Wayland Boot, Channel 3's sports sensation of 20 years ago, was as much entertainer as anchor. "A little traveling music, please!" he'd say, then read the out-of-town scores as blues tunes played in the background.
"Even Stymie couldn't believe it!" Boot exclaimed over amazing plays, and he'd cut to footage of the "Little Rascals" character Stymie, blinking in shock. Another clip, of a toddler eating a biscuit and grimacing, introduced his "Burnt Biscuit Award" for sports bloopers, "to the team or jock worse off than a plate of burnt biscuits."
"I always wanted to do sports for people who don't really care about sports," Boot explains.
Boot came to Cleveland in 1984 from Portland, Ore., home to only one major-league team, the NBA's Trailblazers. So his years here electrified him.
"I watched pro football all my life," he says. "I always liked the Cleveland Browns because of Jim Brown." Echoes of the Browns' glory years thrilled him. "Going down to the old stadium, walking down the old tunnel, you could just picture how it was inthe '50s," he recalls. He met Marion Motley and Otto Graham. Lou "the Toe" Groza was his insurance agent.
But Boot's star fell here after an Oregon reporter called to do a story about what he'd been up to. "I said all these wonderful things about Cleveland," Boot remembers, "but he asked me to compare the differences in society or lifestyles [between] the Pacific Northwest and the Rust Belt of Cleveland. I said — and I'll never forget it — 'Comparing Cleveland and Portland is like comparing a Ferrari and a dump truck.' "
He didn't mean to put Cleveland down, he says now. "The Ferrari being, it's just a faster pace in the Pacific Northwest; 'dump truck' just being a 'roll up your sleeves, go to work' mentality." But word reached Cleveland talk-radio hosts, who tore into Boot for dissing his new town.
Boot apologized twice on the air. Even so, when his contract expired in January 1987, Channel 3 didn't renew it.
Later that year, Boot's old station, KOIN/Channel 6 in Portland, asked him back. He's been sports anchor there ever since.
His segments are "pretty much the same" as his work in Cleveland: "A few more wrinkles, few more pounds," says Boot, 55. Stymie's still a regular and Boot still plays the blues over the scores and gives out Burnt Biscuits.
In Portland, he's known as Ed Whelan, a broadcast name he adopted when he deejayed at an easy-listening station and the manager told him Wayland was too much of a rock-and-roll name.
Boot hasn't visited Cleveland since he left, but he still cheers for the Browns. "I love the city. I'm a better person and a better professional because of the city," he says.
