Profile of Ric LaCivita '74

From The Boston Globe

RIC LACIVITA - ON THE EVE OF PRODUCTION

Date: Friday, December 28, 1984
Section: SPORTS
Page: 61

By JACK CRAIG, Globe Staff

As CBS' top college football producer, Ric LaCivita is busy today
preparing to do justice in words and pictures (mostly pictures) to the
Cotton Bowl and, more directly, to Doug Flutie's final game as a
collegian.

In his own field, LaCivita is nearly as close to being a child of
improbable destiny as Flutie. LaCivita never fulfilled his early
ambitions at Harvard - initially to become a doctor, later to be a
lawyer.

"I would be in a biology class at Harvard with all these kids and
realize that I wasn't prepared to compete with them," he recalled. So,
in 1973, in his junior year, he switched to pre-law. But just before he
entered the law library, television began to zoom into his life.

LaCivita had already made his media debut while playing for the
Harvard soccer and baseball teams and writing for The Globe when
the soccer team toured Italy and when the baseball squad went to
Omaha, Neb., to play in the 1973 and '74 College World Series.

While playing in the the '74 College Series, LaCivita leapfrogged
directly into the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y. It
marked the first time aluminum bats were allowed. Harvard was in
the first game but the leadoff man stayed with a wooden bat.
LaCivita, batting second, chose aluminum. That bat, with his name
inscribed, is now in the Hall's college division.

(LaCivita also is the correct answer to the trivia question that asks
the name of the TV producer who once wore a major league
uniform. The explanation: he was a batboy for the old Washington
Senators.

(How did he get that coveted job? "Oh, you know how it goes - my
best friend in grammar school was the son of the Senators' trainer.")

His introduction to television came as he was graduated from
Harvard, with the "right time, right place" syndrome at work. ABC
had sent notices to 75 colleges inviting submission of the name of a
candidate to fill a single production assistant job with the network
during the 1976 Winter and Summer Olympics. LaCivita was
Harvard's nomination.

"I had my interview with Jeff Mason of ABC and he turned out to be
a very good friend of the older brother of Lee Hogan, our first
baseman at Harvard. ''So he and I talked and talked and I got the
job on July 9th, two weeks after my graduation."

A month later he was on the sidelines for a Monday night NFL
telecast, taking off and putting on the red hat that signalled to the
referee that a commercial had ended or was in progress.

"Here I was," he recalled, "three months after being a part-time
undergraduate bartender at Casablanca (in Cambridge), integrating
millions of dollars in advertising on national TV. I didn't know what I was doing
but it sure was exciting . . . Even picking up Howard Cosell at the
airport." His mother and father soon attended a Monday night game
in Washington. After watching her son, who had gone to Harvard
with thoughts of medicine and law, his mother asked if he was sure
he wanted to do that for a living.

"They didn't know that after just a few weeks I had married
television," he said of his only marriage to date.

Eighteen months later, the Winter Olympics were held at Innsbruck,
Austria, and LaCivita was assigned to skiing. But just before the
competition began, the associate producer became ill and skiing
producer Chuck Howard, a big man at ABC Sports, told LaCivita
he was to be the associate.

Skiing dominated the coverage of those Games, with Franz Klammer
making his final, now-legendary gold-medal run and Rosi Mittermaier
making a gallant attempt at being the first woman to sweep all three
events. (She would miss that sweep with a silver medal in the giant
slalom, beaten by Canada's Kathy Kreiner by 12-hundredths of a
second.)

LaCivita excelled in that Olympic pressure, and did so again, five
months later during the Summer Games in Montreal. Instead of his
job expiring with the end of Olympics, he was named a full-fledged
producer at 26, in charge of minor regional football telecasts.

LaCivita's youth complemented his reputation for boldness in sports
production. For the stodgy Walker Cup golf competition, he got
Alistair Cooke, the oh-so British host of "Masterpiece Theatre," to
fill the same role on the telecast. LaCivita even placed a leather chair
at the edge of the 18th green from where Cooke concluded the
telecast with an essay on purity in sport.

But the traditional post-Olympic blues hit LaCivita: after such
dramatic heights, most other events paled in significance. So, at 28
he left television for film and for two years labored at producing the
highly forgettable ''Ruckus," starring Linda Blair. "It was a $2 million
bust," LaCivita says with a laugh, while noting that the investors
finally got their money back when the movie was sold recently to
CBS.

In 1981, LaCivita was in Boston attending the wedding of Len
DeLuca of CBS, whom he had met 10 years earlier at Casablanca.
DeLuca's best man was Kevin O'Malley, executive producer of
college sports at CBS, which was about to venture into college
football.

O'Malley and LaCivita talked, the latter was hired and soon became
the No. 1 producer of college football at CBS. Now he sets the tone
for football telecasts and promotions and also deals with the budget
and the assignment of broadcasters and equipment to games.

LaCivita was in Boston last week for conversations with BC coach
Jack Bicknell and, especially, Doug Flutie. And it is Flutie who
especially intrigues LaCivita.

"The only one I could compare him with for charisma is Joe Namath,
but a lot of people either didn't like Namath or were jealous of him.
There was a negative side. There is none of that for Flutie, despite
the fact he has had much more publicity than Namath did in college.

"I do have things planned during the telecast on Flutie," LaCivita said,
''although I'm not sure if we can pull it off."

And he offered a hint: "Look in his eyes, you'll see a lot there."

Will CBS cameras do the same?