Diamond Sparkles as Big-Time Producer, Small-Time Coach

publication date: Aug 14, 2008

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author/source: Tim Altork / STAFF

By Tim Altork / STAFF

It’s a not-so-classic case of the dual life. By day Glenn Diamond is the enthusiastic coach of a J.V. girls basketball team. But by night he produces one of the longest-running, most successful sports broadcasts ever and rubs elbows with the who’s who of Atlanta sports.

At home in Roswell, he’s better known as Nancy Diamond’s husband. Nancy has long been an active member of the Roswell Rotary and runs a community after-school program called Star House.

At work he’s the “wizard behind the curtain,” as broadcaster Chip Caray puts it, making household names like Joe Simpson and Caray look good on TV and taking the brunt of their jokes in front of millions of people. Caray also quipped that making fun of Glenn is like “shooting fish in a barrel” perhaps mostly because the fish don’t shoot back.

But unlike the mysterious superheroes that lead dual lives, Diamond’s lives are seamlessly intertwined with each other, so much so that many of his work colleagues know more about Roswell girls J.V. basketball than some of the players’ parents.

We followed Glenn as he prepared for a recent Peachtree TV broadcast of a Braves-Cardinals game at Turner Field, and what we found bore out that his life is an odd juxtaposition of a high-profile career and a thankless job that almost seems like a waste of time when the two are held in contrast. But he’s just as proud of the latter as he is the former, and maybe even more so. 

Here’s how the day went.

3:42 – Glenn emerges from the production truck wearing a loose-fitting shirt with some sort of innocuous red pattern on it. For all the flak he’ll catch for it throughout the day, it may as well have been a big red bulls-eye.

In the land of the Braves, Diamond has learned – and will be reminded of it several times today – that even the decision of which shirt to put on when you wake up in the morning is one that can prove costly in the friendly verbal game of Jab the Producer.

The all-time champion for life in this game is, of course, Skip Caray. The longtime broadcaster, who passed away at his home on August 3, made Diamond a household name with his habit of routinely goosing Glenn on the air. 

“I learned right away listening to Skip say the things that he would say during the broadcast, that Glenn’s got a thick skin,” said broadcaster Joe Simpson, who joined the Braves in 1991. “He does enjoy a good laugh, and he’s not afraid to laugh at himself.”

Over the years Caray has discussed with America everything from his underwear shopping trips with Diamond in south Florida to Diamond’s take on the game of golf (“Glenn thinks there’s too much bending over in golf.”) He even got about four digits into Glenn’s home phone number on the air once before Diamond buzzed in on the intercom and reminded him of the wrath he would incur from Diamond’s wife Nancy if he finished the number.

“He stopped,” Diamond said.

3:58 – We take a tour of the production truck. The truck is literally an expandable version of a semi truck trailer, outfitted with enough television monitors and computer screens to rival NASA’s mission control. Amid this screaming forest of electronics, one image stands out like a palm tree in the Rockies. There, as the desktop image on Diamond’s laptop, is the Roswell girls J.V. basketball team celebrating last season’s region championship.

For a man who uses a video room at Turner headquarters to break down game film of his team and who picks the brain of the fourth-winningest manager in the history of baseball for coaching tips, the image is not surprising.

And it provides a simple microcosm of his life. In the midst of the world that encompasses his career he has injected this otherwise inconsequential basketball team and made it into the adopted daughter of a doting family. And true to form, the Hornets team also becomes another avenue down which the pot shots flow.

Bobby Cox, the aforementioned manager of the Atlanta Braves: “He bugs me with that basketball team on a daily basis.” 

Braves hitting coach Terry Pendleton: “I hear he’s a horrible basketball coach. You have to put that in there.”
Joe Simpson: “I enjoy listening to [him talk about the team]. I do have a time limit though.”

But Diamond takes the team and his job as a coach very seriously. He’s been in the Roswell program for three seasons, first as the ninth grade girls coach and the last two years as the J.V. coach. He got his start in the Roswell recreational leagues in 1997 when his daughter was playing, and joined the Roswell staff at the behest of former girls head coach Tony Bostardi.

Now some of the girls that he has coached are making their way up to the varsity and preparing for what is a hopeful 2008-09 season.

