From a Wall Street Journal story by Emily Bobrow headlined “Dick Ebersol Found the Magic of Sports Behind the Camera”:

Dick Ebersol, once hailed by the Sporting News as the “most powerful person in sports,” was never much of an athlete. A “mediocre forward” on his high school basketball team, he admits that he was “primarily distinguished by my thick glasses and limited ability.” He preferred to watch instead, finding the earliest sports broadcasts on television “magical,” even on the black-and-white set of his childhood. From a young age, he recalls over video from his home in Telluride, Colo., he was “transfixed by whatever was going on behind the camera. I wanted to learn as much about that as possible.”