Today’s guest may not be an accountant, but he’s a legend behind the mic. And what he brings to the table is just as relevant to accountants as it is to football fans. Jeff Joniak is the voice of the Chicago Bears. He spent decades captivating audiences, bringing trust to listeners and bringing energy, authenticity, and clarity to every game. We’ll explore how the same tools Jeff uses to prepare, communicate, and lead under pressure can elevate how we show up for our clients, our teams, and ourselves. Jeff, welcome to The Unique CPA.

Well, you are a unique CPA, and you’re an old friend, so we should tell everybody that now, you’ve probably known me for what, 45 years. So I’m flattered that you even want me on your podcast, being that I’m in the toy department of life in sports.

Well, that is a great place to be actually, because I assume you enjoy it. And being at the place you enjoy makes all the difference in the world. And at least in the game days, it appears you’re enjoying what you’re doing.

Yes. Win, lose, or draw, I definitely do. It’s the greatest rush of excitement you could possibly have in your life on a week-to-week basis for those 20 weeks of the NFL season. And if you’re fortunate enough to do 24, it means you probably got through the playoff gauntlet and won a Super Bowl. So that’s been the evasive goal so far. But yeah, it’s an adrenaline rush and I’m very humbled to be doing it. It’s a great responsibility charting the history of this great sport of the NFL and National Football League.

Yeah. And so since I am a Bears fan, we have to talk about that for a second because you just mentioned playoffs, and I’m not going to ask you what’s going to happen this year, but every year I feel like I’m as excited as I could possibly be, at least in the last handful of years. And this year I’m as excited as I could possibly be.

That is the unique thing about the NFL. 32 teams all have the same excitement, all their fan bases, because this does have a level playing field in a manner of respects; injuries the great equalizer, of course. So any hopes and dreams could be crashed with the injury to your starting quarterback or a middle linebacker.

Ah! Don’t say that!

Not ours, not ours. But, you know, it happens obviously, even in training camps or in preseason games. So, yes, very excited. Ben Johnson, for all you Bears fans out there, and Randy among them, is very unique. I cannot stop gushing about this man’s approach, the way he sets his jaw every day for practice. We just had a practice on Tuesday at Halas Hall. I don’t recall having one like that in my time. I know there had been some, but this was a full-on hitting, contact, emotional, four dust-ups. I mean, it was very pleasurable to watch. And I know for the players, it was very exciting for them too. So he’s sharpening this team to be a very violent, aggressive bunch. And so the only prediction I’ll make is they will be uber competitive each and every week, and I think they’re going to finally learn how to win and how long that takes? That’s the great unknown.

Well, I’m excited. As we record, the first preseason game is a few days away, so you’re getting your voice ready for a preseason at this point. 

Not getting my voice ready. It’s the homework, you know? Trying to learn 90 guys on the opposing team. I know the Bears. But the 90 players on the Miami Dolphins, many of whom aren’t going to play, you’re going to get the bottom of the roster, and those are difficult games. Preseasons are by far the most challenging for me to do.

And you know what, we’re going to talk about things about that in a minute, but first, let’s jump into this. You and I have talked about doing this for a while. I’m very fortunate that we have had a 45-year friendship at this point, 18-year-old kids when we first met, right? And so I’m glad we got to do this and I didn’t mention it, but you are also a podcast host, so you are a veteran of podcasting. How many episodes have you recorded now?

Today we did number 158. That’s bridging three years. It’s fun. I didn’t know that this would be the path. And the one thing, you have to morph into whatever is needed as a broadcaster these days, and that’s true for any profession. Times are always a-changing, and so you have to adapt or die, right? Adapt and overcome, survive and advance. Anything you want to throw out there. And it’s been fun because it’s more conversational, that’s always how I’ve approached my broadcast career—I’ve evolved into sounding conversational, welcoming you into my broadcast—and with Tom, also a veteran radio guy of now some 30 years, probably 35 years after his playing career, he has a flair for what sounds good, what people want to hear. So we’ve enjoyed it.

And you’re referring to Tom Thayer, who was an offensive lineman on the 1985 Super Bowl champion Chicago Bears, who is your podcast host partner and your play-by-play partner for the Bears games.

