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KEVIN GUTTING

ESPN producer Andrew Lockett was in the Clinical Simulation Lab of Skinner Hall at the University of Massachusetts Friday to tape a "stylized shot" for a feature on Rhodes scholar and former Florida State safety Myron Rolle who has postponed his NFL aspirations to study medicine.

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KEVIN GUTTING

ESPN producer Andrew Lockett, left, of Leeds works with Mark Devin of Longmeadow to tape a "stylized shot" Friday in the Clinical Simulation Lab of Skinner Hall at the University of Massachusetts. Lockett was using the Nursing School facility as a backdrop for a feature on Rhodes scholar and former Florida State safety Myron Rolle who has postponed his NFL aspirations to study medicine.

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AP PHOTO

Yekaterina Abramova of Russia, left, races Maki Tabatha of Japan, right, during time trials at the Richmond Olympic Oval at the Vancouver 2010 Olympics in Vancouver, British Columbia, Wednesday.

On Sunday, 25-year-old world ski-jumping champ Lindsey Van will be watching the Olympics on TV from her home in Park City, Utah. ESPN producer Andy Lockett of Leeds will be there with her.

What will be running through her mind, he wonders, as the Games - which should have been Van's Games - unfold in Vancouver?

"I don't know how she'll react," said Lockett. "That'll be the litmus test. The camera will be right in front of her face. Will she get up and kick the TV in? To be blasé about it is not good for the piece," he said with a grin.

Van, like the rest of the world's female ski jumpers, is not allowed to compete in the Olympics. A yearlong lawsuit she and 14 top jumpers brought against the International Olympic Committee came crashing to a halt in December, as British Columbia's Supreme Court refused to hear the case, fearing it would be stepping on the IOC's toes.

"An athlete in her prime, a victim of bureaucracy," said Lockett. "She was 7 when she started, and has devoted her whole life to it. Now she's thinking, 'Maybe I should have done another sport.' She's blessed athletically, the best in the world, and she's got to start something else. A lot of people didn't know that women aren't allowed."

The live segment will be part of a larger piece Lockett did on Van that will run that Sunday morning on ESPN's investigative magazine, "Outside the Lines," where he serves as feature producer in the sports giant's enterprise unit.

In ESPN circles, Lockett is famous as the guy who shot the video of Santa Claus being pelted with snowballs in Philadelphia.

"We always have something to run at Christmas," said the show's host Bob Ley, who calls it "the gift that keeps on giving."

Lockett and his wife, Tammy, a freelance graphics designer, have lived in Leeds about five years, and have three boys, Sam, Jackson and Maximus, ranging in age from 6 years to 6 months.

"We just fell in love with the area," said Lockett. "It was real apparent that it was someplace good for kids. You can walk to Musante Beach, Look Park, the school."

Aside from script meetings and such, Lockett doesn't spend too much time at ESPN's studios in Bristol, Conn. "My offices are at Bradley and Logan," he said. "I'm not an office guy."

UMass shoot

Last week, Lockett and his freelance crew - Mark Devin of Longmeadow and Adam Marotte of Chicopee - were shooting a segment inside the Clinical Simulation Lab of the nursing building in Skinner Hall at the University of Massachusetts. It's a "stylized" shot he needs for the piece he's doing on Myron Rolle, the celebrated Florida State safety who has put off his entry into the NFL draft to pursue a master's degree in anthropology at Oxford University in England.

This is a guy who earned his undergraduate degree in 2½ years with a 3.75 GPA. His goal is to become a neurosurgeon and help impoverished countries build national vaccination programs, a life plan not universally understood in the football world.

"They expect you to have no other interests than football, to be totally committed," said Lockett. "I never met a more committed individual in my life."

Though he shot footage of Rolle at Oxford in November, Lockett now needs some medical ambience to bring the piece home. It's due to run Feb. 21.

As dummies lie on gurneys all around them and models of brains sit on tables, Marotte's lights and Devin's Panasonic Varicon camera are trained on an examination bed, where laptop images of Rolle on the gridiron are projected onto a pillow, a tray of medical instruments in the foreground.

After an hour of set-up, Lockett says, "Let's go for it."

"Rolle has always excelled at both school and sports," Lockett intones into a mic. "While most of the college stars prepare for the NFL, he took graduate courses in medical anthropology. He has been preparing since sixth grade to be a neurosurgeon. Some see a contradiction, but he simply sees two halves of himself."

To reinforce the two halves, a slow-motion image of Rolle is shown holding a pathophysiology textbook, spine out, to the camera, alternating with another of him holding out a pigskin in the same fashion.

"That's cool, man," says Lockett. "Now rack it back to the beginning of the pose."

Lockett does not appear on camera, nor is his voice heard on aired segments. "Wright Thompson will be the actual voice," he said. "We're trying to establish rhythm and timing before Wright reads the V.O."

Philosopher/activist Cornel West has lauded Rolle as the future of black America. So Lockett and his crew flew to Princeton to film West saying just that. In a newspaper or radio story, the reporter would likely try to get West on the phone. But in long-format videography, an important person uttering an important comment requires an on-site visit. "With us, it can't be subtle," said Lockett. "You just know when we're in town."

The next set-up involves one of the gurneys, featuring a backlit silhouette of a prone dummy, sheet up to his chin. But Devin is forced to tilt the dummy's head away from the camera because its mouth is wide open, giving the appearance of a patient Rolle could not save.

