Presentation Advice from L.A. Dodgers Broadcaster Vin Scully

October 19, 2009 by Jerry

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Now that we are in the peak sports period of the year—the culmination of the baseball season and the heat of the football season—the voices of play-by-play announcers and color commentators are filling 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—now playing in the National League Championship Series. Scully, who is 81 years old and in his 60th year as a broadcaster, is widely acknowledged to be the best in the business. The Wall Street Journal recently recognized his talent in a laudatory profile. Scully defined the secret of his success to his interviewer: “I don’t announce,” he said, “I have a conversation.”

That can be the secret of your success in presentations, for it is the essence of the Power Presentations methodology: Consider every presentation as a series of person-to-person conversations.

Vin Scully learned his unique style from his mentor, Red Barber, the radio voice of the Brooklyn Dodgers, the predecessor organization Los Angeles Dodgers. Barber, as described on the Radio Hall of Fame website was “a down-to-earth man who not only informed but also entertained with folksy colloquialisms.”

An even earlier influence for Scully had to be Ronald Reagan, whose origins as the Great Communicator go back to the early 1930s. 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.

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