Rod Gilmore: More Than Your Average Broadcaster

Story by Aubrie Tolliver
Photo from Rodney Gilmore

SYRACUSE, NY -- From August to December, it’s all about football. That's when Rodney “Rod” Gilmore can be found in the broadcast booth or studio, working as college football analyst for ESPN.

But, once the season comes to a close, Gilmore hangs up his microphone walks out of the studio and right into a law firm.

Along with being a broadcaster, Gilmore is also a business attorney for Doty Barlow Britt & Thieman in Palo Alto, Calif. He received a degree in English from Stanford University in 1982, where he also served as the 3-year starting defensive back for the Cardinal football team. Four years later, he earned his law degree from U.C. Berkeley and has been practicing law ever since.

Introduction to Broadcasting

Gilmore got his first gig in broadcasting when a friend would ask him to join his radio show in San Francisco to talk about issues regarding sports law. After that, Gilmore was presented with even more opportunities, such as calling college football and baseball games for local cable stations. That was when ESPN came knocking on Gilmore’s door "out of the blue," he said. He has now been working for the network for more than 20 years.

 “My plan was to finish up as a student-athlete and to go to law school and to practice law in a private firm,” Gilmore said in a telephone interview. “I was just trying to keep my hand in sports.”

Dual Professions

Today, Gilmore says that even though his commitments as a broadcaster sometimes overlap with his duties as a lawyer, with the help of his partners, colleagues and family, he does not have to choose between each profession. 

 “My identity, to a certain extent, is still tied up in being a lawyer. ESPN would love me to spend my time in Connecticut and do more work,” Gilmore said. “It’s not that easy, at least not for me, to walk away from it and simply say, ‘I’m no longer a lawyer.’”

Listen to Gilmore's full interview here:

Aubrie: How were you able to transition from the role of the athlete to the role of the media?

Rod: It really wasn’t by design. It wasn’t part of my plan. My plan was to finish up as a student athlete and to go to law school and to practice law in a private firm. And maybe, one day, practice law for a team or league or something like that but that never happened. Those opportunities are pretty rare. And I was just trying to keep my hand in sports, if you will, and a buddy of mine was doing a radio show out of San Francisco and every now and then he would have a sports law issue come up and he’d call me up and he’d say, "Hey, can you come on and help us pop through this issue," and I said sure. So I did that a few times. Then an opportunity came up where he and a couple other folks, he needed me or someone to do a local small time local college football game and a college baseball game on a local cable station and I kind of fit the build because I was around and they heard me on the radio and they figured I kind of knew what a microphone looked like. So, I did it. And after doing that for a couple years and just seeing that opportunities started coming along. There came an opportunity to work for Sports Channel Bay Area, before they were bought out they decided they were going to focus on a lot of college athletics and for the first time they were doing live games of Stanford, Cal, San Jose State. And each school had a say in who can be in the booth and pretty much every school wanted someone who had a relationship with their school and Stanford recommended me because I was doing some local broadcasting and I had a Stanford connection. And that’s really what kind of got me doing it on a regular basis. And from there I got a phone call from… Prime Ticket out of L.A. before they got bought by Fox and they were doing a PAC-12 game of the week. They called. They said they’ve seen me, they liked me, wanted me to work for them. So, I did. Did that for a couple years and then ESPN called out the blue and I’ve been at ESPN for 20-plus years now.

Aubrie: When were you able to find time to get your law degree?

Rod: I graduated in ’82. But because I redshirted, I had a season for the fall of ’82. I could come back and play my fifth year and I had applied to law school to go to Boalt Hall at UC Berkeley and when I decided to come back and play for the fifth year, Berkeley allowed me to defer for a year. So, that was my time off and I spent three years in law school, fully focused on law school. I did not do any broadcasting those three years. It was simply practicing law. And then I started practicing with a private firm when I graduated in ’86 and ’87, that’s when I started doing the things that I mentioned: helping a friend on his radio show, and then in ’88 kind of getting involved in other local broadcasting. And so that was kind of how it happened. The things that I did with broadcasting in the first couple years wasn’t so extensive that it was an impact on practicing law. But, once I got to a point where I was doing every week, it was pretty challenging because you had to put in a full week of work. And typically in the practice of law, you work between 40 and 60 hours a week. So, that was a little challenging. So I would get out of the office on Friday and I’d make up for it by being in on a Sunday, or whatever. So, I just some cooperation from my partners, colleagues and my family. And so, that’s how we kind of make it work. When I got to ESPN, I really started spending more time broadcasting because it wasn’t just games. It was studio shows and other things. And I was just kind of fortunate that my law firm was pretty accommodating and good about it. To be perfectly honest with you, technology helped dramatically. Had we not developed the cellphone and iPad and laptop where you can kind of seamlessly do work on the road, I probably never could have done it. But, I could kind of do some work while I was traveling or on the road and clients or colleagues didn’t really notice or care. It was fine. Things were happening.

Aubrie: So you were doing both at the same time. Do you still continue to do that?

Rod: I don’t know if it’s a matter of need as much as it is want. I think my identity, to a certain extent, is still tied up in being a lawyer. I know for a fact if I said, hey, I don’t want to practice law and I just want to devote my time to broadcasting, I could fill that time and ESPN would love me to spend my time in Connecticut and do more work. But, I’ve kind of always seen my myself as a guy committed to the educational side, academic side and so I really don’t want to walk away from practicing law. And when you spend a lot of time on something like that… you spend time at law school, you take a bar exam, you put all that time and effort into it for years, it’s not that easy, at least not for me, to walk away from it and simply say, “I’m no longer a lawyer.”

Aubrie: And so even though you’re busy doing football, you still find time for the law?

Rod: Yeah I do. But let me be clear, it couldn’t happen without my partners and colleagues being really helpful and really understanding. They jump in and do a lot of the heavy lifting and when the season is over, I try to reciprocate and jump and take care of some things so that they can’t do their vacations, long weekends and what not. It would be impossible to do it if I was a solo practitioner trying to run a law office by myself. Or, if I was in a firm where partners and colleagues were not supportive. It takes a number of heroes like my wife and friends. My wife basically went years without having a date with me between August and December for all those years because raising the kids and I’d be on the road. So, it takes a pretty understanding to deal with that too.