Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1314046
52 FA L L 2 0 2 0 I C A S Q U A R T E R L Y 2020 brought a new level of heartbreak sports sound mixers had never known. In a matter of 48 hours, they watched the sports world come to a halt. From March Madness to the MLB season, every major sporting event canceled. No one knew when any of it would come back, but from the moment the NBA postponed its finals, the dominos began to fall like clockwork. For LA Dodgers and Lakers sound mixer Antony Hurd, unemployment stared him in the face for the first time ever. "There's always going to be sports—and then COVID happened. I'm out of work for the first time in my life," explained Hurd. "Everything shut down. I'm like, 'Oh my goodness!' It was a reality check, if nothing else. I happen to be a workaholic so not being able to work was really difficult." b y W h i t n e y Wo r t h e n "Honey, you will never know heartbreak like what you're talking about doing," Lee Gamel heard his grandmother say when he announced his desire to become a musician at the age of 12. He carried those words with him through his sound career and reiterates them to the next generation of sports sound mixers. "She was brilliant, [had a] master's degree, the whole ball of wax which, at the time, was 1962 or 1963. She had been a rehearsal singer," remembered Gamel. "She's right. And I took that to heart." Accustomed to hopping from sport to sport, Hurd averaged more than five-day workweeks—working nearly 304 days one year. Sports stopped for nothing, and even if a sport faced a strike or delay of its season, another one filled the gap in his schedule. "When baseball went on strike, that was just one season," recounted Hurd. "They aren't all going to strike at the same time. We've been through strikes before where a sport would shut down, but not the entire sporting world. Nobody could have ever anticipated this." Gamel's story sang just the same. No fans cheered, no athletes trained, and no gymnasiums sung for seven long months. "As of March 14, I was down for—what it's October, I'm just now having work trickle back in." But even with work trickling back in, Hurd and Gamel both knew it would look a bit different. SPORTS BROADCAST MIXING DURING COVID