54. Presentation Advice from Vin Scully: From Reagan to Barber to Scully

Cable, satellite, and over-the-air television make sports pervasive in our lives. The voices of play-by-play announcers and color commentators fill the airwaves. Most of them are just that: filler—stuffing the soundtrack with meaningless digressions, infantile inanities, vain attempts at jock humor, or, at best, statements of the obvious.

One voice stands out from all the rest: Vin Scully, the radio voice of the Los Angeles Dodgers. Mr. Scully, who has spent more than 60 years as a broadcaster, is widely acknowledged to be the best in the business. The Wall Street Journal recognized his talent in a laudatory profile. Mr. Scully defined the secret of his success to his interviewer: “I don’t announce,” he said. “I have a conversation.”

Vin Scully learned his unique style from his mentor, Red Barber—the radio voice of the Brooklyn Dodgers, the predecessor organization of the Los Angeles Dodgers. Mr. Barber, as described on the Radio Hall of Fame web site, was “a down-to-earth man who not only informed, but also entertained with folksy colloquialisms.”^F54.1

An even earlier influence for Mr. Scully had to be Ronald Reagan, whose origins as the Great Communicator go back to the early 1930s. Mr. Reagan was a sports announcer at a radio station in Des Moines, Iowa, where his job was to sit in a studio and describe the play-by-play of Chicago Cubs baseball games from a telegraph ticker tape, as if he were in the ballpark, projecting himself across time and space and, by extension, into the homes of his radio audiences. Then and there, Ronald Reagan learned the art of being conversational.

Reagan to Barber to Scully—a triple play of consummate conversationalists. Make them the role models for the secret to your success as a presenter: Consider every presentation as a series of person-to-person conversations.