He had his moments of glory. A lot of them. In fact, from the outside looking in, it might seem like Bernie Smilovitz has a privileged life: He wears a nice suit, has nice hair, goes on TV to talk about sports for three or four minutes, does some cute antics at the end, and then calls it a day. Right?
But nothing is as simple as it seems, and nothing in life is as simple as a sentence. This Monday, Smilovitz will broadcast for the last time from WDIV studios in Lafayette, in downtown Detroit. For nearly four decades, he’s been a fixture on local TV, delivering sports news and breaking sports updates and making audiences laugh with his signature irreverence that’s absurd but never mean-spirited. He’s so enthusiastic and consistently popular that it’s easy to forget that when he arrived in 1986, local journalists were screaming to hang him.
“That first year, my wife, Donna, was pregnant and had to be hospitalized for seven weeks,” Smilovitz recalled. “I was sitting in my hospital room one day and I opened the Free Press, and there was an article in there that said, ‘Get Smilovitz out of town! He’s one of the worst things that’s ever happened to us.'”
“My wife looked at the paper and said, ‘What’s new?’ I closed the paper and said, ‘No, there’s nothing.'”
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The first thing you need to know about Smilovic is that he perseveres. It’s in his DNA. Both of his parents are Holocaust survivors. His mother, Rita, “walked out of Auschwitz,” in Bernie’s words, where more than a million people were gassed, shot, and starved to death. But she was one of 1,200 people who survived when the camp was liberated.
Bernie inherited his mother’s strong belief that having survived the ultimate horror, he can do anything in life, which explains the kind of bravery he has carried from the time he was a puppy through his career.
start
Bernie graduated from college in the mid-1970s and got a job answering phones at a radio station in Washington, D.C. One morning, he read an article in the New York Times about Albert King, who was the top high school basketball player in the country at the time. King was considering attending the University of Maryland, which would have been big news in D.C.
“The article said that Albert had moved out of his parents’ home and was living with a friend named Winston Karim in Brooklyn. So I found Winston’s phone number through my information, called him and said I worked for the CBS television affiliate in Washington and I’d be very interested in doing a story about Albert. Winston said, ‘No problem. When?’ So I said, ‘How about Monday at noon?’ And he said, ‘Then I’ll see you.'”
To be clear, Smilovitz wasn’t working for a TV station, wasn’t a reporter, and had no instructions to do so, but his courage soon led him upstairs to a local TV news director, Jim Snyder, whom he had never met.
“What do you want?” Snyder yelled.
Bernie said he had this exclusive.
“And who are you?”
“I’m on the radio call downstairs,” Smilovitz replied.
That alone should have gotten him fired, but somehow the news director took notice of the lanky boy and instructed his secretary to order two tickets for a shuttle to New York.
Needless to say, Bernie went to Brooklyn and not only did the article, he got King to tell him on camera which school he would choose (Maryland), he rushed back to Washington, aired the footage that night, and walked into the newsroom the next day to a standing ovation.
Two weeks later, he had his own sports radio show.
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A big step forward
From there, Bernie’s career was a Mario Brothers streak: He went from that radio job to a five-day-a-week TV slot in Washington, D.C., which landed him a job as lead sports anchor alongside Mort Crim and Carmen Harlan at WDIV-TV in Detroit.
By that point, he had already honed his irreverent approach to the sport.
“At the time, I heard that only 5% of people who watch the news are really interested in sports, and the other 95% aren’t. I wondered, which is the best way to attract viewers? The 5% or the 95%?”
That meant more general content, more humor, and fewer X’s and O’s. At the time, WDIV was accustomed to serious, straightforward sports segments that included two-minute game highlights narrated by reporters.
Bernie did the math quickly: With only four minutes total airtime, two minutes is a lot of space to give away. So he started making the highlights himself. And a new approach was born.
“I always felt like I was running for office wherever I was. I needed to keep people engaged. People want to laugh. They want to laugh more than anything.”
“I once received some great advice from a mentor. He said, ‘If you’re having fun, the people watching will have fun too.'”
Even if he angered critics and competitors, there’s no denying that Bernie always seemed to be having fun. Early on, to secure the approval of 95 percent of his viewers, Bernie began inserting easy-to-follow mini-features at the end of his shows: a video of a squirrel running through a baseball field. Or a man asleep in the stands. Or a video of players colliding and falling over.
He added carnival music and cutesy names like “Weekend at Barney’s” and “Barney’s Bloopers,” building a loyal following and becoming a favorite of viewers, if not humorless critics. Smilovitz and his WDIV co-hosts have dominated the ratings for much of his career, and considering he broadcasts five days a week, three times a day (5 p.m., 6 p.m., 11 p.m.), he’s now doing roughly 26,000 sports broadcasts.
That’s quite a bit of real estate.
And what about his catchphrase, “I’ve got the highlights”? It wasn’t a routine. It was just his way of signaling to the director that it was time to roll the tape. But it became a mantra. Broadcasters used it as his promotional calling card. People would shout it at him as he walked by.
