|
The radio executive sat across the desk and smiled. "We'd like you to become our hockey color man," he said. "I didn't think we could use that word anymore." "What word?" "Colored." It would, after all, have been a rather complicated task, but I thought I was up to it. Moving from newspaper work to radio seemed a natural progression for me and, if it required a change of tint, so be it. "Funny," he said, not smiling. "No, color man, analyst. You would work alongside Jiggs McDonald and paint pictures for the listeners. Lotsa reds and blues and bright yellows. We like your voice and the way you tell stories. Think it could work." We shook hands and he left the room, muttering. "Colored. Jesus!" I have spent my life dipping out of the right side of my brain, such as it is, and so painting pictures (colored pictures, in fact) for a hockey audience seemed to make sense. Drawing and painting were a part of my childhood from my earliest memory. Writing just became a natural subdivision in that world.  When he's not painting word pictures, Jim Huber takes to canvas. They seem to be so tied together. Words become pigment, sentences turn into the depth of a face, paragraphs give it clarity and finish. There really seems little difference. And the wisdom of a former water-color teacher always rings true. "Know when you're finished," she smiled. "Too much paint can only make things muddy." I have covered a thousand confrontations during the decades and tried to paint them for whatever gathering were near, to give them texture and vibrancy and a sense of import. Super Bowls or stupid moments, it matters little. Newspaper painting is considerably different than radio painting, which is totally different than television painting. But it remains a form of art. Give me 15 column inches, 45 seconds of totally dead air or 3 minutes of picture. The painting is readable, listenable, watchable, media in an extra-large and very challenging world. It was a warm, gentle autumn day, and I was sitting in traffic at a red light, five or six cars back. The street was one of those that went from residential to village square and so the sidewalks were beginning to have business. After studying the station wagon-load of little girls in front of me, full of great giggles, I glanced into my rear-view mirror and saw something I shall never forget; a robust young man coming up on my right, in his thirties perhaps, head leaning forward as one does in a marathon, arms pumping. Totally naked. I have painted the scene in my mind for months now. Strange tints of purple, great visible gasps, a kind of dark shadow, crimson cheeks behind glass, and finally the bright blue of several uniforms. To tell his story – which unfortunately I never learned – is to paint it. At least, that is my problem. I linger over the whys and whos and wheres and what the hells, but it is the scene that will always fascinate me. I would have had to use a completely different set of brushes to tell that story. And another to put it on canvas. Frank Pace, after seeing a little of my work, suggested I write about painting here. It wasn't my idea. Hardly the stuff of Halls of Fame and thoroughly presumptuous. I'm neither Proust nor Picasso, just a hack with a creative hairlip. But the more I thought about it, the more the right side churned, fomented, crackled. I am a slave to a keyboard and an easel. (And my golf clubs, but they are evil brushes that create nothing close to artistry, most days.) I see life in various shades of both color and commentary. How would I paint this, what great and delicious mixture would I try? And how would I describe this, what magnificent word could I extract? There are times when it leans heavily toward obsession, and I have wondered occasionally about the curses of OCD. I will lay in bed in the middle of the damn night, wide awake, waiting impatiently for the dawn, wondering how I will finish this story or that painting. It is, I would guess, the blessing or the curse of each of us here. And to add more paint, frankly, would simply make this painting far too muddy. Author, producer and writer Jim Huber spent 16 award-winning years at CNN. His accolades include an Emmy for his writing during the 1996 Olympic Park bombing in Atlanta and the Edward R. Murrow award for excellence in writing. |
Newswire 
