Curt Gowdy Jr. bids farewell to SNY after 17 years as executive producer

Curt Gowdy Jr. knew from the time he was a teenager that he wanted to be in sports broadcasting, and he knew which side of it he wanted to be on.

“I was intent not to be in front of the camera, because I knew I could never fill my father’s shoes,” Gowdy said in an interview with Newsday. “I wanted to be behind the camera.”

His father was among the most prominent national play-by-play men of the 1960s and ’70s. But he never pushed his son into the business, merely urging him to find his passion.

Gowdy Jr. did that, enjoying a long career of his own in production.

For the past 17 years, he has been the executive producer at SNY, where among other things he assembled the popular Mets booth of Gary Cohen, Keith Hernandez and Ron Darling.

Now he is ready to move on, retiring at 68 to pursue other interests, including helping his wife run a family ranch in Wyoming and writing a children’s book about fishing, a family pursuit since his grandfather’s days in Wyoming.

“I think I had to work a little bit harder than the next guy because I was carrying my father's name,” Gowdy said. “But it was very important for me to carve out my own niche, my own career, which I did.

“When I look back at everything, the places around the world I've been, the people that I've met, the athletes, male and female, that I've been able to be associated with and be friends with, boy, in my wildest dreams, I never would have imagined that my life would have been changed forever because of the career that I was in.”

The elder Gowdy died in 2006, less than a month before SNY launched. By that point, Gowdy Jr. had compiled a full resume at ABC, producing Olympics, World Series, Triple Crown horse races and Super Bowl pre- and postgame shows.

SNY presented a new challenge, one with less exotic travel but with the task of building a channel from scratch.

There was a lot involved, particularly given SNY’s decision to cover all New York-area sports in addition to its live event programming.

But Mets games always have been SNY’s crown jewel, and from early on its booth has been a hit with fans, from the announcers to reporters to producer Gregg Picker and directors Bill Webb and John DeMarsico.

How respected has SNY’s Mets crew been? Consider that Kevin Burkhardt, its longest-serving Mets reporter, now is the favorite to succeed Joe Buck and call two of the next three Super Bowls for Fox.

“I had a lot of help with that,” Gowdy said. “I can’t take sole credit for it. But as head of production, that was my job – to put the best booth together and the best broadcast team, and the truck as well.”

Gowdy credited Mets ownership under the Wilpons for their support and said he enjoyed the family dynamic of working with the same people over time at a local network compared to the looser bonds at the network level.

He noted his close relationship with SNY president Steve Raab and friendships made with SNY’s partners with the Mets, Jets and University of Connecticut, including women’s basketball coach Geno Auriemma.

“The philosophy that I wanted to bring to the network was I always wanted to have a national sensibility to the way we presented our broadcasts on a regional level,” Gowdy said.

“I think we've achieved that, with a lot of help from a lot of men and women, both on the remote side and the studio side.”

By Neil Best

neil.best@newsday.com@sportswatch

Neil Best first worked at Newsday in 1982, returned in 1985 after a detour to Alaska and has been here since, specializing in high schools, college basketball, the NFL and most recently sports media and business.