BOSTON — On Dec. 30, three days before the 2023 Winter Classic, TNT technicians were debating a dilemma. The makeshift booth on the first-base side — a private suite on Fenway Park’s pavilion level during baseball season — for play-by-play announcer Kenny Albert and analyst Ed Olczyk features a garage-door-style window that can roll up to give the broadcasters a clear view.
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Ballpark officials had warned the techs about a possible problem. The windows are so old that in other suites, they have been known to get stuck in between. The last thing Albert and Olczyk would want is to call Bruins-Penguins while peeking through a half-open window.
(Fluto Shinzawa / The Athletic)It is not the only quirk. The shot known as Camera 1, the standard left-to-right rink panorama, will be slightly askew. On Level 5 above first base, where Camera 1’s Sony HDC-3500 is located, a set of stairs stands directly across from the red line. It would not be possible to place a tripod, to say nothing of a grumpy camera operator, on the stairs.
All of these nooks and crannies, however, are central to the 110-year-old ballpark’s personality. In 2016, the Bruins hosted the Winter Classic at cookie-cutter Gillette Stadium. On Tuesday, the game returns to a ballpark made iconic partly by abnormal architecture.
For TNT, which is in its second season of broadcasting NHL games, the Winter Classic will not be about whether Sidney Crosby outperforms Patrice Bergeron or if the Bruins can extend their 18-0-3 home dominance outdoors. The network is deploying 300 technicians, 64 cameras and 50 microphones to tell the story of baseball’s design diamond, in both senses of the word.
“The star of the show is Fenway Park,” said Lee Estroff, Turner Sports director of technical operations. “It’s a hockey game. But the star is Fenway Park.”
A baseball first
This will be the 12th Winter Classic played at a ballpark. It will be the second held at Fenway. Viewers will have no trouble understanding the identity of the game’s site, from the Green Monster to Pesky’s Pole.
“At an event like this, I’m not doing my job if I don’t show off the venue as well,” said director Paul Hemming. “I can cut a game at TD Garden any night and just show you the ice, boards to boards. But when you put an ice rink in an iconic venue like Fenway, all our shots that you’re going to see pre-puck drop will be establishing that we’re at Fenway.”
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It will be the first baseball-themed Winter Classic in which the rink will be positioned between third base and second base. All other occasions, including in 2010 at Fenway, have seen the nets roughly positioned above third base and first base.
This is by design. The rink will be parallel to the Green Monster. The Wall will be the backdrop to both the rink and a diamond-shaped auxiliary sheet.
“When Steve Mayer and the NHL revealed to us the plans for this,” said Hemming, referring to the NHL senior executive vice president and chief content officer, “I was ecstatic. Because typically, the ice goes from the third-base bag to the first-base bag. I’m like, ‘Well, the background is going to be center field. The iconic piece of Fenway is left field.’ So the way they readjusted the configuration is going to look amazing.”
TNT even customized a setup to showcase the Green Monster. One camera is mounted on a 50-foot jib on wheels. It will be located near the left-field foul line. Hemming already has his dream shot in mind.
“It’ll give you a POV perspective, a fan’s perspective, if you had a seat on top of the Green Monster,” Hemming said. “Then it will swoop down over the aux ice and take me to the rink. When we first surveyed this, I was like, ‘We have to have this. It’s the must-have.’”
(Fluto Shinzawa / The Athletic)On game day, Hemming will be at the controls inside SS8, otherwise known as the game truck. Estroff estimated its value at $23 million. It is stuffed with monitors, dials, buttons and knobs.
For TNT’s standard Wednesday night regular-season package, the network uses two trucks on site. For the Winter Classic, SS8 is one of eight trucks, representing the exponential increase in resources the network is investing in the game.
On Dec. 27, SS8 and its seven companions pulled into a parking lot behind Guitar Center on the corner of Ipswich and Van Ness Streets. The compound is TNT’s nerve center. Estroff pegged the eight-truck convoy to be worth over $50 million.
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Technicians arrived from around the country — a big contingent from Atlanta, TNT’s home base, others from Los Angeles, and even one from snowbound western New York. Lead technical manager Eric Grossman, who lives in Buffalo, drove his car to Boston because the airport was closed and no rental cars were available. Grossman joked that he considered riding a snowmobile to Rochester to board a flight to Boston.
“Just all the trucks and stuff, it’s a small city we’ve got going on here,” said Grossman.
When Hemming calls for a shot, technical director Paul Harvath, seated to the director’s right, will push the button that puts the clip on air. During game action, Hemming likes to take stuff from six to eight primary cameras.
For specialty shots, Hemming has his choice of toys in addition to the Green Monster jib, including:
• “Panger Cam,” the nickname for the Dream Chip AtomOne mini Air, a $2,000 camera the size of a quarter, that reporter Darren Pang will wear on his winter hat.
• Fifteen robotic cameras, each controlled by operators in one of the trucks in a room called “Roboland.”
• An overhead shot from an airplane circling over Fenway.
• A Skycam, suspended by cables, floating over the ice.
• Two custom shallow depth of field cameras embedded in the end boards. The cinema-style cameras, known as ankle cams, can zoom in on one subject and soften out the rest. A player in focus, for example, appears especially dramatic.
• Twelve super-slow-motion cameras, which cost around $300,000 each.
(Fluto Shinzawa / The Athletic)“Things that are really fast look really good slow,” Hemming explained. “Hockey’s a dynamic sport for showing those images of the puck spinning in a very slow motion, when really that shot happened at real speed at 100 miles an hour. We could take a Zdeno Chara slap shot and basically make it crawl to the net. Those images are very, very impactful.”
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At the same time, in a room down the game truck to their left, lead audio engineer Randy Pekich will be keeping his ears on everything, from what the 50 microphones placed around Fenway capture to the chatter between the trucks.
