One corner of SportsChannel’s TV studio resembles a woodsy den, with a basketball hoop mounted where a deer’s head might go. In keeping with that informality, the host of “The Game Room” usually wears suspenders over his shirt instead of a jacket.
On this night, he is slightly out of uniform in a full suit, but definitely not out of character.
Turning to former Bulls guard Norm Van Lier, also in a suit, the host begins one of his signature elongated queries:
“You know what, Van, you played the game. You know how ballplayers react. You know how ballplayers’ psyches can go up and down on the . . . on the meter. You’re Scottie Pippen. You’re watching this ballgame last night. You’ve already said you want to be traded. What kind of thoughts are going through your mind?”
Van Lier begins to answer, but the question isn’t finished.
“Do you feel like you’re a man on an island?”
Chet’s back.
Or, more in the parlance of the man himself, chitchatting Chester William Coppock, 48 years of age, the primo purveyor of superfluous subordinate clauses, the man whose voice doesn’t roar so much as it idles, the master of suspendered animation, has returned to Chicago television full-blown in a sports-related vehicle.
“The Game Room” is SportsChannel’s home-grown half-hour ingredient being tossed into an outsider-mixed salad of national, regional and local sports programming called Fox Sports Net.
The new Fox cable network is set to supplant SportsChannel on Jan. 28. But its gradual phase-in already includes replacing the “SportsChannel Report” with the “Game Room,” featuring Chet Coppock as host.
He’s back from New York, for which he left Chicago three years ago. He didn’t make it there quite as expected with a couple of TV projects. Nonetheless, SportsChannel General Manager James Corno says he was wooing Coppock to return even before things went mushy in the Big Apple.
Coppock is now “The Game Room’s” talking sun in a gabbing galaxy that includes Van Lier, ex-Bear Doug Buffone and ex-Blackhawk Murray Bannerman. “The Game Room” serves as a pregame show for Bulls and Hawks broadcasts on SportsChannel. Ten weeks after its debut, the program remains quirky and uneven.
At its weakest, it jumps aimlessly among features such as “celebrity” chats with the likes of Fox analyst/NFL alumnus/rookie movie actor Howie Long, to sound bite man-in-the-street interviews on Ron Powlus’ hype and shortfall as Notre Dame quarterback, to a computer poll on whether the Blackhawks would be a .500 team by the Olympics. (Seventy-eight percent said no, but that was before the Hawks won four and tied two to pull within three victories of that modest mark.) And there seems to be a compulsion to hype every segment that’s coming up.
At its best, the show offers Van Lier and Bannerman opportunities to do extended analyses on the Bulls and Hawks, more in-depth and less rehearsed than sports segments on the local network stations.
And those moments are amplified, for better or worse, by Coppock.
At his worst, he throws off his co-stars’ timing by embellishing his questions or trying to one-up their answers.
When he asked Bannerman for something positive about the Blackhawks’ poor start, the ex-Hawk replied, “Higher draft picks next year?” Perfect. But Coppock came back with something about lower beer prices at the United Center, one gulp too many.
And there was this prelude to a question about how the Hawks could reverse their misfortunes: “I have a theory. When you’re down, when you’re struggling, when you’re on the deck, if you don’t have guys pointing fingers in the locker room, your club has just waved the white flag . . . “
Van Lier, when disagreeing with a question’s premise, simply takes off in another direction. Unfortunately, he at times gets more verbose than the host.
At his best, Coppock has keen recall of sports history, a deft touch at self-parody (defining himself on a TV guest appearance as a “big gimmick, not to be taken seriously”) and an improving style of setting up Bannerman and Van Lier, pulling out their expertise with blunt questions.
He elicited smart analysis from Van Lier about the essence of positioning and the unimportance of leaping ability in rebounding, hence Dennis Rodman being a great rebounder but not much of a shot-blocker.
