Printable Biography of Jim Lampley

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Jim Lampley first appeared on national television in 1974. He was chosen from a talent hunt to help inaugurate a new role called the "college age reporter" on ABC's national telecasts of college football. Lampley concluded graduate school at the University of North Carolina, and a few weeks later launched the first of three seasons spent prowling the sidelines in Birmingham, Columbus, Lincoln, Ann Arbor, and so forth. It set him up for a thirteen-year matriculation at ABC Sports, working football, baseball, Wide World of Sports and five Olympic games.

In 1987 Jim Lampley left ABC and went to work for CBS in Los Angeles. In the next 5 years he anchored sports, including both the 6:00 and 11:00 news at KCBS-TV; functioned as the sports correspondent for "CBS This Morning" in New York; took over hosting boxing and Wimbledon for HBO; hosted radio shows on WFAN in New York and KMPC in Los Angeles; and went to the 1992 Albertville Olympics as a news anchor.

In 1992 Jim Lampley went to work for NBC Sports, for whom he hosted golf and NFL football in 1993 and 1994, and anchored late night Olympic coverage at Barcelona and
Atlanta. In 1995, he added reporting on the magazine show "Realsports" to his duties at HBO, and has since twice won the Emmy Award for Best Sports Journalism, along with a third Emmy for writing. In 1998 he anchored the Nagano Winter Olympics and the Goodwill Games for Turner Sports. When he goes to Sydney this September to anchor 101 hours of coverage on MSNBC, Lampley will be attending his tenth Olympic games as a broadcaster. No one has had more such assignments.

Right now, Jim Lampley is best known for his work on HBO and TVKO Boxing telecasts for Time Warner. In twelve plus years, he's called more than three hundred championship fights. He reports six stories a year for "Realsports", and his production company has produced feature essays for HBO boxing telecasts.

Crystal Springs Productions, located in Hollywood, has completed the feature film "Welcome to Hollywood", debuting in theaters in the fall of 2000, and then later on HBO and Cinemax. The mock-doc follows the artfully constructed star-trip failure of one Nick Deker, who seeks the Hollywood high wire and trips over about forty legitimate movie stars on the way down. The company has a variety of other theatrical and television film projects set up and underway, including an action-adventure film in partnership with Tinsletown stalwarts Ron Shelton and Gary Foster, and an HBO film on tennis star Pancho Gonzales starring Benjamin Bratt. Jim and Bree are producers on all the company's projects.

Lampley's restaurants, Lakota Restaurant & Bar, are located in Park City and Salt Lake City, Utah. The Park City Lakota opened in December 1996 and has been the town's dining and drinking epicenter ever since. New York Magazine called it "social ground zero after dark." Lakota Salt Lake opened in May 1998, one block from the Delta Center in the heart of the city's booming commercial district.

Jim and Bree Lampley live in Rancho Santa Fe, California, with eleven-year-old Andrea Walker and eight-year-old Aaron Lampley. Jim has two daughters by previous marriage, twenty-year-old Harvard sophomore Brooke Lampley and thirteen-year-old Victoria, who lives in London.