“If it makes sound, it comes through this rig,” said Pekich, pointing to a $1.5 million Calrec Apollo console. “It’s like we’re the neck of the funnel in this room. Everything comes through here. If it’s audio, it comes through here, and we put it out to the world.”
Four players, coaches Mike Sullivan and Jim Montgomery and referee Chris Rooney will be miked up. Some of the other microphones are located around the park on Pekich’s recommendation. Last summer, the engineer attended a Red Sox game to get the lay of the land. Several police officers kindly pointed out to Pekich which sections tended to produce the most colorful language based on expected degrees of lubrication.
Pekich also had to keep in mind that capturing hockey audio in an open-air ballpark is different from in an arena. There is no roof containing the din. The fans are removed from the rink instead of pounding on the glass. As such, the on-ice effects — the claps of the puck, the carvings of the skates — are more pronounced outdoors.
(Fluto Shinzawa / The Athletic)Pekich can control whether to amplify or hush each sound by pushing a slider up or down. For the former, Pekich hopes for Connor Clifton or Josh Archibald, their teams’ leading hitters, to do their thing.
“Big hits in the corner — you can’t beat that,” Pekich said with a smile. “When you’ve got a 220-pounder coming down on a 180-pounder.”
Pekich will also have his ears trained on the shots that Paul Bissonnette, Anson Carter, Wayne Gretzky, Liam McHugh and Rick Tocchet are expected to fire before puck drop, between periods and after the game.
The chirps of the studio crew are just as critical to the broadcast as game coverage. A standalone production team, a separate truck and a set in center field just for McHugh, the studio host, and his cast of characters are proof of that.
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Banter should be flowing. Bissonnette and Tocchet are ex-Penguins. Carter played for the Bruins. Gretzky is Gretzky. McHugh is the traffic cop, facilitating conversation and egging on his partners to initiate further chirping.
All of this is chasing the tail of “Inside the NBA,” Turner’s smash studio success and the brainstorm of Steve Fiorello, Turner Sports vice president and coordinating director. McHugh is playing the part of Ernie Johnson. Charles Barkley, Shaquille O’Neal and Kenny Smith are the stars.
“Our DNA is our studio show,” said Estroff. “You look at ‘Inside the NBA,’ Barkley and EJ, we take a lot of pride in producing amazing studio shows. We give them full production crews, full resources to come out here and to be able to pull off what they do on a nightly basis in studio on site. We could maybe share with the game. But you’re going to limit their creativity and their ability to produce the type of show we’re known for. Turner sinks a lot of money into producing that studio show out in the field. We probably spend as much on studio as we do on game.”
TNT vs. ESPN
At the 2022 Winter Classic, the temperature for puck drop at Minnesota’s Target Field was minus-6 degrees Fahrenheit. Camera motors seized. Headsets froze.
Usually, on-ice camera operator Zac Laszuk keeps his blood pumping by skating onto the sheet during stoppages to get his shots. No matter how hard he skated, Laszuk could not get warm.
“My toes hurt for about three months after that,” said Laszuk, who was on the Vancouver ice in 2011 to shoot Chara hoisting the Cup. “One side, the feeling didn’t come back for a week. And it still hurt for months after that.”
Last year, because of the omicron surge, the studio crew did not travel to Minnesota. The only solace for the team about being left behind was working on a comfortable indoor set in Atlanta.
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Otherwise, they hated it. They were detached from the experience.
“The talent, the guys, they were miserable last year because they couldn’t come out,” Estroff said. “It was a last-minute shift because of a spike in COVID. They were heartbroken they couldn’t come out. We were all heartbroken, too. Because Winter Classic is all about everyone being here. It’s not a studio show. It’s an on-site show.”
It’s different this time. Approximately 75 studio-specific technicians have already been on site. On set, the on-air talent will be seated at a desk facing the center-field bleachers, in front of three cameras.
TNT will run replays of critical moments during intermissions and postgame. But the mandate is not simply to string clips together. Replays serve as the platform for Bissonnette, Carter, Gretzky, McHugh and Tocchet to do their thing.
“We’re not a highlight-driven product the way ‘SportsCenter’ is,” said studio technical director Dan Crosswait. “It’s about the individual opinions and just having fun.”
NBC was formerly the NHL’s lone rightsholder. This is the second season that TNT and ESPN have shared national rights.
ESPN will air the 2023 Stadium Series in February between the Capitals and Hurricanes at Carter-Finley Stadium. The two will share the playoffs. Estroff expects ESPN, which has the first choice, to select the Eastern Conference games. TNT has exclusive rights for the final.
“They’re just pushing each other every night,” Mayer said. “They want to be better. It’s like a friendly competition. They get along great. The two networks work hand in hand. They share facilities and trucks. They do things that are really friendly. But yet they all want to get the story or the scoop. They want to be the first one to do this piece of technology. They’re always trying to outthink each other. When it comes to talent, it’s my talent against your talent. It’s all friendly. But it’s great. In our case, you have two different approaches to hockey. You have fun, a bit irreverent, the studio is a huge focus with Turner. Then with ESPN, they’re much more about the X’s and O’s, about the game and the storytelling about our players. One wants to have fun with the players and get them to laugh. The other one wants to tell the heartwarming story. It’s so great, because we’re getting the best of every world.”
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Naturally, TNT and ESPN are competing. Naturally, Estroff likes one product better than the other.
“I know ours is better. I know ours is better,” Estroff said with a laugh. “I know all the guys at ESPN. I know my equal over there. I know what they’re dealing with. I know our budgets are bigger. I know what we do is better.”
(Top photo: Fluto Shinzawa / The Athletic)
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