Veteran NBC announcer Jimmy Roberts is eager for his 20th Olympic Games

“There was a kid standing on the ice with a sign around his neck that said ‘Keith Jackson,’” Roberts said in a telephone interview last month.

Forty-four years later, Roberts is as recognizable to Olympic TV viewers as McKay was then. The Paris Games, where Roberts will work as a reporter for NBC, will mark the University of Maryland graduate’s 20th Olympic Games. His enthusiasm has not waned in the decades leading up to the milestone assignment.

“The Olympics never disappoint,” he said. “They’re just full of stories, and I think that’s what sports is all about.”

Roberts might not be telling those stories if he had been a slightly better lacrosse player. Roberts, the captain of the lacrosse team at White Plains High in New York, came to Maryland as a freshman in 1975 hoping to make coach Bud Beardmore’s team, which had just won its second national title in three years. He was fired before the season began.

Roberts, who had done some sports broadcasting in high school, instead called lacrosse games for Maryland’s college radio station, WMUC. After ABC announced in March 1976 that its “Wide World of Sports” would broadcast the lacrosse national championship game two months later, Roberts called the network’s main number to offer his services. He wouldn’t take no for an answer.

Maryland reached the finals, where the Terrapins faced undefeated Cornell in Providence, R.I. The Big Red won 16-13 in overtime in what is considered one of the greatest games in college lacrosse history. Frank Gifford did play-by-play for ABC, while Roberts sat in the production truck, helping the TV crew understand the intricacies of a sport the NCAA had only begun sponsoring five years earlier. He would do similar work for ABC during his undergraduate years.

Roberts was working as a waiter at the newly opened RJ Bentley’s in College Park after graduating in 1979 and was unsure of his next steps. He called a production assistant he knew at ABC and offered to work the U.S. Women’s Open in Fairfield, Connecticut, later that summer. The production assistant — none other than Sean McManus, McKay’s son and the recently retired chairman of CBS Sports — gave him the job.

Roberts worked the golf tournament and several other events for ABC that fall, including quarterback Dan Marino’s first start at the University of Pittsburgh. When ABC needed someone to help with various tasks at its New York headquarters to prepare for coverage of the 1980 Winter Olympics, they hired Roberts. From that point on, he said, it was “off to the races.”

Roberts was assigned to the Lake Placid skating venue, where he was responsible for working with the chyron operator to display information and graphics. Roberts still considers American skater Eric Heiden’s record five individual gold medals that year to be the greatest athletic achievement of all time.

After Lake Placid, Roberts was promoted from production assistant to associate director. He won his first Emmy Award in 1984 as an associate producer for “SportsBeat,” a 30-minute investigative journalism program hosted by Howard Cosell, and then worked for ABC News.

“It was really a dream come true for me, making a living doing sports television,” Roberts said.

In 1988, fearing that his job would be eliminated due to organizational changes at ABC, Roberts considered a future as an on-camera storyteller. He asked a cameraman to do a stand-up in which he read what he had written and produced for Cosell, McKay and Jackson, and he sent his audition tape across the country.

The only network willing to ignore Roberts’ lack of experience in front of the camera was ESPN, where John Walsh, a former Washington Post editor, ran SportsCenter. The first event Roberts worked for ESPN was the heavyweight boxing championship match between Mike Tyson and Michael Spinks in June 1988. Despite what he recalled as a steep learning curve, Roberts would become the face of the cable network’s golf and boxing coverage for the next decade.

In 1999, NBC signed a deal with General Motors to produce features on the Olympics called “GM Moments.” Longtime NBC sportscaster Dick Enberg was slated for the role, but after the network lost its NFL broadcast rights, Enberg decided to leave for CBS. NBC Sports President Dick Ebersol saw Roberts as the perfect replacement.

During the 2000 Summer Games in Sydney, his first Olympics with NBC, Roberts wrote and narrated a memorable piece about swimmer Eric “the Eel” Moussambani. The 22-year-old from Equatorial Guinea qualified for the Games as an International Olympic Committee wild card and had learned to swim a few months earlier. After the two other swimmers in Moussambani’s 100-meter freestyle heats were disqualified for false starts, he swam alone. Moussambani, who had never swum in an Olympic-size pool, struggled to finish, but the crowd rallied behind him. Roberts’s recounting of the emotional scene won an Emmy.

Two years later, during the Winter Games in Salt Lake City, Ebersol asked Roberts to interview Mike Eruzione and Jim Craig after the 1980 U.S. hockey duo lit the Olympic crucible with their teammates. The opening ceremonies came five months after 9/11, and Roberts said the “sense of unity was palpable.”

NBC invited McKay, who had not worked at the Olympics since 1988, to its 12th Games in Salt Lake City, where the 80-year-old provided commentary each night alongside studio host Bob Costas. In a segment early in the Games, Roberts had the honor of introducing McKay, whom he idolized as a child.

“I remember saying, ‘Now I get to say something I never thought I’d say on television: I’m joined by Jim McKay,'” Roberts said. “There’s a shot of Jim and he says, ‘You were always my favorite production assistant.'”

Of his 19 previous Olympic Games, the most memorable event Roberts covered was the gold medal Dan Jansen won in the 1,000-meter speed skating final at the 1994 Games in Lillehammer. This victory came after so much heartache.

Last year, Roberts had the privilege of telling one of the most significant stories of his career, a deeply personal essay about the U.S. Army regiment that liberated the small town of Farebersviller in northeastern France from Nazi occupation in late 1944. Roberts’ father, who died in 2007, was a 21-year-old Private First Class in Company C of the regiment.

“NBC threw the full weight of its resources into it,” Roberts said of the Emmy-nominated feature, which he wrote after first visiting Farebersviller. “I’m extremely proud of that piece. It’s the best thing I’ve ever done and the most important thing I’ve ever done. It was totally surreal for me.”

Today, one of Roberts’ Emmys sits on a shelf behind the bar at RJ Bentley’s, where framed jerseys of former Maryland greats adorn the walls. Roberts still returns to College Park to speak to journalism students, and he remains a devoted follower of the Terps’ lacrosse program. In Paris for his 20th Games, he was eager to catch the opening ceremonies, held on the Seine, and to see how American gymnast Simone Biles performs in her third Olympics. What he’s most looking forward to is the unexpected.

“There’s always something that happens that makes you walk away thinking this is the best thing you’ve ever seen,” he said.