Beyond the Byline: Live NFL draft coverage? Scooter was the first

It shouldn’t surprise me that my pal Frank “Scooter” Cerreta invented live media coverage of the NFL draft.

And it doesn’t surprise me at all.

Scooter, after all, is a fan of all real New York sports teams — Yankees, Giants, Knicks, Rangers.

He is such a diehard Yankee fan, that he will watch a Yankee game first pitch to final out and if the Yankees lose, Scooter will wait to watch the replay and root as if the Yanks have a chance to win.

So we were having a couple of hot dogs at Abe’s Lunch on Barney Street last week and Scooter tells me this story.

He tells me that when he worked at WILK radio in the 1970s and 1980s, he went to Roy E. Morgan, the station owner, and asked if he could go to New York City and cover the 1979 NFL draft.

Mr. Morgan asked him what he meant by covering the event. Scooter told him that he would file live reports from the Waldorf Astoria, giving updates on what NFL teams drafted which college players.

To Mr. Morgan’s credit, he didn’t dismiss the idea — he told Scooter if he could sell ads for this idea, WILK would air it.

And Scooter sold the ads — Bruni Auto Sales bought them — packed his bags and headed to NYC to cover the NFL draft.

It was groundbreaking, for sure. When Scooter took his seat at the draft, he was next to a New York Post scribe who asked him what he was doing there. It wasn’t a condescending tone, the guy just wanted know why a radio guy from Wilkes-Barre, would be at the NFL draft filing live reports back home.

Fair questions, given that this had never been done before.

Now let me remind you, Scooter and WILK’s Don Bruce used to banter in the mornings, making people laugh on their way to work, long before that iconic format became popular as well.

So here he was, in the Waldorf Astoria, filing live reports back to Wilkes-Barre on the NFL draft. When you see the extravaganza that the NFL draft has become today, you have to marvel at Scooter’s idea — an idea that nobody had before him.

So I decided to look back at the history of media coverage of the NFL draft and I found a 2020 story written by Craig Ellenport, a veteran NFL writer and author of “NFL100: The Greatest Moments of the NFL’s Century” (Triumph Books).

Ellenport’s story found that in 1980, the fledgling ESPN network approached the NFL with a proposal to televise the NFL draft.

“Those who were there in the early days look back at the first draft telecast, and how it helped launch an event that no one was watching and a network that had nothing to lose,” Ellenport wrote.

Then-NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle’s reaction was, “You want to televise what?” Ellenport wrote that “Rozelle was befuddled after fielding an unusual request from a fledgling sports network. It was an inquiry about broadcasting the NFL’s ‘annual player selection meeting’ — or, as it’s better known, the draft.”

And Ellenport found that Rozelle wasn’t the only skeptic:

“There’s nobody there,” Bill Fitts, a producer at the time, told his boss. “It’s just a bunch of people on the phone. And they’re not even ‘name’ people — they’re nobody. It’s just a room with some people on the phone.”

Yep, like Scooter Cerreta was — THE YEAR BEFORE, in 1979!

But in a Seinfeld like moment, Ellenport wrote that Chet Simmons, then the president of the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network (ESPN), envisioned the New York City ballroom where league officials presided and team officials sat at their respective tables. He saw the potential for something more, or, at least a reason to give the idea a try.

Like George Costanza’s explanation on why viewers would watch a show about nothing, saying, “Because it’s on TV,” Fitts explained why he thought televising the NFL draft was a good idea: “It’s the NFL.”

Over the years that have followed, the NFL draft has become one of the biggest annual sporting events on the television calendar — drawing thousands to the event and millions watching on TV.

Ellenport wrote:

“But it won’t be as weird as the broadcast that aired the morning of April 29, 1980, when the idea of putting the NFL draft on live TV was nothing short of preposterous. Because, just like they do for Super Bowls, cities now bid for the right to host the draft.”

And, Ellenport wrote that it all grew out of that vision, 43 years ago, from a room with some people on the phone.

But let’s remember, that 44 years ago, Frank “Scooter” Cerreta, a native of Mocanaqua, got on a Martz bus at 6 a.m., arrived in Manhattan at around 8:30 a.m. and picked up his credentials for the NFL draft at the Waldorf Astoria.

Scooter was there to report that his beloved New York Football Giants selected quarterback Phil Simms of Morehead State with the seventh pick in the 1979 NFL draft.

When I asked Scooter why he wanted to do this, his response was perfect:

“I just thought people would be interested.”

Indeed they were.