"Yeah," the producer said. "It'll be a riot."
Mayock did as he was told.
"I had no choice," Mayock remembered last week. "The producer is the boss. So I got up there and asked the statue a question. And then I would say something stupid like, 'An unusually stony-faced Gretzky refuses to answer . . . "
How did that prepare Mayock for the career he always dreamed of: working in the booth as a football analyst? Well, Mayock will tell you it was a surprisingly valuable experience, one that enabled him to learn broadcasting profession from the ground up. By doing those spots on live television, he said he picked up "the nuts and bolts of understanding of what producers want, how to get in and out of questions, and so on." He also became accustomed to working without a safety net.
"If you messed up, you made a fool of yourself - no one wants that," Mayock said. "But what I discovered was that all that stuff came back and helped me, now that I have gotten somewhere fairly legitimate."
That would be in the analyst chair at NFL Network for "Thursday Night Football," which this evening features the Eagles at Seattle. But that is only part of what Mayock has on his plate these days. He just completed his second season with NBC as a game analyst for Notre Dame home football games. And he also has been a principal player in the draft coverage for the NFL Network, where he has appeared as an analyst at the Under Armour Senior Bowl, the NFL Scouting Combine and on the "Path to the Draft." Mayock has come a long way from interviewing that statue of "The Great One."
