Tom Hammond-Races, Games, and Olympic Dreams. A Sportscaster's Life

Speaking of Writers

In sports, not all the long shots who succeed are athletes. In 1984, Tom Hammond, a forty-year-old sportscaster who had primarily worked in Kentucky and the Southeast, got an unlikely opportunity to appear on the NBC Sports telecast of the inaugural Breeders' Cup. Assigned to report from the stall area on what was supposed to be a single broadcast, Hammond performed so well that an NBC executive offered him a chance to call NFL games on the spot. That broadcast launched Hammond's thirty-four-year career with NBC Sports and his rise to the top levels of American television sportscasting. Along with cowriter Mark Story, Hammond pulls back the curtain to reveal how a Kentucky native who started out reading horse racing results on Lexington radio went on to broadcast from thirteen Olympic Games.

Tom Hammond is a retired American sports broadcaster. Mark Story, a sports reporter with the Lexington Herald-Leader for more than three decades, has been a sports columnist since 2001. He writes about college football and basketball and has covered every Kentucky Derby since 1994.