Peter Graves was an aspiring 27-year-old sportscaster when ABC offered him a 1980 Winter Olympics gig with a two-week paycheck that rivaled his annual entry-level salary.
The one stipulation: “Did I know Bill Koch,” he recently recounted to VTDigger, “and did I have access to him?”
Graves said “yes” about Koch, the publicity-adverse fellow Vermonter who had surprised the television network four years earlier when he became the first U.S. cross-country skier to win an Olympic medal.
That’s why, when Koch dropped out of the same race in 1980, Graves received orders from ABC to seek the reticent athlete’s reaction.
“At that moment, I felt like Mike Wallace at 60 Minutes doing a stakeout,” recalled Graves, who, in his first prime-time appearance, elicited Koch’s reply: “Let’s not talk about this race, let’s talk about the human race.”
Graves, now 73, aimed to echo that Olympic spirit as he worked at a dozen subsequent games. Inducted into the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame for his “inimitable voice” in 2023, the Thetford-based announcer now is sharing nearly a half-century of memories in a new memoir, “I Almost Made It.”
At first glance, the title sounds like Graves missed the mark. But read the full story — detailed in the 210-page book from Vermont’s Green Writers Press — and you’ll discover it’s as much about the so-close-to-the-sun highs as the falling-back-to-earth lows of the fickle business of broadcasting.
Born in Bennington in 1952, Graves spent many childhood nights tuning a transistor radio into stations in Boston, Buffalo, Chicago and Canada.
“It gave me a window to the world,” he writes in his book. “I’d listen to faraway baseball contests like the Red Sox games from Fenway with Ken Coleman and Ned Martin, trying to emulate softly what magic I was hearing.”
A young Graves practiced by grabbing a microphone and amplifier gifted by his parents, opening his bedroom window and broadcasting sports to the neighborhood.
“I don’t recall anyone telling me to shut it off,” he writes. “I was hooked.”
Graves also found his groove in Nordic skiing. He was competing for Mount Anthony Union High School when he met John Caldwell, a 1952 Vermont Olympian and author of the trailblazing “Cross-Country Ski Book.” Caldwell coached a rival team. But his training tips helped Graves make the Eastern Junior National Championships in 1970.
Enrolling at Colorado’s Fort Lewis College, Graves qualified for the 1974 NCAA skiing finals, all while working at the school radio station and, upon graduation, the local AM outlet. He was pinballing between radio and public relations jobs when, sitting in a Midwest office, he received a call inviting him to Manhattan.
Suddenly Graves was flying to an ABC Sports job interview with the division’s pioneering president, Roone Arledge, and its equally innovative vice president, Chuck Howard.
The two pushed Graves on his ties to Koch, who shocked everyone by winning silver in the 1976 30-kilometer race.
“They were really caught off guard by his success,” Graves recalled. “This time they wanted to be ready.”
Soon after, Graves was wearing a custom ABC parka with a “Lake Placid 1980” logo alongside “Wide World of Sports” host Jim McKay and “Monday Night Football” announcers Frank Gifford and Don Meredith.
“I wondered if I was an imposter here,” the Vermonter writes of his first Olympics. “Truth is, though I knew something of my sport, my experience was lacking and it was somewhat frightening. I never thought I was ready, but you don’t turn an opportunity like that down.”
Graves’ ABC stint led to a job at a new 24-hour cable channel that billed itself as the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network (since shortened to ESPN). He announced from its stateside studios during the 1984 Sarajevo Olympics in the former Yugoslavia before broadcasting in person at the 1988 Calgary games in Canada.
Graves worked 15 years for ESPN, then freelanced for outlets including Canada’s CTV, the former Outdoor Life Network and a precursor to NBCSN called the World Championship Sports Network — a start-up that shared space with the daytime drama “All My Children” and the Playboy Channel.
Doubling as a public-address announcer, Graves has welcomed spectators to summer and winter Olympic events in Sydney, Australia, in 2000; Salt Lake City in 2002 (where he was the English stadium voice for the opening and closing ceremonies); Athens, Greece, in 2004; Vancouver, Canada, in 2010; Sochi, Russia, in 2014, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 2016; Pyeongchang, South Korea, in 2018; and Tokyo in 2021.
“I not only had the luxury of having all my travel paid for,” he said, “but I was paid to do the job.”
Then again, Graves candidly acknowledges the flip side to so much time globetrotting, be it seeing his three marriages suffer, delaying treatment for what he discovered was Stage 3 cancer and, most recently, sitting on the sidelines this winter as he recuperates from a fall.
“I realize now that, for the most part, I shall never have the kind of adventures I’ve written about ever again,” he notes in his memoir.
But as the mere existence of the book attests, Graves has plenty to remember.
“Given the state of the world currently,” he writes, “I believe the games are needed now more than ever.”
