PORT ANGELES — There’s no stowing the stat board with the checked luggage.
Port Angeles’ George Hill toted the homemade statistics board he will employ during today’s Super Bowl telecast as carry-on baggage on his Thursday night flight from Seattle to Phoenix.
Hill will provide statistics for announcers Al Michaels and Cris Collinsworth during NBC’s coverage of Super Bowl XLIX, a telecast that could have 100 million viewers worldwide.
Hill will track every offensive play of the Super Bowl matchup between the Seattle Seahawks and New England Patriots on the board, Seahawks on one side and Patriots on the other.
Every rumbling rushing yard from Marshawn Lynch, each properly inflated pass attempt from Tom Brady . . . all will be marked down on the stat board with a color code from a four-color pen for each quarter of the game.
He’ll pass along 3-inch-by-5-inch note cards with important information —rushing yards for Lynch, consecutive pass completions for Russell Wilson, for example — for Michaels to use in his commentary.
This is the 10th Super Bowl in the broadcast booth for Hill, 67, who grew up in Port Angeles and is a 1965 graduate of Port Angeles High School.
Hill attended the University of Washington and secured a position with the Huskies sports information office with the help of longtime friend Bruce Skinner, also of Port Angeles.
It all begin with a phone call.
“ABC Sports would send out inquiries to sports information offices looking for people interested in working the Olympics,” Hill said.
Hill worked the 1976 summer games in Montreal, and a year later, he received a call from ABC Sports wondering if he knew how to take stats during football games.
“I lied and said yes,” Hill said with a sly grin.
“I’d handled the stats for the [UW] sports information office, the weekly releases, so I knew how it worked, but I’d never done it before.”
ABC Sports hired him to work with another new hire, the then-relatively unknown Michaels.
“My first game was San Diego State at Arizona in 1977, and the announcer was Al Michaels,” Hill said.
This was a different time in sports broadcasting, before the launch of ESPN and the subsequent growth of televised games.
“I did games with Al, and in 1985, I got a call asking if I could work ‘Monday Night Football’ games, as the person doing the stats had gotten injured,” Hill said.
His first season in the Monday night booth, Hill worked with Frank Gifford, Joe Namath and O.J. Simpson.
Michaels transitioned to the “Monday Night Football” booth the next year after an ownership change with the network.
Hill then worked for 11 years with the longtime grouping of Michaels, Gifford and Dan Dierdorf.
Others in the booth have included former player Boomer Esiason, comedian Dennis Miller and legendary coach and announcer John Madden.
All the while, Hill has worked as a spotter in which he points out players involved in game action, and statistician for college football and basketball contests with another sports broadcasting legend, Brent Musburger.
Michaels, Madden and the production crew, including Hill, switched networks and nights — to NBC and “Sunday Night Football” — for the 2006 season.
Chris Collinsworth joined the booth after Madden’s retirement following the 2009 Super Bowl.
“The problem with ‘Monday Night Football’ at the time — and still to this day — is the games are scheduled in May,” Hill said.
“Now with the flex scheduling available to us at NBC [in which the network can rearrange late-season games to showcase better matchups], it really is the best situation.
“It’s been the No. 1 show on television for the last three years, I believe.”
Hill hasn’t focused solely on football all these years.
He worked out of homes in New York and Phoenix, covering such sports as track and field, tennis, swimming, gymnastics, auto racing and boxing.
Hill had a rink-side seat to Michaels’ most iconic call — “Do you believe in miracles? Yes!” — from the U.S.-Soviet Union hockey semifinal in the 1980 Winter Olympics.
“The two teams had played an exhibition game prior to the games in Madison Square Garden, and the Soviets had beaten the U.S. something like 10-3, so nobody expected the upset to happen,” Hill said.
“There were the boxes for each team and then two rows of seats kept empty for security purposes.
“I was the only one in those two rows. I sat behind the two benches and wore a headset up to the booth and passed things up to Al in the booth.”
This will be the second Seahawks Super Bowl appearance he has covered, having worked Super Bowl XL when Seattle lost 21-10 to the Pittsburgh Steelers on Feb. 5, 2006.
In his time in the booth, he’s seen his share of super-blowouts.
But Hill also has had a firsthand look at classics like the New York Giants’ 20-19 win over the Buffalo Bills in 1991 and Pittsburgh’s last-second 27-23 win over the Arizona Cardinals in 2009.
His favorite Super Bowl involved the St. Louis Rams and the Tennessee Titans.
Hill had worked for years with St. Louis head coach Dick Vermeil, Musburger’s longtime color commentator on college football games.
“That’s one of the only games where I truly cared who won,” Hill said.
The Rams denied the Titans 23-16 at the goal line on the game’s final play in arguably the best finish in Super Bowl history.
“It was a great game, and it was a win for a guy who’s just a wonderful human being, so the one where Dick Vermeil got a win was my favorite, Hill said. ”
Now on the ground in Phoenix, Hill was involved with a production meeting Friday and another Saturday with Michaels, Collinsworth and sideline reporter Michelle Tafoya.
He doesn’t sit in on the interviews with coaches and players but does go over the finer points of the broadcast with the announce team.
During games, Hill is one of just a few NBC Sports employees in the broadcast booth.
Each announcer has a spotter, and then there’s Hill as stat man, plus camera operators and makeup people.
Hill wears an earpiece that allows him to listen to Michaels and Collinsworth, as well as lead producer Fred Gaudelli.
Besides passing notes to Michaels, Hill relays information to NBC’s graphics producers, who put up the statistics that show up on our television screens.
The vast majority of the broadcast team works out of satellite trucks on the stadium grounds.
As for today’s matchup itself between the Patriots and the Seahawks?
Well, Hill, as a member of the working media, has to stay impartial.
But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t hold a soft spot for Seattle.
“When I lived in Seattle, I worked with [the Seahawks’ first play-by-play radio announcer] Pete Gross on Huskies and, later, Seahawks games as a spotter,” Hill said.
“I was his spotter for the first four seasons of the franchise and went to every home game.
“And then living up here, I was always thrilled when I got to cover Seattle games.
“I wouldn’t say I was a fan, but I certainly want them to win.”
Michaels, who golfs with Patriots quarterback Brady and has traveled the world with New England owner Robert Kraft, has to remain impartial as well.
But Hill said Michaels wouldn’t be upset with a Seahawks victory.
“Al lives in Los Angeles and is very much a West Coast guy, and it’s a much easier trip to Seattle than Boston,” Hill said, referring to the NFL’s yearly tradition of opening the NFL season at the home stadium of the previous season’s Super Bowl champion.
The only thing Hill won’t root for is overtime.
He’s got a flight out of Phoenix tonight to cover the Kansas-Iowa State men’s basketball game with Musburger on Monday night.
Hill knows he’s been lucky to have spent a lifetime in sports media.
“All the things that I have seen,” he said, “all the changes that have occurred in sports broadcasting, its growth — it’s been a good run.”
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Sports reporter/columnist Michael Carman can be contacted at 360-452-2345, ext. 5250 or at mcarman@peninsuladailynews.com.