“You want to talk about satisfaction,” he said. “I’ve known those girls a long time. I haven’t coached all the girls [that will be on varsity this year], but I’ve coached a lot of them. And to watch them put on a varsity uniform and perform well, I love that part of it.”

4:26 – We walk into the Braves clubhouse so that Glenn, like a troublesome child who has been asked by his father to go fetch the paddle, can line up a couple of interviews for me. As he’s doing this Jeff Francoeur walks by wearing a blue No. 13 Braves jersey that he apparently lifted from reliever Will Ohman’s locker.

“Nice shirt,” Glenn says.

Without breaking stride Francoeur says, “Same to you.”

4:32 – Diamond spends the time before and during batting practice talking to the players and coaches and getting updates for any story lines that may pop up in that night’s broadcast. While Diamond is teased relentlessly by those who have known him the longest (“Wait a minute, now. You’re doing a feature on who?” cracked Pendleton. “Oh my God. I’ve been waiting for this day”), it is those same people who are quick to comment on Diamond’s status as one of the best producers in the business.

“It makes all of our jobs a lot easier when we know he’s in charge,” Pendleton said.

Diamond is in the precarious position of having to maintain relationships with people like Cox and Pendleton and Tom Glavine and John Smoltz, but at the same time use those relationships to bring valuable – and sometimes sensitive – information to his broadcasts.

It can be a fine line. Over the years managers and players have even tested him by feeding him some false information in confidence, watching to see if that information resurfaced anywhere else.

“All you have in those situations is your word,” Diamond said. “And if you break that trust you can’t ever get it back.”

“That’s a tough line for him to walk,” Glavine said. “Because he has a responsibility to report things and report stories and at the same time he’s guarded towards the trust that he has in this clubhouse from guys. Sometimes he has to say things or report things that people don’t necessarily like in here, but that’s the way it goes.”

He’s clearly earned the respect of the players and of Cox.

“Glenn’s never over-stepped the boundaries of the team,” Cox said. “He’s been a professional about his job completely. He’s one of – and this is true, I’ve heard this from a lot of people – the most well thought of guys in this industry with the work he does.”

4:48 - We go back to the truck from the clubhouse to oversee the recording of a segment with J.J., the on-air personality who “hosts” the Peachtree TV Braves broadcasts. While there, Howard Feinberg, a video editor who also calls Roswell home, shows Diamond the radar that shows a line of thunderstorms that are treating the I-285 loop like a dartboard and Turner Field as the bullseye.

“This is all going all the way back I-20 to Alabama,” Feinberg says pointing at the image on the computer.

Diamond’s reaction is like that of a child being told he has to clean up his room.

“Awwww! You’ll see me have to work,” he says.

5:08 – With J.J.’s segment recorded and ready to go we walk back toward the clubhouse so that Glenn can have his daily conversation with Cox. Cox generally sits in the dugout during batting practice and Glenn will grab his ear for a few minutes to get any player updates or information. As batting practice winds down, the rain begins to fall in earnest. Within minutes the tarp is on the field.

For Diamond, rain means improvisation. If a delay knocks back the start of the game, he has to rearrange the opening segments and coordinate with the studio about what programming will fill the dead time.

5:19 – As we’re walking down the tunnel from the field to the clubhouse we find ourselves in front of a group of players, including Ohman, who is notorious for his sense of humor.

“Glenn, you got the bottoms and the robe that go with that shirt?” he cracks.

5:26 – Diamond goes back upstairs to discuss the open with the broadcast team of Simpson and Chip Caray. With the trade deadline just two days away Simpson wants to go beyond the obvious names of Ohman and Teixeira and discuss the bigger picture of available Braves personnel.

“What does this organization really have to do to set itself forward for next year and beyond? That’s what we’re trying to address,” Diamond says.

6:00 – As the deluge continues outside we head back to the clubhouse to see if there is any new information about the weather. Glenn is not the least bit worried about the game’s start time and seems pretty confident that there will be no delay. In almost 27 years of doing Braves games in Atlanta, Diamond has an uncanny knack for understanding the weather. That kind of experience has afforded him a steely set of nerves and an ability to not make any panicky decisions, even though game time is now just over an hour away.

