Ernie Johnson recalls faking his way through World Cup highlights

Ernie Johnson has spent more than four decades at Turner Sports covering everything from the NBA to the NFL to Wimbledon to the NCAA Tournament, and was inducted into the Sports Broadcasting Hall of Fame in 2023. His colleagues have described him as the most prepared person in any room he walks into. That reputation was not built overnight, and Johnson himself is happy to tell you about the moment that probably best illustrates how far he has come.

There was a time when he was just a newcomer at TNT who had never covered soccer, knew almost none of the players, and was handed a shot sheet for a Yugoslavia highlight with one line of information on it.

“One of the things I remember too — look, I was a newcomer to the game,” Johnson said ahead of the USMNT-Portugal friendly earlier this week. “I’m trying to learn who these players are. It’s not like I could look at a game and say, ‘Oh, that’s so-and-so, and that’s so-and-so.’ And I remember we’re doing highlights of a game in progress featuring Yugoslavia against somebody. And a lot of our folks working on the World Cup didn’t know the game real well either. But here’s a highlight of a game still in progress. They hand me a shot sheet with one play that said ‘Hugo hits post.’ That’s amazing.”

Johnson had just joined Turner Sports in 1989 when the network handed him one of his first major assignments: hosting TNT’s coverage of the 1990 FIFA World Cup in Italy. He had come to Turner from local news, spending years as a general assignment reporter and weekend sports anchor in Atlanta before getting the call. Inside the NBA was brand-new — it had launched the same year he arrived at the network — and Johnson was still figuring out what kind of broadcaster he would be at this level. Soccer was not exactly in his wheelhouse. It wasn’t really in anyone’s wheelhouse at an American sports network in 1990, which was part of the problem.

The United States had not qualified for a World Cup since 1950. The sport had almost no footprint in American sports media, no established infrastructure for covering it, and no real base of institutional knowledge to draw from. The broadcasters who knew soccer well were rare, and the ones who didn’t — which was most of them — were largely improvising their way through it.

What Ernie Johnson had for a Yugoslavia highlight — a game, he noted, that was still in progress when they went to air — was a shot sheet with a single solitary line written on it.

“I don’t think I can go on the air just with that, but I faked my way through it somehow,” Johnson said.