Welcome back to the second edition of THE INDUSTRY, where I had the privilege to interview Gregg Winik, owner of the sports production company Winik Media. Mr. Winik has had a long and storied career in sports media and he recently spoke to me by phone from his production offices in Newark, New Jersey.
Gregg began his sports career in middle school, carrying camera equipment around on film shoots for his father Barry Winik. The elder Winik was a renowned Sports Cinematographer who traveled the world for most of the 1970s filming Olympic profile features for NBC Sports. Barry would go on to play pivotal roles in training the next generation of Sports Producers while helping to launch both MLB Productions and NBA Entertainment. “I was definitely a child of the sports production industry”, Gregg stated. “Some of my earliest memories in the business was working behind the scenes with my dad on numerous film shoots. And, I quickly developed the dream to work for NBC Sports like him.”
Throughout his high school years, Winik learned a great deal from these experiences working “in the field” with his dad, which led him to major in film and television in college. After touring multiple schools in the Boston area, he was most attracted to Emerson College because of the hands-on experience the school offered their students, “The other universities in Boston had signs up saying that no one was allowed to check out equipment until they were a senior,” Winik said. “Meanwhile, from day one, Emerson let students produce all types of programming and content, covering a diverse set of themes and stories that inquisitive college students would want to tell. It also didn’t hurt that the college offered a strong internship program and I jumped at the chance to intern with the Larry Bird-led Boston Celtics for three years.”
It was not surprising that Winik would follow in his father’s footsteps after college, but instead of picking up a camera, Gregg would make his mark as a sports executive.
One of the first positions he had was helping the national newspaper USA Today move into broadcast television. He moved to NBA Entertainment as an executive, and it wasn’t too long before he fulfilled his dream of working with NBC Sports when they acquired the network rights to broadcast NBA games in 1990.
Over the course of his career as the Executive Vice President and Executive Producer at NBA Entertainment, he won multiple Emmy Awards and developed NBA Inside Stuff - the league’s first-ever network series that ran for 16 years on NBC and ABC Sports.
Winik’s role at the NBA went well beyond producing because he also oversaw the league’s ever important broadcast relationships with several national TV networks that held the NBA’s broadcasts rights, including NBC, ABC, TNT, and ESPN.
I asked him who were some of the most important athletes that he worked with over the course of his career. Winik’s first answer was Ahmad Rashad. Rashad made his name as a versatile wide receiver in the NFL, making four Pro Bowls during his career and having his name added to the Minnesota Vikings Ring of Honor before going to work at NBC Sports as a football analyst, sideline reporter and sports desk update anchor. When NBA Entertainment was tasked by NBC to create NBA Inside Stuff, it was up to Winik to pick the on-air talent and when Rashad became available, Gregg jumped at the chance to have him host. Ahmad became an NBA staple - to the point where many people today have forgotten about Rashad’s original association with the NFL.
In 2006, after his long career at NBA Entertainment, he was then inspired to start his own business and launched CineSport right when the internet was starting to change the sports media landscape. Gregg wanted to be at the forefront of this new technology and pursue new forms of sports production and distribution that are so prevalent today. CineSport became one of the industry’s first digital platforms to power video highlights in the sports sections of many well-known newspaper websites such as the Philadelphia Inquirer, Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the Boston Globe. Winik called the Cinesports startup his “passion project”, which perfectly combined his skills in production, business, and technology. “It made a lot of headway towards where we are today with online distribution. To be one of the first companies to see how important this online space could become in the digital world was really exciting,” Winik said.
However, it’s Winik Media’s ongoing relationship with the NBA - as a trusted production partner - where the company continues to shine. Currently, Gregg’s editing teams are producing two projects for the league. NBA Rooks, is a series airing exclusively on ESPN + that takes fans behind the scenes as NBA rookies experience their first season in the league, both on and off the court. The series follows the league’s top rookies from the 2019 NBA Draft class through the entire 2019-20 season.
It’s been interesting for teenagers like myself to feel such high regard for these younger NBA players, who are usually just a few years older than us. According to Gregg, this is the exact appeal of the series. “There’s such a raw sense of discovery and fascination with these next generation of NBA stars,” Winik said. “The series is really a character study on the effect of suddenly having millions of human beings of all ages judging your every move.” Gregg interestingly views the transformation as easier for today’s athletes due to their earlier exposure to the spotlight through social media during high school and college, when most became known to basketball fans and the public for the first time.
The most important project that Winik Media is working on right now in conjunction with the NBA is also perhaps the highest profile production the league has ever done to date. The Last Dance, a 10-part series on the legendary Michael Jordan is set to air on Netflix in 2020. This docu-series will cover Jordan’s illustrious career set against the backdrop of his last season with the Chicago Bulls when the team won 62 games en route to defeating the Utah Jazz in the 1998 NBA Finals to win their sixth NBA Championship with MJ.
To this end, Jordan is Winik’s second choice for the most impactful athlete that he has ever worked with. What it must have been like to be an NBA executive when MJ, arguably the greatest player to ever play the game, was in his prime. “Michael was a spectacular athlete, winner, and defined the era of my time at the NBA”, Winik said. “Many basketball fans around the globe know about Michael’s influence on the world and his phenomenal accomplishments on the court, but it’s his personality and relentless competitiveness that fans didn’t get a real chance to see when he was playing,” Winik said. “Yes, fans might have seen glimpses of how competitive Jordan was when he seemingly took over games in high pressure moments,” he said. “But the Netflix docu-series, The Last Dance will have the proper time to really delve into this aspect of his personality and show how his relentless competitive spirit drove him to succeed”.
This topic of “competitiveness” led me to ask Gregg about the competitiveness that is needed to succeed in a career in the sports industry. Here, Winik emphasized that it’s important to have your own personal drive, set goals to be the best you can be and consistently deliver your best work. However, he also made sure to caution me that teamwork is just as important. “There are certain times you have to share the ball, and other times you have to say give me the ball and let me take it from here,” Winik said.
I then asked Gregg that out of all the important works in his career, what is he most proud of? He responded that the launch of NBA Inside Stuff on a major network like NBC was near the top of the list, along with the longevity (16 years) that this series aired under his guidance. “This series was the first youth-targeted show produced by a sports league,” Gregg said. “This paved the way for other sports leagues to see the value in creating this type of programming that fans wanted to see and is one of the reasons most of the major sports leagues now have their own networks where this type of content is available in abundance.”
From the interviews that I have conducted with sports media executives to be featured in upcoming articles, there’s no disputing that writing is a key element in sports production because storytelling is so important. I concluded my conversation with Gregg by asking him if he could offer me any advice about writing as it relates to the sports media industry, and I was happy to hear him answer with a resounding Marv Albert-esque like “YES”. “When producing the USA Today show in the late ’80s, it was the first time that I was exposed to real journalists in a professional setting,” Winik said. “These journalists produced their own video packages, but the stories were told through the written word first and the pictures were added secondarily by an editor,” Winik continued. “It was fascinating to learn this approach, which luckily stayed with me for my entire career,” Winik said. From this experience he continues to believe that the narrative storytelling in writing is one of the most important aspects of what makes this industry so magical.
It was an honor to interview Mr. Winik and I found his words and advice to be very motivating and an inspiration for me to continue to share more stories from these incredible guests who have made their mark on THE INDUSTRY.
Writer and MadCats Films Intern, Jacob Jarrett, is currently a senior at High Tech High School in Hudson County, New Jersey and is currently applying to colleges with strong Sports Broadcasting Programs.