“For them to prepare the field and get the pitchers warmed up, the whole bit, is about a 40-45 minute process,” he says. “Until we get there I’m assuming that we’re starting on time.”

6:04 – We catch up with John Smoltz, whose season ended in May after surgery to his right elbow. Smoltz, who helped start King’s Ridge Christian School in Alpharetta and who has said that he will coach basketball there when he retires, is one of the players that has been around long enough to know Diamond as well as anyone.

And he’s not afraid to take advantage of that comfort level.

A few years ago when Smoltz was on the shelf, he worked with the broadcast crew on a few telecasts. At one of the games at Wrigley Field in Chicago Smoltz decided to play an on-air practical joke on Diamond. Smoltz had a microphone and was doing his part of the telecast from the dugout.

“It basically went down like this,” he said. “I told the guys [in the broadcast booth], whatever you ask me I’m going to talk about the ivy. And then whatever next question you ask me I’ll talk about the first thing you asked me.”

This went on for several questions, making for a tense few minutes for Diamond.

“If he’s truthful, probably he had to pee his pants trying to figure out what was going on,” Smoltz said.

6:19 – As we’re walking out of the clubhouse, I look to my left and see someone sitting on the couch in the security area near the entrance. It’s Mark Teixeira. He’s showered and wearing a Georgia Tech polo shirt and khaki shorts and talking on a cell phone in hushed tones. This close to game time, that is not normal. Something has gone down in the past few minutes and it’s clear that Teixeira is no longer a member of the Atlanta Braves.

6:24 – Glenn gets all the details about the trade, which completely scraps everything that the broadcast team had planned for the open of the show. If the weather had people on alert, the trade sends them into a full-fledged frenzy.
Diamond sorts out the priorities in his head and simplifies what he has to do between now and airtime at 7 p.m.

“What I’d like to do is have our opening, put the guys on, explain the trade that’s happened, go to the break, come back and hopefully I have Frank Wren,” he said.

Wren is the Braves general manager, the man who pulled the trigger on the trade that sent Teixeira to the Angels. Diamond wants to have Wren on live in the booth with the broadcasters at the open of the show, but he hasn’t been able to nail him down.

6:37 – After a meeting with the umpires and a couple of other stops along the way, we head back to the truck to hole up for the game.

Even in the midst of the mad dash to airtime, Diamond’s attention to detail is unwavering. He makes sure his crew has the updated lineup minus Teixeira and all the stats and graphics updated to reflect the new lineup. He scraps the lead-in to the broadcast that J.J. recorded because J.J. made a minor factual error about how many games were left in the Braves current series.

Then he oversees the recording of the opening segment with Chip Caray and Simpson announcing and analyzing the trade. They get it done in three takes, and it appears that everything is ready for the broadcast.

And Glenn’s instinct about the weather was correct. The rain has stopped and the game is set to begin on time.

“If that happened at six o’clock, we’re not starting on time. But when it rains that hard at that time, we’re good,” he said, before adding with a smile, “It’s not my first rodeo.”

7:00 – The game starts without a hitch and Glenn is locked in on the broadcast. Frank Wren is not going to be a part of the open, so after running the pre-recorded segment about the trade they come back and use the information from the original open of the show that was bumped.

Diamond has three basic fundamentals that he wants to make sure he shows the viewers at home – safe or out, ball or strike, fair or foul. He gets a chance to put this philosophy into action when home plate umpire Tim Tschida apparently misses a call on a play at the plate.

After showing the play again from several angles, Diamond finds the definitive shot that shows that Tschida did in fact miss the call.

“I try to empty the bag to show you this angle, that angle, this angle and then when you’ve found the right one, show it again,” he said. “We showed you safe or out. The umpire missed the call.”

7:26 – Wren eventually comes on around the second inning and talks about the trade. The Braves acquired Kasey Kotchman and a minor league reliever from the Angels for Teixeira.

After Wren is done and the show is in a commercial break, Chip Caray shows that despite all the hard work and scrambling around, it’s still just another day at the office for the Turner broadcast crew. And that means it’s still open season on Glenn Diamond.

“If this was Baseball Tonight we’d have Kasey Kotchman on the air already,” he said.