
Marty lives in Charlotte, which makes the commute a little easier (Charlotte being a hub for American Airlines). There are a whole gob of airports with nonstop flights from CLT, including XNA. Not much having to go from Terminal D to Terminal B to make a connecting flight, like I did Monday in Atlanta.
That would get very tiresome, especially if there are connections to be made rather than direct flights from XNA.
I read about one of his weekend trips in 2022. He called the Thursday night NFL game in Denver and flew to Lawrence, Kan., that night for Friday production meetings ahead of Gameday; flew to Cincinnati on Friday afternoon for his youngest son’s high school game and back to Lawrence; then on Saturday had Gameday, flew to East Lansing, Mich., for an afternoon game before returning home to Cincinnati.
Private aircraft or not, that’s quite the three-day load.
Unless it’s a team like Vanderbilt in a major metro area, travel to SEC towns is almost always going to include a connection or a lengthy drive to and from the airport — or maybe both.
Jimmy Dykes called the Arkansas-Alabama game with Jay Bilas because Karl Ravech had travel issues flying through Chicago. Dykes and Ravech had called a game the night before in Lexington.
Dykes called the Arkansas-Texas A&M game this week and was in Gainesville the following night for Tennessee-Florida. I’m sure he’ll be somewhere this weekend, too.
I thought Kirk lived in Nashville, not Cincy. I know nutso Suckeye fans chased him out of Columbus where he lived for years.
He moved back to Cincinnati a couple of years ago for his son to play high school football for a certain coach. Kirk lived in the Cincinnati area for part of his childhood. I get the feeling he considers Cincinnati home, though he attended high school near Dayton.
I’m reading his autobiography right now. It is very good. He had a hard childhood.
This is not about commentators but was listening to ESPNU radio coming from the gym the other day and they were talking about how some of these officials are really overworked they called out this guy schedule and he called 7 games in 8 days starting off with a game in New Jersey on Sat then flew across country to Oregon the next day and then several places in between the next week ended up taking a night game on the following Saturday night followed by a noon game on Sunday.
They were talking about a lot of these officials are overworked especially the good ones and that might be why you’re seeing some officiating not be up to par and I could totally believe that after listening to his schedule …it was insane
Dudley tells the story of an official who he watched call a game at the Maui Invitational one night, then saw eating Tim’s Pizza the following afternoon before a game that night in Fayetteville. The officials take as many games as they can because that is their primary source of income.
Yeah I was looking up what some of these conferences pay and I think the SEC Big 10 ACC May pay up to $2,000 a game so that’s quite a bundle of cash if you’re working as much as they are
Yep, but they cover their own expenses, and those flights and hotels add up fast,
No doubt… that’s a very hectic lifestyle for sure.
That’s a heavy carbon footprint for Kirk
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