The little things are what this crew is all about.

Lockett tends to favor the obscure sports, the ones with players nobody's ever heard of. Working events like the Super Bowl is boring, he says. "Too rehearsed. In 2002, Pats/Rams, I did a piece on how they were going for a patriotic theme," said Lockett, rolling his eyes at the hackneyed assignment.

After a devastating tornado tore through Kansas in 2007, Lockett heard about a track meet there that resumed after the twister passed, mainly as a way to keep folks' spirits up. This is his kind of event. Sports at its purest. Get on the plane. It's no coincidence, he says, that "Outside the Lines" is his TV home.

Career path

Lockett, 50, was born in Seattle, and was one of those kids who always knew what he wanted to be. "There was never any doubt," he says. "A lot of people want to be on the air, but the better opportunities are on the other side of the camera. That's where the creative process lives."

He says he inherited his mom Sharon's DNA. She was a story editor for an ABC affiliate and a writer of teenage mystery novels. His father Jim's more analytical mind was not passed on, much to his dad's chagrin. "He'd come home and say, 'Look at this - a portable computer!"

"But he's been collecting my VHS tapes for 25 years."

Lockett started out working in the small TV market of Billings, Mont., as a reporter and line producer, then on to Greensboro, N.C., where he carved out his niche writing stories for anchors to narrate. "I learned a long time ago not to have an ego," he said. "I like being an anonymous person."

Then, from the founder of the Iditarod, came an intriguing proposition to work in Alaska.

"It was based in Anchorage, long-format programming, just what I wanted to do," Lockett said. "But the financing fell through. Now you've got 'Deadliest Catch' and all these other shows. I knew it would catch on. But here I was back in the lower 48."

Atlanta Games

Lockett soon hit the big time with an NBC affiliate in Atlanta. He was in Centennial Park during the 1996 Olympics, just wrapping up when a terrorist's bomb went off, killing two, wounding hundreds. "I spent the next 27 hours on my feet. We had Richard Jewell on our first Sunday program. That night was insane."

But a one-hour documentary he produced on retired slugger Hank Aaron propelled him to the next level. It was about kids, mostly, and juxtaposed Aaron's image against the very wall he smacked his 715th homerun over, that section of wall preserved forever in the Braves' parking lot. The piece got ESPN's attention, and he was invited to join the conglomerate's Sunday magazine, "Outside the Lines."

Like any growing family with a suddenly larger paycheck, the Locketts went looking for the perfect place to raise kids.

"Tammy and I were in New York City when ESPN hired me," Lockett recalls. "I was thumbing through some magazine, saw an article on the Best Arts Towns in America - and Northampton was number one! ... Then I came up for a Drive-By Truckers show in '03 or '04. Such a cool area. First Night, horses in pastures, what more do you need?"

The couple sold their house in Bridgeport, hunted for houses for eight or nine months and found a fixer-upper in Leeds. "My next-door neighbor, Steve Richards, works for ESPN.com. What are the odds?"

Though his pal spends most of his time in Bristol, Lockett is always on the move. Between trips to Oxford, Vancouver and California, Lockett was on the road 14 days in November.

"I have an amazing family. I come home after a long road trip, the house will be destroyed, Tammy frazzled. Life doesn't stop in Leeds."

Of his three young sons, Lockett says, "I don't know if they have any real sense of time, but when I'm home, they're at my pillow at 7 a.m. - 'tap, tap, tap, let's go, Dad.' NBA ref Tony Brothers told me that his son would hide his suitcase so he wouldn't be able to go back out."

The Emmys he's won he gives to his oldest son, who puts them in his closet. "They're his first bevy of trophies," said his dad.

Jumper's plight

Lockett, who hurled the discus in high school, often develops a kinship with his subjects, and the plight of Lindsey Van has been gnawing at him.

"I feel terrible. When you don't get your shot at 25, it's tough to do at 29. There's no 'get 'em next year.'"

The IOC believes the women's division is not organized enough in enough countries to warrant its own event. Lockett notes that the summer Olympics in 2012 will feature women's boxing. "'Hey,' say the jumpers, 'We've been doing this a lot longer than women have been boxing,'" he said.

To be at the starting gate as a world class ski jumper shoves off is to witness a singular courage, he says. "You don't have an appreciation for it until you see it live. Right off the bat you're moving very fast, and then - stopped at gravity's hand. Your self-preservation neurons have got to be firing. I don't think it's a sport you can take up as an adult. She's made 16,000 jumps. Just a walk in the park."

"During the hearings she said she was looking forward to closure, but when closure came, so did the tears. She's gritty, doesn't like to cry. She compared the IOC to the Taliban - and that's gonna be in the piece."

Footage exists of Van in 2002 when the Olympics came to her hometown in Utah. "I'm really looking forward to being in the Olympics," the then-teen tells a local TV reporter.

But securing the rights to air the footage is another matter.

"Everybody's got a copyright to something," said Lockett. "We're hoping we can get the rights to that."

Ironically, Van holds the record on the very course her gender's not allowed on, Whistler's Hill. "Two, three years ago, they unveiled that hill and invited the best American and Canadian jumpers, male and female to compete," said Lockett. "It was not a sanctioned event, but she beat everyone there. She just had a good day, she'll tell you."

Bob Flaherty can be reached at bflaherty@gazettenet.com.