Right. He’s lived a gifted football life. When you consider he grew up as a Chicago Bears fan, he always says, I’ve been a Bears fan since 1961, since birth. He managed to play at Joliet Catholic as an outstanding offensive lineman, and they lost one game, and then he gets recruited to go to Notre Dame, every Catholic family’s dream, right? For your son to play football at Notre Dame. And then gets drafted by the Bears, a little dive off into the USFL for a bit for the Arizona team and the Chicago Blitz, but the first year he plays for the Bears after being drafted in ’83, he starts on the Super Bowl team, week four on, never left the field in those years. 

Nine years in the NFL, played for George Allen, Hall of Fame coach, played for Mike Ditka, Hall of Famer, Don Shula for a year in Miami. I mean, he’s been touched by greatness all the way along the line, but it’s a dream to be with him as play-by-play guys. It’s our job to make the analyst look good—I don’t have to do that. He does it on his own, he knows the game so well, and I’ve had many extra degrees added to my bachelor’s because I’ve gone master’s program and deep dives into the doctorate of football because of Tom.

Well, let’s go into this then. Let’s go into your master’s degree through time and just in general. The way you have to, we’ll talk about the way you prepare and we’ll talk about everything else. But first, just finding your voice. So, accountants in general, this is The Unique CPA, we have to teach the accountants something that they’re listening to this, because I could talk Bears all day, so we’re going to not do that right now, but accountants, I think, don’t realize how important their communication skills are and what they have to do because, hey, we’re numbers people, we can do that, we have this. But now you just can’t do that, you have to be able to communicate. So, I mean, accountants are not calling touchdowns, but they are talking about important things. For you personally or for them, what advice would you give them? How they can start to communicate clearly with confidence and finding confidence in your voice? Because obviously, I’m guessing from day one you were confident, you’re one of 32 people that do this job in the entire world, but is there any advice you can give them to find their voice and confidently be able to communicate?

Well, first and foremost, that takes time. That takes reps. It’s like anything in sports or any walk of life. You’ve got to have reps at it. And you’ve got to keep harnessing your spirit, your energy, your mental acuity to what your tasks are. And my biggest advice is something that I learned from following some of the great broadcasters of all time, including Vin Scully, who always said, “Don’t water your wine.” He never listened to another broadcast ever in his illustrious career doing it for the Dodgers into his upper 80s. And that means God gave you your mind, your eyes, your voice. “You see it, you say it.” Which is another great broadcaster, Ernie Harwell. I met him in 1984 when I was an intern in Cleveland, Ohio at an Indians-Tigers game, and I visited with him for quite some time before the first pitch. I asked him personally, “How do you get to where you are? And how do you call a game?” It’s “see it, say it.” It sounds so simple, but it’s not easy to do. 

It’s funny you bring up the whole communication thing because Kyler Gordon, the Bears nickel defensive back, just the other day at the podium was talking about communication and he just threw it in there kind of rapidly, but I hung onto his words: “Communication breeds understanding.” If you don’t write well, you don’t talk well, you don’t harness your thoughts in a way that can be understood completely and understanding exactly what you’re trying to get across, you’re going to have some rough—you might fail, and failure’s okay, because failure is fertilizer. But the communication thing is critical and you would be shocked to know, even in this high level of sports, how much communication falls by the wayside, because if you don’t keep hammering the fundamentals of communication, something’s going to go awry. Words are powerful. We know that. How they’re phrased is powerful. How people take them is powerful, and you have to practice what you preach every day. So the communication is critical, but like you say, you’ve got to find your voice, but don’t imitate anybody. Be yourself.

I think that’s great advice. And so to expand on that, because I like what you’re saying there, but the communication, preparation, all that, but you’re doing this in a split second. You’re communicating what you’re seeing on the field, this happening in that moment. And so let’s say an accountant’s in a meeting, they have to react to what’s going on in that meeting, what the client’s asking. And I’m thinking that sometimes they get a little overwhelmed and nervous in that situation. What advice would you give or how do you personally just react to that situation and not worry what else is going on around them?

You have to train yourself. I had a guy once—the individual, his name is Drew Hayes, he was a program director in Chicago, was also on the air as a talk show host. He’s the guy that really believed that I could do this because I didn’t have any professional experience doing it. They took a big chance on me, the Chicago Bears and CBS at the time, to give me this opportunity. They saw how I worked and so forth, but he was going to take me out on the street, on Clark Court, and just have me describe the traffic going by. Paint the picture. But the bigger scope of what I do is knowledge: It’s the homework. Knowledge is power. It allows you to stand up there without a script and speak what you know. 

