St. Louis native and three-time Emmy Award winner Alex Williams has had an incredible career in television working behind the scenes.
Williams is a freelance videotape operator working in entertainment and primarily sports. He has worked for ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox Sports Network and ESPN and has covered the Olympics, basketball, baseball, football, hockey and even minor sports such as bull riding and badminton.
He performs work that forms an integral part of how we view sports games. He works in a fast-paced environment where he quickly isolates sections of tape and has it ready for immediate broadcast, making possible the instant replays and player-and-coach interactions that we see during games.
“We’re broadcasting this to millions of people around the country, and nobody likes mistakes,” Williams said.
“So the pressure to not make mistakes and the pressure to make decisions in split seconds – that’s where the skill part comes in. So basically, we call it telling a story, trying to tell a story of how that play happened.”
Williams grew up in St. Louis and attended Pleasant Green Baptist Church, where he was the first Eagle Scout from the church’s Boy Scout troop. Being an Eagle Scout, Williams was always focused and at a young age had a pretty good idea about what he wanted to do.
“I knew in seventh grade that I was going to go into television,” Williams said, “I originally wanted to be an announcer, and I kind of got led into videotape operations.”
Williams grew up listening to Harry Caray and Jack Buck in the 1960s, two icons who inspired Williams to want to work in broadcasting. Williams also spoke highly of his mother, Doris Williams, and her support all through his life and career.
He attended University City High School, where he was an All-Conference athlete, which won him a football scholarship at Drake University, in Des Moines, Iowa.
“After I graduated I got a job at a TV station up in Des Moines and then I moved to Houston,” Williams said.
“That’s when I got into sports. I got in at a good time because in the 1980s, that’s when ESPN started. That’s when sports kind of exploded and covering sports exploded.”
Before he started working in sports Williams worked for Access Hollywood, dealing with entertainment news. Soon Williams will be doing more entertainment work for the upcoming awards season. He has worked for the pre-Oscar Red Carpet Show and the E! Network’s Fashion Police for years.
In Houston, Williams landed near the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center, where NASA trains astronauts and launches many of its critical missions.
“I worked on the shuttle landings. Also while at NASA we helped train the astronauts in Houston,” Williams said.
After working for NASA, Williams worked for the Houston Astros, and in this way he met one of his childhood heroes from St. Louis.
“One of my biggest thrills was being the stage manager for Jack Buck,” Williams said.
“One time Jay Randolph, who was the other announcer, left the booth, which left me alone, just me and Jack Buck. And I was looking around and said, ‘Someone needs to take a picture of this, because I’m in the booth with Jack Buck.’”
Williams also worked three Olympic Games, including the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles.
That year he covered the gymnastics competitions and prepared the replay for Mary Lou Retton’s final activity in the all-around competition, the vault, when she was going for the gold medal. Mary Lou Retton was the first American woman to win the gymnastics all-around medal.
Williams earned three Emmy Awards for his work with the Olympics.
Since 1989 Williams has been living in Los Angeles, where he continues to work as a freelance video operator in sports.
“The hardest hurdle is being freelance is like being hired everyday,” Williams said.
“I was one of the original freelancers who started when sports just exploded. You have to be good every day, so every day is like getting a new job.”
