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Monday, December 10, 2001

Greg Gumbel stood high above Heinz Field yesterday afternoon and marveled. He delighted in the ambience of the new address. “The Denver stadium is awful. First of all, they built it to shake like Mile High Stadium. But this is beautiful.”

He reveled in the home-theater system that is the scoreboard, allowing him to watch two (count them, two) NFL games at once. “I’ll have to get those guys to come to my house and wire me up.”

He even liked the seats.

Yes, the dude relished The Mustard Bowl.

“Phil and I were talking, we just love the yellow seats,” Gumbel said, referring to his CBS partner Phil Simms. “I think it gives the place some atmosphere, some life.”

“Not like you’re going to see them [empty] for a while,” Simms added.

The only factors that would have made yesterday better for the play-by-play guy: warmer weather and a resodded surface full of Rolling Stones.

Nothing against Jets and Steelers, but Gumbel, the network’s lead football announcer and NCAA basketball tournament studio-desk host, has been Stones-struck since the British Invasion. He has seen the band in concert at least once every tour since 1965, since his days as a collegian. He is 55 now and gets to hang with Mick and the boys backstage, but he still refuses to miss a stop through the years: ’65, ’67, ’69, ’73, ’75, ’78, ’81, ’89, the ’90s ... maybe even next summer, so he hears.

“They might need a cardiac unit nearby, but I love them,” Gumbel said. “I tell people all the time, if I was ugly and skinny, I would have been a Rolling Stone.

“We were doing a game in Philadelphia earlier this year. A guy asked, ‘Is this your first time here for an Eagles game?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘You mean, you’ve never been to the Vet before?’ ‘I didn’t say that -- three times for the Stones.’ ”

Gumbel doesn’t prattle, doesn’t intrude, doesn’t detract from the game. He is probably the reason Simms grew into America’s Finest Football Announcer. On his own merits, Gumbel comes close in the play-by-play category, but he finishes strong in an the All-Around competition because he is much more than a football guy.

If you recall, he worked eight years as an studio host, once toiling alongside a young Terry Bradshaw whom CBS’ intelligentsia constantly asked to tone down his act. When the network returned to the NFL business more than three years ago, it plunked him in a football booth alongside heretofore fellow NBC employee Simms and gave him the studio desk amid the hoops hysteria trademarked as March Madness. He enjoys the mix.

Of signing a three-year contract extension last spring, he said, “God, when it expires in ’06, I will be 60 years old. I still consider that to be ... somewhat young. I’ve been lucky. When the time comes around, I’ll see if I want to keep doing this.”

An NFL studio desk, his previous incarnations on NBC and CBS, doesn’t interest him. Three basketball weeks a year behind a constantly updating studio desk is enough for him.

“I feel like I never want to go back to that,” Gumbel said of the place where Jim Nantz now sits for the network. “It was nice and it was fun, but that was then. It’s far too exciting to be at the scene of a game. God, I got a chance to do a Super Bowl last season. It was phenomenal. OK, it wasn’t the best game in the world ...”

When Gumbel got to sit down with Baltimore Coach Brian Billick this past preseason, he opened the conversation, “On behalf of everybody at CBS, thanks for screwing up our Super Bowl.” Or when his old buddy Bradshaw called to talk about getting a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, Gumbel reorted, “Where is it, between Jethro and Uncle Jed?” Covering the Steelers yesterday, CBS’ top team was up to its usual insight and entertainment. “Three good drives, but only 12 points,” Simms assessed of the Steelers’ first half. Toward the end of that half, Gumbel began to throw it to a commercial, then halted midthrow. “Greg changed his mind,” Simms joked. “I’m going to change it again,” Gumbel replied.

Sure, Gumbel was too quick to call Plaxico Burress’s third-quarter sideline grab a touchdown when it was out of bounds. (“We just got to get a better seat,” Simms joked.)

It was good to hear the network’s best. As Uncle Jed might say, Ya’all come back to The Mustard Bowl, ya hear.

In addition to The Big Picture, Chuck Finder writes a general-sports column exclusive to the http://www.post-gazette.com/ every Tuesday. He can be reached at cfinder@post-gazette.com