Tiki Barber: Welcome to Today, Now Get to Work
Posted: Thursday, May 03, 2007 8:05 AM by Jen Brown
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Anchor Talk
(By Tiki Barber, TODAY national correspondent)
We all know the expressions “trial by fire”, “hitting the ground running”. Well, that is exactly how the first few weeks of my second career would be described, and you know what… I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Little did I know when I stepped into my new job here at NBC as a national correspondent on Today and an analyst on Football Night in America (Sundays this fall), that the challenges I endured as a running back for the New York Giants would be nothing compared to what lay ahead, or that they would be coming at such a rapid pace.
My first day on Today was April 16, a day that would come to mark one of the darkest days in the history of our country’s educational system. In a little town named Blacksburg in Montgomery County, VA (where I was born), at about the same time that I was being introduced to Today Show viewers across the country by Matt Lauer and Ann Curry, Cho Seung Hui, a deranged 23-year-old Virginia Tech student, began, as President George W. Bush described it, “the worst day of violence on a college campus in American history.”
Oblivious to the growing tragedy, my day was grand. I felt great about my introductory piece, I was upstairs in the NBC gym, having just gotten my butt kicked by resident trainer, Jennifer Wilson, when Elena Nachmanoff, VP of Talent for NBC News and my sage, came up to me and said two things… “Your piece on Marcus Buckingham got cancelled for tomorrow”, and “Virginia Tech is a major story, do you want to go?” The fire was burning, and I was about to jump in.
Growing up in Roanoke, VA (40 miles north of Blacksburg, where both of my parents went to school), and going to college at the University of Virginia, where my brother and I shaped our futures by becoming gridiron stars, I consider myself a favored son of southwest Virginia. Even though it was my first day, I had to go cover this story – this was my home.
I hadn’t been to this part of the state in a few years. My mom recently moved to Maryland, so I never had a reason to go back “home.” This wasn’t the reason I had envisioned.
Covering such a major tragic event was exciting and terrifying, tragically sad and eye opening, but mostly it taught me a valuable lesson. I had the opportunity to interview students around campus about their experience, feelings and emotions. The following day, I did a story about the surrounding community and how they, too, were deeply impacted by the events. News, broadcast journalism, is ultimately about the people.
I left Blacksburg having vast sorrow inside for too many young lives lost prematurely. I also came to understand the value of a story, and the urgency and challenge it takes to bring it to the public.
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A little more than a week later, the next big assignment was on the radar screen, “Where in the World is Matt Lauer”! Having watched the series over that last four or five years, I was already a big fan of Matt’s experiences around the globe. Now, I was getting to be a part of one. Come back tomorrow to find out where they sent me...
