Interview with GOLTV’s Lindsey Dean

Lind­sey Dean of GolTV was kind enough to speak with me about the Bun­desliga.   Those of us in Amer­ica will know Lind­sey as the voice of Hallo Bun­desliga, the league’s review show on GolTV.  Lindsey is orig­i­nally from Maine and grew up in New Eng­land; how­ever, he enrolled at the Uni­ver­sity of Copen­hagen in 1977 at the age of 19. He spend a year in Den­mark and dur­ing that time he played for a small Dan­ish side by the name L.I.F. Allerød/Lillerod (now Allerød FK), which has pro­duced Peter Løvenkrands and Dan­ish wom­ens national team player Bet­tina Falk .  While Lind­sey has a var­ied back­ground in sports broad­cast­ing hav­ing done almost every sport imag­in­able (includ­ing suf­fer­ing through the painful pre-Belechick era of the Patri­ots), he isn’t some Amer­i­can who stum­bled into the Bun­desliga because there was a pay­check.  Lind­sey has a pedigree.

1977 was a golden year for Borus­sia Mönchenglad­bach, who won their third straight title that year, and also met Liv­er­pool in a mem­o­rable final of the Euro­pean Cup.  One of the star play­ers of that side was the Dane Allan Simon­sen, who won the Euro­pean Player of the Year and Lind­sey watched this mag­i­cal sea­son in Den­mark, where every Glad­bach game was aired and watched reli­giously.  This was his intro­duc­tion to the Bundesliga.

When he returned, he kept up with the Bun­desliga the way so many of that gen­er­a­tion did, by watch­ing Soc­cer Made in Amer­ica with Toby Charles.  I asked him if it’s in any­way odd to him that he would become the mod­ern ver­sion of Mr. Charles.  He was humbly unwill­ing to com­pare him­self to Toby Charles, but he did fondly remem­ber the man that brought Amer­ica the Bun­desliga for so long.  He remem­bered his elo­quence with words and could even recount a time when Toby said “Dus­sel­dorf Dogs were wag­ging their tales in delight.”   I asked him if we was ever tempted to use the phrase “that shot was high, wide and not very hand­some” which he enjoyed, although I don’t think I con­vinced him to use it.  But while Toby Charles would help shape the style of his com­men­tary, he was quick to note that he grew up in a golden era of sports­cast­ers. His influ­ences include the likes of Johnny Most, Jim Karvel­las, Gil San­tos and Marty Glickman.

The next sub­ject in our con­ver­sa­tion was how he got started at GolTV.  At the time, he was work­ing as an asso­ciate attor­ney at a South Florida law firm. How­ever, he really felt unsat­is­fied by the work. He returned to sports broad­cast­ing, (hav­ing done a plethora of work in New Eng­land prior to his move to Florida for law school),  as the P.A. announcer for the NHL’s Florida Pan­thers, and also as the radio/internet voice of the defunct Miami Fusion of MLS.  After the Fusion folded, Phil Schoen called him to tell him that some­one was start­ing a soc­cer chan­nel in Miami.  Dean audi­tioned and has been with GolTV ever since.   Besides his work on Hallo Bun­desliga, Lind­sey is both a play-by-play and color ana­lyst com­men­ta­tor for var­i­ous GolTV matches. As we talked about the start of GolTV, we real­ized that the Bun­desliga owes a big bit of grat­i­tude in the states to the Miami Fusion, where Ray, Phil and Lind­sey were once all employed.

I asked him about his prepa­ra­tion for the weekly show and he gave me the break­down of the week.  He is obvi­ously privy to the matches he does com­men­tary for, of course, but he has the full library of games at his dis­posal.  By Sun­day he is read­ing game reports and sum­maries.  By Mon­day he has the DFL’s pro­duc­tions pack­age and makes notes on each match.  Tues­day, he looks for news and final­izes his script.  The last minute check is invalu­able as so much can hap­pen from Sun­day to Tues­day after­noon.  With U.S. play­ers like Steve Cherun­dolo and Michael Bradley, as well as Cana­di­ans Paul Stal­teri and Rob Friend, Lind­sey keeps a close eye on the North Amer­i­can play­ers in the league, and tries to include infor­ma­tion about their appear­ances and sta­tus. For exam­ple, because of the sit­u­a­tion with Lan­don Dono­van and H1N1, Steve Cherun­dolo and Michael Bradley were quar­an­tined by their respec­tive clubs.  By the time he enters the stu­dio, it usu­ally takes him from an hour and a half to two hours to voice the show,  due in part to the prepa­ra­tion com­pleted in the 48 hours lead­ing up to the show’s final production.

I asked him about his expec­ta­tions for this year.  He doesn’t see the sea­son as a one-horse race (and I did this inter­view before the last two Bay­ern deba­cles).  While he feels that Bay­ern have a plethora of tal­ent , he men­tions the lack of a top class goal­keeper as one issue, and he also won­ders about how well new sign­ings like Mario Gomez will per­form.   He feels that Wolfs­burg are quite capa­ble of repeat­ing, due to hav­ing a very bal­anced squad, with a strong defense, a good cen­tral mid­field pair­ing and great flank play to com­ple­ment Grafite and Dzeko.  He, like Andy Bras­sel, brought up Ziani as a sign­ing to look out for.

He feels that it will be more dif­fi­cult for Hof­fen­heim this sea­son,  as they will not be able to sur­prise any­one like they did in the first half of last sea­son.  He thought that the chal­lenge for them would be tac­ti­cally, in that their oppo­nents are now much bet­ter pre­pared for Hoffenheim’s intense attack­ing play.  Finally, he feels that, although it’s very early, it appears that Felix Mag­ath has already made big improve­ments at Schalke, sim­i­lar to how he began to improve things at Wolfs­burg.  But for Mag­ath, the job is a bit eas­ier this time around, as Schalke already had the mak­ings of a good team.  He could see them as dark horses.

Mostly he was look­ing for­ward to the sea­son as the Bun­desliga is so high-scoring and full of attack­ing play.   He says that one of rea­sons why the Bun­desliga has so much scor­ing is the num­ber of big, strong strik­ers, who are typ­i­cally very hard to defend for a full 90 min­utes.  (Don’t tell the EPL).  And he said some­thing that I felt needed a quote as it was quite a great insight by Lind­sey, “the men­tal­ity of attack­ing play comes in part from some of the philoso­phies of leg­endary play­ers as far back as the 70’s, some of whom man­age clubs and work to keep that attack­ing men­tal­ity.”  That a deserv­ing place to end this piece, don’t you think?

Tagged as: Allan Simonsen, Borussian Monchengladbach, goltv, Soccer Made in America, Toby Charles