I, as a church-going man, when I listen to priests talk, if they’re reading from a script, it does not hit home as well as somebody that’s going up there without a script and just walking and talking. You’ve got to bring them into your home, and whether that’s in church or an office meeting or at a stadium, calling one of 32 NFL teams’ games, you’ve just got to bring people along with you and make them feel right at home.

Yeah, that’s great advice. So you’re reacting, what you just said, you’re out, you’re going to be calling traffic, so it’s preparation too. So you have to know the situation. And you’ll get that preparation or the repetition by it being other client meetings. But you can actually do that sitting in your office too. You can role play. I’ve seen companies do that as well. And so, preparation, and we’ll talk more about preparation because that’s gotta be a huge part of what you do. In fact, let’s jump into that. We just talked about the fact you’re reacting to what happened on the field, but there’s a lot of behind-the-scenes work that goes on to that, like you just said about Miami and the 90 players that you have to get ready for. So if we’re talking preparation for you, what do you do? And then how can accountants learn from that?

Well, I’ve always believed that success is where preparation meets opportunity. So you also have to seize moments, and the preparation, the homework, allows you to do that. You might be nervous before a meeting, you might be nervous before, in my case, a game, but it’s nervous energy. It’s not necessarily nervous, like, “Oh my gosh, I’m going to fail today.” No. You’ve got to have that confidence. And I prepare to the point that 90% of the information I accumulate over the course of a week before I prepare for a game, because it is like studying for 20 final exams, that’s how I look at it, or reading 20 books over the course of a season. You gather information, in my case from scouts, just from my own eyes watching practice, reviewing notes, reading, but that information is there only as a protection. 

I could go into a game and not look at my board, which I put together of notes and statistics—I can’t remember all the statistics, of course, because I’m not a mind math guy like you, in fact, I’m awful with that. But it just comes to you. And you never know what you’re going to need. One game we played against Baltimore, we had a tornado warning in November in Chicago. Game stopped, stadium clears out. I became a traffic cop. I became a guy that’s now at a news event, not just a sports event. And all your preparation allows you to feel confident and powerful. So my preparation involves just a deep dive into everything. I don’t want to leave any stone unturned. If I don’t, I would be cheating myself. I’d be cheating a listener, but most of all, yourself.

Listen, I’m big when I do public speaking about four Hs. Tom Thayer adds about a fifth for my hair as an H, you know, mindful of my hair. But you’ve got to have humility in this business, and in any business. You can’t, you know this, you can get inflated. You’re at the top of your profession. It can inflate your ego naturally. You’ve got to harness that a little bit, and you’ve got to stay humble. You’ve got to hustle. You’ve got to hustle, and I take great pride in hustling. I’ve always been known as a hardworking journalist, hardworking reporter, hardworking play-by-play guy. You’ve got to have humility, but you’ve got to do that homework and you’ve got to have that honesty to look in the mirror every day and ask yourself, face to face: “Are you doing everything you possibly can to be the best person you can be?” And that will allow you to be the best professional you can be. So all those things add up, and that’s how I approach getting ready for a game. It takes a lot of hours though. 

It takes a lot of hours, a lot of preparation. There’s two things that come to mind off of that: One is you are preparing, you are getting ready. And actually, let me tell a story before I get to this because one thing you just said—you speak at events, you know, I do that as well. I just for the first time made one of my keynote slide decks without words on it. No words on the entire thing, and that becomes the preparation. I just know then this slide comes up—

Why’d you do that? What was the purpose? 

One, because I’m just telling stories and nobody needs to see the story. The picture was the story and then I explained pretty much what that picture was. So it’s up there and it’s just because if I have all these words, someone’s just going to look at the words, right, and that’s all they’re going to pay attention.

You take away the mental imagery without it, which is highly important also.

And, but you can’t do that, going back to, without doing what you just said, is the preparation, right? The being prepared. And when I was up there doing this keynote and I’ve done many keynotes, this was my favorite one ever. I think it was partly the slide deck, but it’s always a personal story that I do most of the time.

You know what, Randy, this is one thing, if I can interject. And you’ve said it many times here, storytelling. That’s our lives. 

Yes, yes.

