By Jimmy Roberts
When I was a kid, my father loved big band music and I remember thinking: “God — why? Who could ever think this stuff was cool?”
It’s not like I’ve had a musical epiphany and find myself now bingeing on Harry James music (Google if you’re younger than 60), but these days I do better understand the divide between the generations. It’s both disturbing and easy to see how quickly time passes.
It hit me like a ton of bricks a few years back when I was talking to a class at the University of Texas, about 100 students, all of whom aspired to one day make a living in some facet of sports communications.
At one point, I found myself telling the students about a man I used to work for, Howard Cosell. But when I mentioned his name, I looked around the room only to see blank stares.
Could it be? These otherwise bright young people who wanted to work in sports had never heard of arguably the most famous sportscaster of all time?
Cosell was not only that, he was outrageous, brilliant, colorful, and polarizing. He was a huge piece of the cultural landscape — an enormous celebrity. With his typical bombast, Howard used to say, “Half the people love me and half the people hate me. But ALL of the people listen to me.”
He would add, accurately, “I’m one of the three C’s of broadcasting. “Cronkite, Carson, and Cosell.” And those other guys? The newsman? The late-night TV host? Never mind, there’s a word limit on this column.
“Who’s heard of Howard Cosell,” I asked the class?
I got maybe 15 hands, at least half of them tentatively raised.
Oy.
I mean it wasn’t like I asked them about big band music. But maybe it was.
We accept it as an article of faith that time flies, we just don’t think we’re passengers on the flight — until we are, and find ourselves desperately hitting the call button, hoping some imagined flight attendant will help us deal with the turbulence.
To live in the past is unquestionably not a good thing. But to honor it? Absolutely. And to visit it now and again? Why not?
For young people who roll their eyes when “old folks” talk about Woodstock or manual transmission cars or Wide World of Sports (again — Google it), remember this: Everyone’s got a past. You too will one day (sooner than you think) look back fondly. The key word in that sentence? Fondly. We could all use a few more fond thoughts in our lives, right?
Now we’ve got AI. The other day I asked Chat GPT to write an essay in my voice and style. Omg! It was close. It lacked the nuance, but it won’t for long.
These days, a killer sound system is compact enough to carry around in your backpack. It just doesn’t feel like that long ago it was furniture that made dorm move-in day an exhausting exercise.
The problem with “remember when” is that you can get stuck there.
I love The Allman Brothers Band, but I’d have been missing some good music if I’d never sampled the Avett Brothers.
My kids think I’m something of a museum piece, which is, I guess, how I felt about my father. Don’t look now, but we’re not far from a world of self-driving cars. I tell my kids: good luck explaining to THEIR kids (not born yet) what it was like to have learned to parallel park.
“Wait, why? You had to take a driver’s test?”
Maybe the trick is to not live in the past, but to respect it and understand that one day, although it seems impossible to imagine, you will look back fondly.
Rye resident Jimmy Roberts is a 13-time Emmy Award-winning broadcaster and writer, known most recently for his work on NBC and Golf Channel as an essayist, interviewer, feature reporter, and studio host.