Jockying for Air Time
Jock Talk is a weekly sports panel show hosted by seniors: Jesse Betar, Tim Hipszer, and Justin Teles. You can catch Jock Talk Sports Mondays at 9:00 PM on BUTV.
(From left to right) Tim Hipszer, Jesse Betar, Justin Tele
I sit in the editing suite in McCormick and observe three students huddled around a computer. The mood in the room is light, as they smile and joke with each other, despite being hard at work. Some of you may have seen their work, while most have unfortunately not. These three seniors: Jesse Betar, Tim Hipszer, and Justin Teles are behind Jock Talk Sports.
Jock Talk Sports is a weekly sports panel show on BUTV. The show is produced, written, hosted, and edited by Betar, Hipszer, and Teles. The only help they get is on camera and control room equipment by Josh Dunst, Chris Tarricone, and myself; although I will do my best to not sound too biased.
Each week the topics of discussion are the major sports stories and match-ups. The show is broken down into segments such as: “Cash it or trash it”, where the hosts decide whether a team or player are “cash” or “trash”, “Tweetle Dee or Tweetle Dumb”, where the hosts take viewer submitted predictions from their twitter fan base and decide whether they are smart or “tweetle dumb”, and interviews with BU athletes; including Dana Wieller, Cory Stiger, and Mike Varanvage.
Filming takes place every Friday morning in the McCormick studio A, at 10:30 AM. The actual filming of the show takes roughly three hours, with editing taking the same. A lot of people probably do not realize that a show with a run-time of only 30 minutes can easily take over 10 times that to produce.
This where I find myself now, in the dimly lit editing room with the team. They have just finished shooting a new episode and are commencing with the monotonous, and often frustrating, task of editing. For the moment, though, we are laughing at a blooper take from the previous show. During a take, Tim messed up a line and decided it would be a good time to start acting out the famous Bill O’Reilly freak out tape. “I can’t read the words! There’s no words on there!” yells the digital Tim. “I don’t think we’re going to be using that,” replies the organic one.
I ask the crew what makes them work so hard for a show that, due to a time slot that competes with Monday Night Football, does not have a very large following. Jesse jokingly tells me that he showed up the first day expecting to meet a girl, and was surprised to find Tim and Justin there with cameras rolling. “I was bummed at the time but after I saw how good we all looked on the screen, I figured I could do it.” We all laugh at the joke but it’s clear that I was looking for a serious answer. Thankfully, Justin saves me from having to re-ask my question. “Well we are all telecommunications majors and want to have a nice resume when we graduate. Sports are a great subject to talk about because its something we all know a lot about… except Tim.” Tim promptly hit Justin after that comment.
Jock Talk Sports is not the only claim to fame that they all have together. Last year they made up, along with Professor Jason Genovese, Dream Team Sports. The previous show shared the same topic of sports, but it differed in format. Dream Team was more of a round table discussion, as opposed to the ESPN style pacing of Jock Talk. The team all decided they wanted to reunite this year to make a new show, and really went all out with it. Jock Talk Sports looks very professional, it features filmed opening credits, has moving graphics, and makes use of the green screen to use a digital background.
The reasons they give me all sound valid. It sounds fair that they do it all to pad a resume, but I have trouble believing that for some reason. As I watch the computer screen and see the show coming together it is obvious to me why they do it. They really enjoy what they do. I don’t just mean that they simply enjoy each others company, or that they like talking about sports, its more than that. Everything from writing up the topics and researching stats, getting on the set and arguing about topics, and even sitting in the editing room for hours on end on a Friday, is all something that they just genuinely enjoy doing.
Confucius famously said, “Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.” If that’s the case then Jesse Betar, Tim Hipszer, and Justin Teles haven’t worked a single minute on Jock Talk Sports. Hopefully for them, being stars of a BUTV show could just be a stepping-stone into long television careers for all three. No matter what happens, I’m sure that they are all going to enjoy every minute of it, just as they manage to have fun tediously editing for hours on end. You can follow Jock Talk Sports on Facebook and Twitter. Jock Talk Sports airs Mondays at 9:00 PM on BUTV.