Everybody. We’re all storytellers. I’m a unique storyteller because I’m calling National Football League, and I’m charting the history of the game and charting history for the players. Also, Vin Scully, you know; Vin Scully, in big moments, he would turn into talking about the game and setting the scene, so that player, Sandy Koufax, in a perfect game, what the time of day was. Noting the time of day. You can go on YouTube and listen to this broadcast and pull a lot of that out for any professional walk of life that you’re in. Because that moment in time is what the story is going to be told for the next 50 years. And that’s still the case. On that particular broadcast, he switched into, “I’m calling this game for him. It’s his keepsake.” And our stories are what gets us to where we go. People love stories. Many times I get asked, Hey, you want to come to the Masters, I’ll take you to the, I want to go to the Masters one day. Maybe you’ll invite me, Randy, because I know you’ve been many times. I’m joking.

Only once I was once. 

Oh, see? See, I wasn’t that far off. You’re a man who knows how to get things. So, you know, if you can just come and just tell stories. Tell stories about the Michael Jordan days when you covered the Bulls. Tell me about what’s really going on now. You know, it’s a great offer, but you’ve got to realize, you can’t let all the secrets out, right? You can’t be that transparent, I don’t think. But that’s what I do when I stand up and before an audience, and believe me, there’s a little bit of, you know, you’re climbing up the steps on a high dive platform and you’re walking out there and you know, you just gotta rip the bandaid off and jump in, otherwise, you’re going to be hesitant, you’re going to hurt yourself, you’re not going to have the guts to do it. That’s what every event I do, that’s what I feel. 

But I go in there with confidence and I pick out three people. I have an audience, maybe not as large as yours. I don’t know. You’re probably in a big auditorium, but I’ll pick somebody to my left, somebody in the middle, and somebody to the right. And those are my focal points, and I get immediate engagement with them, eye-to-eye contact throughout. And now I’ve got, if I’m in a situation where I don’t know where to go, I look at them. And if they’re nodding approvingly, I know I’m resonating. If everybody’s on their phone, I know I’m in big trouble, if their mind isn’t listening to me. And that’s—we’re on the radio, Randy. Radio’s a unique medium. Now it’s not television. This is impactful, is that you’re trying to reach somebody, a mom driving in her car with three screaming kids in the backseat and we’re telling a story on the radio. Keeping her attention. Or, you know you’re talking to one person, that’s how I approach it. You’re talking to one person that’s listening to the game out of the hundreds of thousands that are listening to our broadcast, so you’ve got to relate to them.

That’s funny you say that because that’s exactly how I look at it. In fact, I was just talking to somebody right before you and I got on, and we have a webinar we’re doing in 37 minutes. Webinars, there’s no interaction. You can’t pick out a face. But every time I’m on there, like you at the radio, I still envision myself having a conversation with these people and that’s exactly how I do it. So I should start doing the Bears!

Here’s my big thing. Don’t talk at somebody.

No.

Talk to them.

Yes. 

And it, believe me, it is a tidal shift difference. If you’re talking down or condescending, you’ve got to talk to me. Don’t talk at me.

Yep. And I love the whole storytelling because that’s something accountants can, you know, accountants need to get the skill of getting the information to their clients, financial statements, trends, what’s going on, tax advisory. And if we’re just up this high level and just saying all these things that are, okay, well this code does this and that. No, let’s talk together. Let’s have a discussion. You know, talk to me. That’s going to be the, we’re going to make that the title of the podcast, “Don’t Talk at Me, Talk to Me,”

Talk to me, man.

I will go to my grave that storytelling is one of the best communication styles you can have. 

We bankrolled and deposited so much in our minds of a life lived, right? You and I are gray hairs, right? We got some white hair, gray hair. 

Yeah, we do. 

And we’re still hobbling around getting things done, but people love stories. That’s all we do is tell stories and sometimes my stories are long and that’ll, you know, all right, get to the point. Some people don’t have that attention span, but you’ve got to hook ’em, keep ’em, and just have some fun.

Yeah. With this last keynote they did just to give more people information on storytelling: It was the first time I actually worked with a speech coach, I guess I’d call him, or somebody that, I’m a speech writer. I mean, I wrote it, but he gave me the whole concept. And I never even knew this before, but he said, I want you to follow the SCOPE method. I don’t know if you’re familiar with this.

No.

It’s the situation. Then what’s the complication? The C. What’s the opportunity that is there? What’s the problem, I think came in, but planning as well, and then the E was the end results, you know, whether we wrap it all up into one bowl. And when I did that, when I started thinking about that way, it was really cool, because you set the stage here at the beginning, and then at the end you pull all of that back in to wrap it up. And I probably have done that without thinking about before, but being intentional about that just made—that’s why it was my favorite one ever, I think, is because I ended up tying everything together that we started with, found out what the whole complication was and what we went through, and then what the results and what we took away from that. Storytelling like that, I think accountants can use that in their presentations, man, it had such a big impact on me, I hope the audience as well. 

