2023 Sports Broadcasting Hall of Fame Inductee Profile: Tom Fletcher's Passion for Production Innovation

2023 Sports Broadcasting Hall of Fame Inductee Profile: Tom Fletcher's Passion for Production Innovation By Ken Kerschbaumer, Editorial Director

Tuesday, November 7, 2023 - 11:54 am

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When Sports Broadcasting Hall of Famer Tom Fletcher and his father, Archie, started Fletcher Chicago in 1987, having a big impact on sports production around the globe was most likely not on the to-do list. But the then-fledgling company made a ton of right moves in those early days, making the right hires (like Dan Grainge, Ed Andrzejewski and Jonathan Stein), building the right relationships with networks and leagues, and understanding how to put new camera systems into new locations to capture sports events in completely new ways.

There are many angles of coverage that you are familiar with that, before Fletcher, did not exist. Take the now ubiquitous camera position in NBA and big-time college basketball coverage of Above the Rim (on top of the shot clock) or remote controlled Slam Cam (behind the glass). It's come a long way since those early days in the 1991 NBA Finals with a full sized Hot Head or 1994 NBA All-Star game when the camera was an industrial security camera that required two people (Tom and Dan) to operate it. Fletcher says many camera positions were inspired by the iconic Sports Illustrated still photographers.

We wanted to create cameras that were more impactful and more necessary in the game, says Fletcher. The shots that really drove us to the next level were putting a remote-controlled camera behind the backboard for NBA on NBC director Andy Rosenberg.

Operating the cameras back then was a two-person job, with Grainge handling the pan and tilt while Fletcher operated a separate device that controlled zoom in (one button), zoom out (another button) and focus (two additional buttons).

It was designed for security guards not to cover guards, Fletcher loves to say. The team at Fletcher pushed manufacturers to build small more professional tools.

And then there is Fletcher's favorite sport: hockey. Watch any NHL game today and you will see literally decades worth of innovations on-air that were developed by Fletcher Chicago.

We had the idea for a goal judge camera when they used to have a physical goal judge cage in Los Angeles, he says. They had a still camera located up behind the net above the glass and looking down on the net and the slot area. I asked if we could put a camera there because the technology was still a full-sized hothead. We tested it, and it became a staple shot that they just take on power plays, and just became a go-to angle on all shots. I'm a hockey fan over all the sports, so that's the one that I'm most passionate about because it helped the sport of hockey translate better to TV.

Adds Dan Grainge: Hockey was Tom's passion and he was always looking for ways to improve the coverage. His idea was to find a way to stay inside the glass, so you never lost sight of the puck. With that goal in mind, we worked together to develop the Goal Judge and Red Line camera angles and we combined the best quality box camera with the widest lens and the fastest robo on the market. We came up with a new mounting method using speedrail to reduce fan blockage by hiding our mount behind the existing stanchion and, eventually, these angles would become standard and change the way hockey was covered.

NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman says that Fletcher Cams revolutionized the televising of NHL games at about the same time that high definition television was coming into being. Tom and his group gave us an opportunity to show views of the game that nobody had ever seen before, says Bettman. Whether it was the speed shot or the rocker cam, or overhead from the scoreboard or in net, it enabled our fans to get inside a game that up until then, many people thought was too fast to televise. It was always a priority of our broadcast department to work with Fletcher because we knew we needed to try new things that we needed to be innovative and we couldn't afford not to experiment. And again, because the game is so fast, all of these innovations actually made us as good a sport on television as all the other sports, when the conventional wisdom at the time was that was not possible.

Getting Started

Fletcher graduated from the University of Illinois in 1985 with an eye on the film industry when an opportunity to start a new business with his father, who was a regional director for the lighting company Strand Chicago, arose.

My father had just secured a deal to build a new studio for Oprah Winfrey for WLS Chicago and redo all of their studios dimming and lighting fixtures and things like that, he says. And one of the companies involved was a company out of San Antonio, Texas called Media Specialties and they asked my father to start a business together and open up a Chicago office. I didn't want to do sales, but I went down to San Antonio for the for the summer and learned the lighting side of the business.

Eighteen months later the relationship the team in San Antonio and his father soured and a friend, Ginny Hart suggested that Tom and his father start their own business.

I called my dad and said, let's do this together' and we started an equipment company to sell dimming systems, but we quickly pivoted to sell to news' mini-cam departments. And I liked going into the mini-cam departments because when you'd go in and show them a new piece of equipment, they'd buy enough for whatever number of crews they had.

Helping boost sales was the major transition from two-man to one-many crews. And given the weight of cameras back then, close to 30 pounds, helping cut down that weight made the Fletcher team popular in through in the Midwest.

I needed my dad&#

LINK:	https://www.sportsvideo.org/2023/11/07/2023-sports-broadcasting-hall-o...
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