Regis Philibin throws out a ceremonial first pitch before a game between the New York Yankees and the New York Mets in 2016.
Photo: Chris O'Meara/Associated Press
Regis Philbin knew how to be Regis Philbin.
“What do you MEAN you’re not wearing a tie?” he’d say to me, voice rising, eyes widening. “OF COURSE you’re supposed to wear a tie. REGIS is wearing a TIE. Now Regis is UPSET. You don’t want to make Regis UPSET.”
Then he’d smile, which was just as good as a wink. That fake aggravation, that talking about himself in the third person—it was a put-on, part of the sui generis persona Philbin crafted over a staggering 17,000 or so hours on television. From time to time, he’d unleash it backstage, for an audience of one or two, for laughs, because he knew how much we all loved it.
I was mesmerized. Regis is doing Regis! It felt like watching DiMaggio take swings in the dugout hallway.
“Now, will you wear the TIE? DO it. Do it for REGIS.” (He didn’t really care if I wore a tie. Sometimes he didn’t wear a tie.)
Philbin, who died Friday at age 88, knew what he was. He was a host. He was not a TV blowhard or provocateur. He was a person who could calmly steer a program from commercial break to commercial break without hitting the guardrails, and he did this as well as anyone ever has. His existence was calming and unpretentious, because even when he was faux-ranting about some faux-grievance, he was himself. From his early on-camera days in San Diego, and later, in Los Angeles, where he got a break as a side man to Joey Bishop—he used to walk Bishop up and down the sidewalk to settle him down before shows—Philbin was on TV, constantly, for years upon years, then decades, then generations, until he did more TV than anyone ever had in the history of the medium.
He made it seem easy, even though it isn’t easy. Not in the slightest.
By the time I crossed paths with him, in the early part of the prior decade, he’d entered his 80s. He’d finished a long, genre-defining run on the chatty A.M. show “Live with Regis and Kelly” (before that, with Kathie Lee Gifford) and, of course, there’d been the smash success of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” in which Regis appeared on TV more than the weather forecast, giving away a fortune while dressed in a monochrome suit and tie. Now I was among Regis’s panelists on the nascent Fox Sports 1’s “Crowd Goes Wild,” a program everyone knows ranks up with “The Wire” and “The Sopranos” as one of the most influential and important TV shows ever.
OK, so that is a bit of an exaggeration. “Crowd Goes Wild” was a weird show with odd choices, and I was probably the oddest choice on it. Have you ever watched a TV show and thought: All those other people seem pretty talented, but what is that guy doing there? That was me! I was that guy! My colleagues were skillful, built-for-TV professionals, but I was a face-for-podcasting newspaper hack with zero television experience. Yet there I was, five days a week, talking sports for one hour a day, to dozens and dozens of people across the country.
Related
- Regis Is Still Holding Court (Jan. 12, 2012)
I was there because of Regis. He was a loyal Journal reader and we’d built up a repartee, subscriber to columnist. He was one of the most famous Notre Dame graduates, and I’d call him whenever Notre Dame was doing well in football, which used to frighten him more than anything. (“Nervous? I am SCARED TO DEATH!” he told me before a big showdown with USC.) One winter, I’d gone down to Florida and played tennis with him and his wife, Joy, which was a spectacle unto itself.
“NET MAN!” Regis would say when he thwapped a volley for a winner. “You never know when NET MAN will strike!”
He would playfully harangue me about the Journal. He’d call me into his dressing room, where he kept a copy of Dean Martin’s and Frank Sinatra’s competing hamburger recipes on the wall—Google it if you don’t know it, it’s unprintable here—and he’d be sitting there with a stack of newspapers, and he’d have torn apart that morning’s Journal trying to locate the sports page. This was back in the days when the WSJ had both a national and “Greater New York” sports page, and they ran in different sections, a fact that made Regis, well, nuts.
“It’s TOO MUCH! Put it all TOGETHER! LISTEN TO REGIS!”
He was magical living history. His career had intersected with everyone’s. He’d sung with Bing Crosby! He’d been a page for Steve Allen! He was pals with Jack Paar! He’d taken Walter Winchell out for Chinese food in the middle of the night, then dropped him off at the newsroom to peck out a column. He loved sports deeply, since his childhood in the Bronx, not far from Yankee Stadium and all those pinstriped legends.
Maybe the sports story I heard him tell the most was about a time when he was an up-and-comer, and he’d gotten himself assigned to cover a big Notre Dame game versus USC. He’d set an interview with the legendary Fighting Irish coach Ara Parseghian for 9 a.m. the morning after the game, and when Notre Dame lost, spoiling an undefeated season, Regis was certain Parseghian wouldn’t show. But then Parseghian arrived, the next day, 9 a.m. as promised. The coach had honored the appointment. He’d shown up.
He respected that. Regis always showed up.
I guess I could go on about his career and accomplishments, as many others have, but I’ve reached the point in my own life when what I remember most about someone is whether or not they were kind. “Crowd Goes Wild” lasted barely eight months before getting canceled—a minor blip in Philbin’s career—but in that time, I saw him be endlessly kind. He was kind to my wife. He was kind to my infant son. He was kind to my mom, my friends, my in-laws. He was kind to my father, who, we didn’t know it at the time, didn’t have much longer to live. My mom reminded me of that this weekend.
Meeting someone behind the scenes, Regis would be sweet and gentle, but he’d also give them a little of that Regis Philbin energy, because it was what people expected—hoped for—when they met him. They’d grown up watching him, and now he was right there, in front of them, the person. He delivered. He knew how to be the Regis everyone wanted him to be.
I wore the tie.
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What will you remember most about the television career of Regis Philbin? Join the discussion.
Write to Jason Gay at Jason.Gay@wsj.com
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