Did you take a speech class in college at all? 

It was like the very last class I took because I never wanted to be in front of people talking. 

Which shocks me, shocks me. Shocks me now. I mean, you’ve never been one to shy away from a good conversation and a little talking to. You know, it’s no different in speech. You have a beginning, a middle and end, here’s what I’m going to tell you about now, here’s what I did tell you about. It sounds simple. I know it’s hard to navigate there at times, but no detail is too small though, in your storytelling and getting to that final end game. And I don’t know, a lot of people can’t do it. A lot of people don’t want to stand in front of anybody and some people just freeze up, lose their thought, and it’s heartbreaking to watch, because I’ve been in those situations where someone’s trying to get something across, they lose their place on the notes.

Heck, I hosted the Chicago Bears Charity event in the spring, which I do every year, and I’ve done for the past 25 years. I’m a hand talker.

Oh, me too.

And so I had a script that I had a script for because you have to hit some key points for the charity, and I [papers flying sound]… my script went flying. Now what? So in one clean move. I went down, grabbed it on the fly. It was a thing of beauty. It was like Lynn Swann in a Super Bowl catching the touchdown pass from Terry Bradshaw. So yeah, you never know what’s going to happen. Hey, what if your audio visual stuff goes? You know, it’s like Caleb Williams. Ben Johnson is testing his ability to handle all stressors, so there’s communication in the helmet until 15 seconds before the snap or something like that. But in the first 25 seconds of that 40-second period, if you’re going like this, that means you know he can’t hear you well, right? What are you going to do? You can’t, don’t waste the timeout, we’ve got to save those timeouts. You’ve got to have a bankroll of ideas, thoughts that you can rely on to get you through the moment. Because the worst thing you do, you stand up there, you feel embarrassed, you’re getting blushed, now your mind shuts off. You can’t think.

Yep. Again, preparation. A lot of it comes back to preparation.

Or self-deprecation I’m big on too. Make fun of yourself. Nobody knows you but you.

Oh yeah. No, I agree with that. It’s definitely, I’m trying to think. I’m usually perfect so I don’t have to do that, but.

Right, right. You’ve said that many times too, yes.

Alright, so let’s go back to one thing that you just said then too, because you’re saying, you know, Caleb is in the huddle with the helmet. But it’s not just him. It’s an entire team around him there on the field and off the field. And how about teamwork? Because teamwork I think is so important. I think sometimes and just in general people, but they always bring it back to accountants. We think we are the one, we have to do it. We have the answers. When in reality we have so many people there that can support us and that we’re supporting. And how about in the broadcast booth? How does that team work with you and Tom? But you’re not the only two there. There’s other people.

 

Oh, no, no, no. We have a tremendous statistician, Doug Colletti. He’s been doing it, you know, 35 years. He did it before I got there, and he’s been my right hand man. He’s also a numbers guy. He was a banker, he’s now in retirement, but he continues to do this for the love of just being at the stadium every Sunday. And he is fabulous. Puts things in context, things we never thought of, and it’s amazing the comparative analysis he’ll do on something such as, he’ll do a comparison contrast, I’m just throwing this out there, I don’t have anything specific, Jim McMahon, after 30 games as a Bear and then Rex Grossman after 30 games. And then the similarities, despite what, how do the numbers say that it is crazy, stuff like that. 

We have an engineer who makes sure that my ears don’t start ringing after games more than they normally do. Keeping my levels right, making sure I’m punching it through the crowd. We used to have a spotter. Spotter would help me identify tackles and things like that. No spotter now, so I’m doing that myself, an added layer of trust in my own self. Which is quite challenging because there’s a term in football and probably in all sports: “If you think, you’re beat.” And you have no time to think when you’re calling a football game or you’re on stage or doing anything important for a client. You have to react. You can’t be thinking, you’ve just got to go. We have a producer in my headset telling us when we have to go to commercial break or how many seconds are left in the break. We’ve got another producer that’s watching these people on the field that have orange sleeves and green sleeves when the referee’s going to call for a timeout. If he doesn’t call for timeout, we go to a timeout, now we’re running a commercial and we miss two plays. You can’t have that. You can’t miss plays. You know, so there’s a lot there. We have a sideline reporter, so there’s a lot, but it’s like an orchestra, or a dance troupe. It’s like an offensive line. If one guy false starts, the whole thing is going to come apart. If one guy’s not on the same plane dropping back to protect his quarterback, there’s going to be a crevice for an opening for a rare one-percenter in the world that weighs 350 pounds that could put his foot in the dirt and do a hand move like this and boom, he by you on your edge and he’s sacking the quarterback. 