“Hey, We Got Highlights!”
More than a highlight
But it would be an insult to trivialize Smilovitz’s work with a catchphrase: He had great personal relationships with some of the biggest names in Detroit sports — Chuck Daly, Sparky Anderson, Joe Dumars, Isiah Thomas, Jack Demers, Jim Leyland and Matthew Stafford — and if there was anything newsworthy going on, he was often the first person they turned to.
The same journalistic instincts that drove him in the Albert King case, for example, were evident in 2000 when Grant Hill was considering leaving the Pistons. Everyone wanted to interview Hill; but no one knew where he was camped. One day, Smilovitz saw Hill being interviewed on the radio and heard his kids in the background. He guessed Hill was probably at his wife Tamia’s house in Windsor. So he took his longtime producer, Lo Coppola, and they drove across the border in a news truck at 10 p.m., tracked down Tamia’s family residence, and knocked on the door.
“Grant came out and said, ‘You got me. You get me. What do you need?’ We then had a lengthy interview over the next three nights.”
That’s not gossip. That’s coverage. Smilovitz has had a lot more coverage than people realize.
He has also endured severe hardships that belie the idea that life will go smoothly.
In 1993, Smilovitz was offered a sports anchor position at WCBS in New York. With family living on the East Coast and lured by arguably the largest market in the country, he took the job. It was a tough one; New York’s toughest critics were not pleased with his light-hearted style. (One cantankerous New York Times reporter actually wrote that they would “like to see Storm Field, Frank Field, Sally Field or Mrs. Field commentate on sports.”)
Less than three years into his stay, he got a call from his agent one Friday night.
“You just finished your last show for CBS in New York,” the agent said.
Smilovitz said it was so unexpected that at first he thought he’d be promoted to network news.
He wasn’t: WCBS suddenly fired him, along with many others, as part of a cost-cutting measure that left Bernie Smilovitz, the world’s top executive, out of a job.
About an hour.
Return to Detroit
WDIV called him right away and offered him his old job back, and within a few weeks he was back in Detroit. He wasn’t embarrassed. He wasn’t ashamed of what had happened.
“My parents taught me what it meant to be resilient,” he says.
He took his old seat and picked up where he left off, and in the decades that followed, he became synonymous with Detroit sports. He was celebrated, embraced and appreciated. Not many people can hold the top spot for so many years in a competitive television market, much less for four decades.
But nothing lasts forever, and the past few years have been a reminder, sometimes painfully, that work is only one part of life’s tapestry — and often the easiest part. He’d happily watched his two sons graduate from the University of Michigan and become successful husbands and parents. But he’d lost his father, and then his mother, who lived to the ripe old age of 97.
Then, most tragically, Bernie’s wife, Donna – a pillar of their family, mother of their two children, and beloved member of the community – died suddenly in the middle of the night from a blood clot at age 66 in her husband’s arms.
It was an out-of-place loss for a man who was the epitome of ease. I personally watched him endure his grief; the sudden emptiness of a home he’d shared for decades; the blank looks that came after his funeral; the quiet cries of, “What do we do now?”
When he finally returned to his WDIV duties, the sympathy of his co-stars and legions of viewers was palpable. Even the normally surly Lions coach, Dan Campbell, stopped mid-press conference to say to Barney, “My deepest condolences. May God bless you.”
Less than a year after that life-changing event, Smilovitz is leaving WDIV. The network and Bernie himself announced what both sides called a friendly “buyout.” But in today’s corporate world of TV news, this is surely more about saving money than anything else. It’s hard to imagine Bernie quitting of his own accord. Not now. Not when this job has been his anchor in the sea of his latest sorrow.
But television is a business, and the man who has held the reins for so many years is giving it up on Monday night. He’s not dying. He’s 71 and as healthy as someone 20 years younger. But by living each day, you lose something and gain something. Joni Mitchell wrote that. Bernie Smilovitz embodies that.
“There’s no other place that has treated me and my family better,” he says of Detroit. “Both my children were born here. I’ve lived here for over half my life. I’m grateful for everything I have. Channel 4 has given me everything it has in my life.”
“I can’t express the gratitude everyone deserves, but I will. For watching, for supporting. I love everyone here. I’ve made lifelong friends, and they will remain lifelong friends.”
“I’m not going anywhere. I’m here. I love Michigan. I love Detroit. I might be spending more time at home. But I’m going to do something.”
I end our conversation with a basic question: When people remember him, how would you like the sentence to end, “That Bernie Smilovitz…”
“I’m a lucky guy (bleep),” he interjects with a laugh. “Hey, my mom walked out of Auschwitz. What are you talking about? Of course I was lucky! I loved my job. I was passionate about my job. If that’s not lucky, then what is?”
He exits laughing. His name is Bernie Smilovitz, and he’s had more success with his career than most of us. After all, what more could you ask for in a career?
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