And he got Van Lier to chuckle when he reached into the archives to recall that in the ex-Bull’s playing days, there might not have been TVs in the locker rooms, but there were players smoking cigarettes in there.
He greets Van Lier primarily as “Van,” “El Toro” or Dutchman.” After Van Lier and Buffone revisited their five greatest sports moments of 1997, ex-wrestling announcer Coppock chided “El Toro” and “Buffy” for not including pro wrestler Shawn Michaels knocking off The Undertaker.
Poking fun at the trend toward excessive hype of athletes, Coppock introduced a “Game Room” segment on emerging Los Angeles Lakers star Kobe Bryant as follows:
“One ballplayer is the Mona Lisa, the Sistine Chapel. The other is a 19-year-old kid with impeccable talent. But in my opinion, it is ludicrous to compare Kobe Bryant to Michael Jeffrey Jordan. So that’s what we intend to do next. . . . “
Corno says he knew Coppock’s style would grate on some viewers who enjoyed the more straightforward “SportsChannel Report.” But he says ratings have doubled from about 12,000 TV households pre-Chet. And, he adds, “This is the highest level of energy we’ve had on our channel outside of the sporting events. He’s evoking passion out there. People react very positively or very negatively.”
Coppock insists he’s not bothered by the volume of caricature and teasing his on-air persona has spawned, from sportscaster Bruce Wolf’s memorable “Chet Chit-Chat” imitation to less creative criticism across the radio dial.
“I love it,” he says. “Nobody likes to laugh at Chet Coppock more than I do.
“I understand that I’m a target. People are going to tease about the way I do things. Sometimes I think I’m kind of funny. I’m a character.”
And he has been tweaked by the best. David Letterman, once coming off a commercial break wearing a white shirt, loose tie and no jacket, announced to his late-night audience, “How ya’ doin’? I’m Chet Coppock. Welcome back to `Sports Line.’ “
Lest anyone think all the wisecracks roll off Coppock’s back, however, he inserts a qualification: “Sometimes it’s criticism. Sometimes it’s personal. I was amazed that people were taking potshots at me in Chicago after I’d been in Year 2 or Year 3 in New York.”
This is where he began, doing play-by-play on New Trier High School football broadcasts as a senior at the Winnetka school. This is where he did sports shows on WFLD-Ch. 32, WSNS-Ch. 44, SportsChannel, WMAQ-TV, WMAQ-AM and WMVP-AM, sandwiched around six years as sports director at WISH-Ch. 7 in Indianapolis. This is where he won awards for sportscasting.
The New York experience was an overall minus. He was signed away from WMVP to take his sports-interview format to TV via NewSport cable network. Coppock’s live program reached the huge New York City audience when it was launched in mid-1995, but channel access was cut back to outlying areas by year’s end.
NewSport went out of business last year, and a proposed New York-based “American Sports Classics” program failed to materialize for Coppock.
But unlike 1983, when he “hit bottom” after being fired as lead sports anchor for WMAQ-Ch. 5 in Chicago, there was an easy exit ramp back to Chicago from New York’s fast lane.
“The three-year run at NewSport, while not as fulfilling as it looked like it would be on paper, was a lot of fun,” he insists.
And so the rambling raconteur–whose experience includes promoting boxing and wrestling, announcing them as well as roller derby, writing music, serving as a roadie for Chicago’s New Colony Six rock group and being the ongoing host of “The Back Table” national TV interview show taped in Chicago (he commuted here from New York to do it)–is back on his seat . . . and back in town.
At times, those who listen are still not certain when he’s serious.
Even as he’s telling Corno he would like to take “The Game Room” out of the studio to live venues, he adds a pitch for wrestlers as guests. He was criticized for that in New York, but insists, “We didn’t get one-tenth the response with a linebacker that we did when we put The Undertaker on.”
Sitting beside Coppock, Corno grapples with the idea. He says he “could see where we’d get one (a wrestler),” but “there are no plans to do so yet.”
Stay tuned.