So you have to rely a lot on non-verbal communication, a nod. That’s the benefit of being in the same booth for 29 years, 25 years as play-by-play. Tom’s been there the whole time. I can look at him knowing when he’s about to say something as I look at him. Maybe I want to just have some, you’ve got to feel okay, right? He looks like he’s got something to say. I don’t want him to forget it. We have a small window here. We have 40 seconds between snaps and I have to set the field. It’s a rhythm. And if I don’t get to set the field the way I want, you know, “Caleb in the shotgun, back to his right, slot receiver to the left, three wides. First and 10, here’s the snap.” Oh, I might have to catch up and say, “Okay, Bears have three wides. Here’s the snap.” You’ve just got to work on the fly. And that’s how life works, man. You’ve just got to be ready for anything.

Yep. And then what I got out of that too, what you were saying, when you have this teamwork, you have people that are in the roles that they’re meant to be. Doug Colletti with the numbers and being able to do that. You, with the play-by-play. Tom, having the experience on the field, the engineers obviously, and so getting the right person into the right seat is so important for that too. And I think sometimes we don’t look at that from a, “Hey, we hired this person as this role, so we’re going to keep them there,” rather than looking at this person and say, “Oh wow, their skills are so good here, we should have them over there.” And having this team, this group that all works cohesively that you have in that booth and outside the booth, you can’t do what you’re doing without that. And I think we need to look at that as well from the accounting profession. Just make sure that person is doing the right thing that they’re good at, that they love doing.

Comes down to trust. You’ve got to trust. Once that trust is broken though too, that’s trouble. And, you know, we mentioned communication at the top. Over-communicate, man, over-communicate. I don’t care how many times I’m told, “Hey, do this, that, and the other thing.” Sometimes it gets annoying, but you’ve got to over-communicate because then you can never be wrong, right? You’ve got to over-communicate. Everybody knows the same plan, pulling on the same rope. There’s so many sports tie-ins and things you could put together in business, and they’re mentioned often by great speakers out there and authors and the military. NFL teams often have public speakers that come in, authors especially from the US military and just what teamwork is and everybody pulling on the same rope, everyone on the same goal, what all that means, and those stories are fascinating and they resonate with players.

Because the one thing about sports, especially the NFL, because it does stand for “Not for Long,” that you have a finite amount of time, your body’s able to hold up and play. Once it starts to lose whatever, athleticism, speed, whatnot, your time is limited, but they want to be put in a position to succeed. Don’t we all? Like if you have managers or leaders in your organization that their sole goal is to help put you in a position to succeed while keeping the company’s goals in mind, you’ve hit a home run. I’m sure not every company has that approach, or every manager or executive has that approach, but your people want to be put in a position to succeed. That will make them more money. It’ll make you more money, and that’s all players want. They may not like the coach, they may not like the leader, they may not like the boss, their position coach, but if you tell me to do A, B, and C and I do A, B, and C, and that’s a win, I just did something good, or I handed in a great project, man, you’re going to fill that person’s bucket up with a lot of emotion and a lot of confidence and a lot of trust. Period.

Yep. Trust is key and you build trust with your audience. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have been doing this for how many years now?

Well, 25. This is my 25th season as the play-by-play. Dream come true.

And that also then what you mentioned about players, they want longevity in the league. You’ve got longevity in the booth. How many play-by-play do you know? Are you one of the longer tenured play-by-play guys?

It’s getting up there. But a dear friend of mine, Merrill Reese, is in his 80s. He’s doing the Philadelphia Eagles. He said they’ll have to pull him out of there on a gurney. He’s never leaving. He just was named to the Hall of Fame last year, I happened to be at the Hall of Fame because of Devin Hester and Steve McMichael Enshrinement. And it was a great honor for me to see him give his acceptance speech for the, and the rare broadcaster that gets into the Hall of Fame. A lot of writers. I believe he’s only the third broadcaster and one of the few play-by-play guys to get into the Hall of Fame. And that’s not just because of longevity, just a terrific voice of the Philadelphia Eagles and the fans love him to this day.

