By Cameron Morfit
Rich Lerner is working inside, finding combinations, settling into a rhythm, the clackety-clack of his keyboard reminding colleague Brandel Chamblee of a boxer working a speed bag.
Wait. Lerner is more like a basketball player as he hosts Golf Channel’s Live From show at the majors, moving the ball around to make sure Chamblee gets his points, giving Paul McGinley space, kicking it out to Johnson Wagner, altering the tempo, all of it reminding colleague Damon Hack of a point guard.
Hang on. Lerner, who will receive the MGA’s Distinguished Service Award on Dec. 3 at Westchester Country Club for his many contributions to the game, is closer to a five-tool baseball player, observes friend and CBS News correspondent Jim Axelrod.
“He can anchor, do play-by-play, and he writes like a dream,” Axelrod says. “He’s an insightful interviewer, and when he does Live From, he processes information in real time very well.”
So, let’s see, that’s boxer, basketball player, baseball player.
Oh, and Lerner covered gymnastics at the 2024 Paris Olympics as NBC won an Emmy. He’s pretty good at golf, too, the sport in which he has made his living since joining Golf Channel in 1997, the year Tiger Woods won his first Masters. (Nice timing.)
So that’s it, then. Lerner, one of four brothers from Allentown, Pa., all of whom worked at their father’s driving range, is a creature of sports. He knows them intimately, and that explains his longevity and why the MGA will be honoring one of the good guys in golf who has always made time in his busy schedule to share his time and talents with the MGA.
Well, not quite.
If you work in journalism, you hear about the story that writes itself. Can you grab a cup of coffee while it writes itself? Unclear. Does it write itself in Word, Times New Roman, double-spaced? Unclear. And if it writes itself, do you still get paid for writing it? Surely, you think, this elusive concept is a myth, journalism’s siren song.
But then you’re asked to write about Rich Lerner.
Lerner’s memoir (“Aren’t you that Golf Guy?”) is set for release next May, and after you’ve done the usual legwork, calling his friends and colleagues, Lerner himself drops the best story because it’s already written. You’ve asked him: Why do you like basketball so much? Here is the 6-foot-4 Lerner, pickup hoopster until his late 50s, friend of NBA icon Steph Curry, from the book:
“Basketball was an enormous part of my childhood, particularly at the Allentown JCC. The athletic director there, Hal Grossman, was one of the best college basketball referees in the country… I was one of Hal’s golden boys, along with Stevie Korfin, the greatest 6th grade basketball player I’ve ever seen. He once scored 72 of his team’s 74 points in a JCC Biddy basketball game, a feat that reverberated across Allentown’s leafy west end like Wilt Chamberlain dropping 100 on the Knicks in Hershey. With his Sly and The Family Stone afro, Stevie Korfin was the Walt Frazier of white, Jewish suburban kids.”
It’s hard to read that without hearing the voice of an adult Ralphie in A Christmas Story, all that reverence, innocence, and wonder. It’s also hard to read it without laughing.
“There’s something about his humanity,” Hack says of Lerner. “There’s just a nice way about him that speaks to the depth and longevity of his career. You don’t get this far without that.”
Indeed, Lerner’s secret is not basketball or even golf, which he played at Lehigh University before transferring to Temple (Class of 1983). It’s that humanity and his ability to put it into a story. Any story.
“Rich would hold his own whether it was golf, sports, news,” Axelrod says. “He understands a well-constructed narrative.”
Lerner knows stories because he grew up listening to them as he kicked around his father’s Dorneyville Golf Center with its 25-cent pinball, cigarette machine, and clientele from Mack Trucks and Bethlehem Steel. Pro Frank Stocke worked nights as the foreman in a battery plant, hustled $5 lessons by day, and kept up a running commentary through it all.
“He dispensed wisdom that no father, priest, or rabbi would touch,” Lerner says.
The best golfer of the brothers, Lerner was also perhaps the best listener. He studied cadence, word choice, and delivery at Dorneyville. He picked up on tone and timing. He looked up to Philadelphia Phillies play callers Harry Kalas and Richie Ashburn, Philadelphia Eagles radio man Merrill Reese, Keith Jackson on college football, and Vin Scully on many sports. He revered Jack Whitaker and Jim McKay.
All of which set him up to be a travel agent.
Here, again, is where the story writes itself, because you need your protagonist to fail, at least at first.
Although he worked as a journalist at Temple, calling basketball games while earning his Radio/Television/Film degree, and although he was the sports director at WFMZ-TV in Allentown from 1984–91, Lerner became convinced the big markets didn’t want him. His mom, Elaine, had started a travel agency, which was so successful that she hired his dad, Les. Rich joined up, too, thinking eventually he would take over the business. It all seemed imminently sensible.
It was a disaster.
He didn’t love booking Disney vacations, and during this time he pulled up to a red light and saw four kids playing pickup football on a snowy hill, a tableau that reminded him of his youth. He penned an essay and cold-called WHYY in Philadelphia, the NPR station. Would they be interested? The program director said no, but Lerner persisted until the guy gave it a look, saw something of rare quality, and changed his tune, granting Lerner an essay a week.
“That sparked a fire in me, and I never really stopped,” he says.
It was the craft of storytelling that mattered, he realized, not the market. All that was left was to quit the travel biz, which he did, giving notice to his parents. It was a risk. He was 33. What was he going to do now? All these years later, he credits his wife, Robin, with whom he has two kids, both boys, for her unconditional support.
With a recommendation from Earl “Yogi” Strom, a retired NBA referee from Pottstown, Pa., who had done a radio show with Lerner, he got a gig at a new Dallas sports radio network. He and Robin sold their house, packed up the car, loaded 2-year-old Jesse into the back, and moved to Texas, a roll of the dice that paid off with a steady job until Golf Channel called three years later.
How he has stayed at Golf Channel, forging one of the most enduring careers in sports broadcasting, is worth careful study. He is, to Axelrod’s point, adaptable. He’s also a polymath.
“Rich is relentless,” Chamblee says. “He reads a lot and draws on what’s going on so that he can bring that in. It’s hard to tell stories in an original way because we’re all looking at the same players.”
Well, mostly the same; Lerner studies players from other sports. He had always sensed eye-rolling from Chamblee about Curry, so the week of the Arnold Palmer Invitational in February, Lerner scored floor seats for the Orlando Magic/Golden State Warriors game. Curry, an excellent golfer who met Lerner on a 2021 visit to the Golf Channel set, went off, scoring 56 points as Golden State won. After one splash he gripped an imaginary club in front of Lerner, Chamblee and his wife, Bailey Mosier, delighting them all.
“Brandel is now a fan,” Lerner says with a laugh.
Lerner is thankful for such highs but has learned to mine even the lows. Last year, while covering the U.S. Open at Pinehurst, he was working on little sleep when he missed breakfast in the compound. He got in his rental car and drove, and drove, no diner, no Golden Arches, until finally nosing his Chevy Impala into a Sunoco station.
“And there they were, spinning like a ballerina under the heat lamp,” Lerner says. “Two pieces of pepperoni pizza that even the meth addict at two in the morning says no to. I boxed them up and bought a Coke, and lo and behold, there was breakfast.”
Did that story write itself? Nah. But it took the ever curious, ever resourceful Rich Lerner to make a meal of it.