Presentations in Action - Jerry Weissman [41]
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.
55. “Ya’ Either Got It or Ya’ Ain’t”: The Fear of Public Speaking Is Universal
One of the most commonly held misconceptions about public speaking is that good speakers are born that way—meaning, in the lyrics of a song from Stephen Sondheim’s classic Broadway musical, Gypsy, that “Ya’ either got it, or ya’ ain’t.”F55.1 If any speaker were to accept this false belief, he or she would never be able to change—and presentation coaches would be out of business.
I’m pleased to report that the presentation trade is alive and well, primarily because of the pervasiveness of one of the most common maladies known to humankind: the fear of public speaking. Underlying that fear is another fear: the fear of failure. After all, public speeches and presentations are high-profile events in which the outcome hangs in the balance of success or failure in front of a mission-critical audience. All presenters, whether they are political candidates seeking votes or businesspersons seeking to raise capital or sell a product, face this pivotal juncture. But professional performers also face it because their very livelihood depends on their ability to hold audiences spellbound.
Actor Sir Laurence Olivier, singer Carly Simon, and pianist Glenn Gould have all acknowledged their extreme stage fright. That celebrated list was lengthened by Terry Teachout, the theater critic of the Wall Street Journal. In an article on the release of a book about jazz great Benny Goodman’s famous 1938 Carnegie Hall concert, Mr. Teachout quoted Mr. Goodman’s daughter, who wrote that her father was “always fearful of losing the ability, reputation, and money that he’d gained.”F55.2
Mr. Teachout went on to cite the apprehensions of choreographer Jerome Robbins and actor–director Orson Wells. Mr. Robbins “left behind a journal in which he set down on numerous occasions his belief that the world would someday realize that ‘I’m not talented.’” And Mr.