It’s just, listen, we’re all lucky. We all sound different, all 32 guys. And that speaks to what I talked about: “Don’t water your wine.” We do sound distinctly different. We all bring emotion. We’re the home team call. Long time ago I met Steve Sabol, part of the late family, he passed away, but the family that put together NFL Films and I introduced myself. I thanked him for NFL Films because it is history right there before your eyes. And he was so excited to meet me, one of the local broadcasters, not the TV broadcasters, because they come in, they get out, they go home. We’re there every day. We bring the raw passion and he said, until we marry the radio calls to the video, you know, the pictures came to life. The moving pictures came to life and it just added that extra layer and I’ll never forget that. That gave me great responsibility to make sure I chart the history of the game properly. Because you get one crack at a big play. You don’t get a redo. There’s no, oh no. We gotta do that over. Nope. And that is going to live for perpetuity on NFL Films. 

There is one call I want back and I just saw him a couple of weeks ago: My good friend Brian Urlacher, the Hall of Famer against Atlanta, in my first year in 2001, it was Michael Vick getting hit and there were three men in the booth at that time. Hub Arkush, along with Tom Thayer and myself, and the ball is out. I got that far. And “he’s hurt” was what Hub yelled, and I stopped talking for a minute—not a minute, seconds, feels like an eternity in our booth and there’s Urlacher, he had a scoop and score running 90 yards down the field for the touchdown. And I didn’t catch up to that play until he got to the end zone. And I regret and rue the day that I stopped talking for that instant of time. You’ve just got to roll with it. And that’s the one play I want back. The one big play. I want a lot of plays back, but the big, big plays that live forever, that’s it. That’s your moment in time. And the very best broadcasters are able to capture that moment. And so I don’t know how that relates to your world, but I’m sure there have been those home run moments in your life, those big touchdowns where you’re like, I captured that moment. That made a difference in my career, or for this particular project, or for this particular company.

Well, I think that for sure, but I think what it is, you learn from it. Because you just said you’ve never done it again. So you’ve made sure you’ve always been in the moment. And we said earlier, at the beginning.

You don’t know when that moment’s coming!

Right. And you may make a mistake, but you learn from those mistakes and everybody has to do it, and that’s what you did. So I think we need to—I want to keep going forever, but I think…

It’s at that time, huh? 

About time to wrap up. But before we do, I think we learned a lot. I mean, obviously the passion, having that, the storytelling is a big thing. The preparation, the teamwork, all of that is universal pretty much everywhere. But I want to talk about passion outside of work. So when you’re not calling games, when you’re not part of the Chicago Bears family, what do you enjoy doing?

As you know, they don’t know, but I’m a big put my hands in the dirt type of guy. So, I think I learned from my grandfather and my dad, they love working in the yard. My dad, many times had me out in the back garden or planting shrubs or flowers, and I love that. That’s my escape a little bit. I’ll spend an entire day just doing my thing out there in the yard, making it look nice. And so, yeah, maybe I’m a “landscape architect wannabe,” I don’t know. But I do enjoy the final, you know, again, it’s putting in the work, right? It’s digging those holes. It’s making sure you water and nurture and then wow by midsummer. It’s a beautiful palette of colors and that kind of just takes me to a place away from the excitement of and the banter and the pageantry of an NFL Sunday. So, yeah, that is, and certainly, my time with friends and family, so, yeah those are my passions.

Awesome. Well, your “wordsmith” just showed through explaining how that garden works. So I appreciate it, Jeff. It’s been so much fun. I’m glad we did this. Thanks for being on the show. 

I appreciate the invite.

And enjoy this Bears season because it’s going to be a great one.

Oh, I know. Randy will be texting me, you know what’s going on here. Why is this happening? Are we going to be okay? Talking about his beloved Bears. You know, how many texts I get within games, friends and family? I can’t answer those during the game, but we’ll get to it another time. No, I appreciate it. And Randy, and those of you listening to this, I’ve known him so long. This guy has always been a confident leader. I have the utmost respect, especially for your second act in life, how you have captured the moment. And you’re running with it. You’re being, as you like to say, and I know you said it in this, is you’ve got to be intentional and you’re a heck of a leader, man. And so you’re setting standards. Way to go. We’re all proud of you.

I appreciate it. Thanks again, Jeff.