Tom Brokaw tells why you should care about Brazil
Yahoo.
That’s the last word Tom Brokaw will say on a four-minute Olympic essay, airing this week, about those South American cowboys known as gauchos. This is not a spoiler. NBC played a clip of the yahoo moment on the night of the opening ceremony in Rio.
Brokaw doesn’t exclaim “yahoo!” with the throaty exuberance of a cowpoke in an old Western. He says it at normal volume — on horseback in gaucho gear — accompanied by wry smile and ironic inflection, as if we are all in on the joke.
“I did that spontaneously,” Brokaw tells Paste BN Sports. “My granddaughter, who’s working down there ... and she said, ‘Oh, Tom, that’s so you.’ ”
Brokaw is 76. He was anchor and managing editor of NBC Nightly News from 1982 to 2004. Now he’s a special correspondent for NBC News. Since the Sydney Games in 2000, he offers distinguished disquisitions on the host countries at each Olympics.
“Well, the assignment really is the Brokaw essay on where we are and why we should care about this country,” he says, “besides what goes on at the track or in the swimming pool or in the gymnastics venue.”
In Sochi, Brokaw told the story of the Cold War space race between the United States and Soviet Union. In London, he told the story of British resolve during World War II. In Vancouver, he told the story of Gander, a town in Newfoundland that provided refuge for passengers on U.S.-bound flights on Sept. 11, 2001.
“So I’ve been doing these kinds of essays for every Olympics,” Brokaw says. “And this time there were two naturals — the Amazon rainforest and the gaucho way of life.”
Brokaw’s reflective essay on the rainforest ran on the first Sunday night of the Games, but was abruptly interrupted partway through when a beach volleyball game that had apparently ended suddenly resumed unexpectedly. Brokaw was watching at the time.
“I was in my hotel room saying — ‘Oh no!’ ” Brokaw says. “They said they got late notice that the thing was going to resume so they had to get back to it. They didn’t have a chance to say, ‘We’ll be back with Tom in a moment.’ ”
When the game between Swiss and Chinese teams ended — for good this time — a bemused Bob Costas observed that you know it’s important when they interrupt Tom Brokaw. “Now, where were we?” Costas said, and then NBC replayed the feature from the start.
The essay running this week, as early as Monday’s prime time, is called "The Gaucho Way of Life," and it begins with those words in Bonanza-style, Old West lettering. Brokaw tells the story of the gauchos’ cowboy lifestyle in Brazil’s Southeast and how it is not so different from the American West.
“I have spent a lot of time in South America, not so much in Brazil but in Argentina and Chile, where I go fishing and trekking with my friends,” Brokaw says. “And we are always coming across these gauchos in the middle of nowhere.”
Brokaw and his wife Meredith live on a ranch in Montana that they’ve owned for 30 years. He says they learned to be serious riders under the tutelage of Buck Brannaman, known as the horse whisperer, who has become a close friend.
“Our children and our grandchildren all ride,” Brokaw says. “It’s a part of our lives that we could not have anticipated.”
That’s why Brokaw looks so comfortable on that horse, though it almost didn’t happen.
“My horsemanship has been curtailed somewhat because — I think you’re probably aware that I have cancer; it’s in remission — but it’s multiple myeloma and it invades your bones, among other things, so I’ve had to be more careful.”
Brokaw worked both political conventions this summer and can still make news with strongly worded opinions. In December he called Donald Trump’s stance on Muslin immigration “a dangerous proposal that overrides history, the law and the foundation of America itself. In my lifetime alone, we have been witness to the consequences of paranoia overriding reason.”
Brokaw says he heard right away from family and friends — “Dad, you’ve gone viral” — and from Democrats and Republicans who approved.
He relishes his role as elder statesman of NBC News — and his Olympic role as a sort of cultural cryptologist.
“I got into this business because I love being a reporter and finding out how other parts of the world work,” he says. “I’m happy to be there.”
Being there, in this case, also meant being with his granddaughter, Claire Fry, a rising sophomore at Columbia and a researcher for NBC Olympics. She’s the one who thinks her grandfather's mashup of that old cowboy interjection is so him. And she wasn’t the only one.
“It’s become sort of the byword around the IBC (International Broadcast Centre), in the NBC part of it,” Brokaw says. “People will walk by each other and say, ‘Yahoo.’ ”
They do this, Brokaw says, with the same ironic inflection that he put on it. This seems to please him.
The setup for Brokaw’s yahoo moment comes at the close of a sort of postscript to his gaucho essay, as he tosses it back to Costas in the studio.
“I do think that sometimes everything looks like it’s so pat” on a TV segment, Brokaw says, “that anything you can do to remind everyone that we are all pals and we are having fun as well.”
Yahoo.
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