Legends Behind the Lens: David Mazza The technical and organization magician behind the largest events in sports television history By Brandon Costa, Director of Digital Tuesday, June 23, 2020 - 11:15 am
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The story of American sports television is engrained in the history of this nation, rising on the achievements of countless incredible men and women who never once appeared on our screens. During this pause in live sports, SVG is proud to present a celebration of this great industry. Legends Behind the Lens is a look at how we got here seen through the people who willed it to be. Each weekday, we will share with you the story of a person whose impact on the sports-television industry is indelible.
Legends Behind the Lens is presented in association with the Sports Broadcasting Hall of Fame and the SVG Sports Broadcasting Fund. In these trying times - with so many video-production professionals out of work - we hope that you will consider (if you are able) donating to the Sports Broadcasting Fund. Do so by visiting sportsbroadcastfund.org.
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By Ken Kerschbaumer
There aren't many people who can turn a childhood passion for taking things apart in elementary school into a Hall of Fame career, but David Mazza has done just that.
I was very lucky to start developing a passion for this in elementary school, which then led to the A/V club, building a TV studio in junior high, and then an internship at WPSX-TV in Penn State and working on Penn State Football while in high school, says Mazza.
Growing up in Pennsylvania afforded him the opportunity to be part of the early years of companies like TCS, NEP, and TPC (which became Unitel) and even to work alongside one of his stalwarts at NBC Olympics, Terry Adams.
He was the EIC on the truck I was working on in college, Mazza notes, Now Terry is in charge of all our IBC engineering.
Getting from being passionate about the industry to working in it required a lucky break, and that came in 1977, a year he spent in Colorado washing dishes at a ski lodge and playing the role of ski bum.
I had hitch-hiked to Colorado and got a job, so I could ski every day, he recalls. At the end of the season, I saw an ad in Ski Racing magazine that read, Wanted: good skier with an electronic background.' I got the job with Omega Timing, and they told me to show up in Aspen on Dec. 15. They taught me how to run timing systems along with being race tournament director.
He traveled with the World Pro Skiing tour for two seasons and started dabbling in being a freelancer in TV production in 1979. From 1980 to '86, he was a full-time freelancer and worked as TD for HBO on boxing and Wimbledon, CBS Sports (one of the first freelance TDs), NBC golf in Hawaii, and even the first two MTV Music Awards, in 1984 and 1985.
His First Olympics
It was at the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles that Mazza made the Olympic leap, serving as technical director for the rowing and canoeing venue. It wasn't an easy job: the production team produced both the ABC feed and the host feed from the same mobile unit, which meant that Mazza had to cut two separate shows at the same time (in a world where automated routing processes were nonexistent).
He also was involved in an early iteration of the virtual-line technology for rowing split times. It was a physically intensive process, part of a live-production dance that Mazza found exhilarating. And, by the end of 1985, he was considered one of the top freelance sports TDs in the business.
It was fun, he says, because the live nature of the shows multiplies the complexity - especially with production switchers, because, at the time, they had very little memory. You had to do a lot of very fast button-pushing. I still miss the adrenaline of sitting behind the switcher and getting only one shot to do it correctly.
In my two decades-plus of running NBC Sports, there was no single person as valuable to me and to our entire unit as Dave. Dick Ebersol
Two years later, however, it was time to find something more stable: he and his wife, Taylor, had recently married. In 1987, he moved to Boston, where he was hired by his now good friend Matthew Adams to help build a technical TV facility for the Christian Science Monitor Channel. While in Boston, Mazza continued to fulfill his live-production passion by working on boxing and Wimbledon for HBO as well as the Seoul, Albertville, and Barcelona Olympics for CBS and NBC. He and Taylor also had two children: a daughter, Niven, in 1989 and a son, Lundun, in 1991.
In 1992, he went to work for Sony on the design and construction of DirecTV's playout plant in Castle Rock, CO. He also consulted for various other clients on system design.
Working on the Christian Science Monitor Channel gave him a chance to cut his teeth on system design. The experience served him well when he made the move to NBC Olympics and was where he met Chip Adams, who now oversees all of NBC's venue engineering.
In 1994, Mazza joined NBC as director of engineering. Two years later, he moved into the same role at NBC Olympics, reporting to Charles Jablonski, and, in 1997, opened the NBC Olympics Engineering office. Since then, he has worked on 11 Olympic Games for NBC (15 overall). Each Olympics is unique, he notes, with each host city posing new cultural differences, new languages, and a new approach to completing a task.
He adds that it is testament to the NBC culture that so many production and technical staffers return for every Olympics.
It takes a few days for things to settle down after the Opening Ceremony, but it is gratifying to see the number of things that have to go right to get to that point, Mazza says. We have to manage the balance between the new things we attempt in each Games vs. the
