America's Cup TV: With Assist from Annie, OLN On Right Track

By Rich Roberts

After a bumpy start, for better or for worse, the Outdoor Life Network has established itself as North America's window on the Louis Vuitton Cup challenger trials for the America's Cup. It's too early to think about an Emmy nomination, but it came a long way through the first round.

Let's face it, it's tough for a rookie team plunging into the deep end of an unfamiliar sport far afield from its normal fare of blasting birds and hooking fish.

Then add the problems of piggybacking a production from 10,000 miles away with an audio and video feed over which you have no control, races that can't be sailed because there's too much wind and then not enough wind, and finally your expert commentators bailing out because they have their own racing commitments and you have a bunch of people left wondering whose idea was this, anyway.

Annie Nelson to the rescue!

Well, maybe that's a wee stretch, but OLN was lucky to land the San Diego sailor for the last two shows of the first round.

"They called me the day before I flew out there," she said---"there" being east to OLN's studios at South Hartford, Conn., not southwest to New Zealand. "I flew into JFK and they picked me up with a limo.

"What happened was, everything got extended so far with the races being delayed that Chris [Law] had to go back to Bermuda and race and Dawn [Riley] had already left to race. I flew the red-eye to get there, and the first night I was pretty much a wreck, I was so tired and yet so nervous because it was the America's Cup."

Who noticed? She came out of the bullpen like Troy Percival (aside to non-baseball followers: Percival is the Anaheim Angels' ace relief pitcher, soon to be seen in the World Series).

Nelson, wife of Bruce the designer and a former AC campaigner herself, knows her stuff. She also was no neophyte to TV. She hosted her own outdoor show, "Trailside: Make your Own Adventure," on PBS for two years.

Even so, performing in an isolated studio was an interesting experience.

"It's really nerve-wracking," Nelson said. "You have all these bright lights on you. There are three cameras out there and you've gotta know which one has the red light on top. You have three monitors in front of you. One is the program we're actually doing, one is the live feed from New Zealand and another one is what's going to come up.

"You have this earphone on that nobody can see, but there's a guy talking in your head---'You've got 10 seconds'---and there's maybe 15 people out there in the dark you can't see. You have a laptop next to you. You have a writer that can help you to talk about stuff: John Rousmaniere. He's fantastic. He's behind the scenes making sure we know the [racing] rules."

The host is Bill Patrick, who "claims he didn't know anything about sailing three weeks ago," Nelson said.

"There is somebody there writing for Bill, and Bill's doing teleprompting mostly, but he's good---a guy that's smart enough and can pick up on stuff and is comfortable with the role of a host. He's done the Tour de France and golf and he was with ESPN Sports Center. No big ego, just a nice guy."

The shows aren't exactly live but close enough to keep the mood pressurized. The live feeds are edited to fit OLN's two-hour time slot.

"We're doing it as if we're live, but we're not quite live," Nelson said. "When I'm up on the set I see the live feed and what we're about to show, and then I talk after that. But you don't have time to know what they're editing out. You have to be ready and nail it."

As the round progressed, OLN became more confident and relied less on the audio from TV New Zealand's Peter Montgomery, Ed Baird and Peter Lester, while still showing the video. They have no direct communication with those guys, by the way.

"We can take their sound out and talk," Nelson said. "We can call it, too, but when you're on the water behind the boats as they are you have a great view. They're not only looking at a screen but are seeing it and feeling it."

Nelson doesn't know if she'll be called back, but she'd like to be. There is still a lot of room for improvement, and she would like to be part of it.

"For being their first time, they're doing a great job, and it's getting better," she said. "Everybody is learning as they go. It was a really nice group of guys and girls working there.

"They've had time to talk about it with this week off. I was talking to John Rousmaniere about how to make it interesting for the serious sailor but also interesting for the people who are curious and know just enough to watch it.

"One of the things I wanted to do was to give them more of the personal side---the human interest side, like what about that guy hanging onto the bow when [Oracle] did that hairpin turn? I should have said something about it. And what's it like at the top of the mast, 90 feet up? Why does it cost millions of dollars?"

The AC is a bold move for OLN. The seven-year-old network also jumped track from semi-involvement to a spectator role when it showed Lance Armstrong winning another Tour de France this year.

Oddly, on nights when racing was abandoned, OLN gave us substitute shows featuring a distinctly different form of outdoor life: models prancing around beach and bistro scenes in bikinis. Who ordered the Playboy Channel?

Nelson said, "The guys I was working with were kind of giggling, too, but they don't choose [the shows]. I think it's somebody in an office somewhere."

That may change starting with the quarterfinals in mid-November when production will move from Connecticut to Auckland. With an on-site presence, Nelson thinks the America's Cup could do for OLN what it once did for ESPN in bringing the network closer to mainstream viewers.

"This should help attract more shows for them," Nelson said. "When they got the Tour de France and now that they have the America's Cup, they're climbing up."

Meantime, Riley, bright and upbeat, and Law, sometimes dourly technical, will be back, and all OLN has to compete with the next couple of weeks is the World Series and Monday Night Football.