The Pro Football Hall of Fame passed an uncomfortable Rubicon in 2018 when former Baltimore Ravens linebacker Ray Lewis spoke more than 33 minutes into his induction ceremony.
The Hall’s role is to celebrate the NFL’s greatest players and coaches, who often give passionate and emotional speeches at their inductions. But in the past decade, the event, held annually in August, has become an arms race of “thank you” and rambling speeches that last 15 minutes or longer.
While the ceremonies had passed for four hours, the crowd of fans sitting outside the Tom Benson Hall of Fame Stadium in Canton, Ohio, left early. The Hall of Famers, wearing the gold jackets customary at the ceremony, walked offstage to escape the sweltering heat. Producers at ESPN and NFL Network, which broadcast the inductions, struggled to avoid showing empty seats and worried about losing television viewers. Lewis’s unscripted speech was far from over.
“We’ll sit in the production trucks and talk to each other and say, like, ‘this is awesome,'” said Seth Markman, who has led ESPN’s NFL studio coverage for more than a decade and will lead the production this year. “It is not possible for the event to last this long. People are leaving.”
Hall executives, the league and the networks are looking for ways to speed up the ceremony. They thought of holding packing signs and playing music to finish the speakers, and even thought of sending someone on stage to escort the late speakers. None of those options were used, however, because they could embarrass the speakers, said Rich Desrosiers, a spokesman for the Hall.
One solution is to enlist Jezra Kaye, a professional writing coach, in 2021 to work with the inductees to develop – and shorten – their speeches. Kaye, a former jazz singer and romance novel writer who lives in Brooklyn, said it didn’t matter that he knew nothing about football.
“My favorite pastime is reading romance novels, and I have this privilege of being killed by others,” Kaye said. “But awards speeches are very similar regardless of the field because they have a specific social function, to show gratitude.”
Joe Thomas, the former Cleveland Browns offensive tackle, is working with Kaye on the induction speech he plans to give Saturday. He and two others of this year’s nine speakers — Ken Riley II will present for his father, who died in 2020 — began with Kaye in the spring after the Hall of Fame class was announced in February. Others wrote notes or, like Thomas, wrote first drafts. “Anyone who doesn’t use a speech coach in this situation is a fool,” he said.
Kaye said his main task was to cut the speeches down to size by getting former pros and coaches to prioritize who they would like to thank so there would be time left to describe their importance.
In 2021, when the 28 inductees from that year’s class and from 2020 were enshrined over a weekend, the Hall cut the target speaking times to eight minutes. Inductees are also given the option of videotaping a longer version of their speeches to be posted on the Hall’s website. During the speeches, the names of friends and family members will scroll across the bottom of the stadium screens so the speakers don’t have to read them.
This year’s class is a more average size, which allows Thomas more wiggle room. He said Kaye cut his original draft from about 15 minutes to a 10-minute, Hall-approved target time during several videoconference sessions.
“I can say, ‘half of it has to go away, so you have to reject half of the people or half of what you say about them,'” Kaye said. “The way you bring out beauty and meaning is to limit the amount they can say.”
For Steve Atwater, the Denver Broncos defensive back who is in the 2020 class, Kaye’s condemnation made an impact. He ended his eight-minute speech by rousing former teammates in attendance to the stand, calling them by name so he could share the spotlight.
“His expertise helped direct my ideas in the right direction and helped to toss them in a way that was easy to digest, instead of being all over the place,” Atwater said. “Once we knew that, the rest was simple.”
The rest of Kaye’s guidance mostly boils down to three messages: don’t go off script; Stories that look good on football players don’t always make it to TV audiences; and jokes don’t work if they take too long to set up.
Peyton Manning earned high praise for his rolling nine-minute speech, in 2021, which he began by thanking “those previous inductees who gave long acceptance speeches, forcing us to have one You can drop six minutes to get our football careers back.” He gave special thanks to Lewis, saying he “just finished his speech that he started in 2018.”
Although Kaye generally advises against following Manning’s comic example because most speakers can’t match his tone, Tom Flores, the former Raiders coach who worked with Kaye in his 2021 speech, opened by joking that the Hall made him the second speaker on the program because they knew he would keep it short. “I’m 84 years old in frappin. I have to go to bed at 9 o’clock,” he said with great joy.
Kaye insisted, as he did with all the inductees he helped, that Flores read his speech to him several times and practice it himself. But the emotions on the stage for a while surpassed him, even though he gave hundreds of speeches as a coach and a master radio announcer.
“When I went into the speech, there was a point where I was completely blank, I didn’t know where I was, and kept talking,” said Flores. “But I didn’t say anything I didn’t feel. I think that’s what they want and that’s what they should get.
Flores ended his speech with a touching story. He and Sam Boghosian, an assistant coach with the Raiders, stood on the field in the waning seconds of Super Bowl XV with their team up 17 points. Both men grew up in the Central Valley, California’s agricultural heartland, and rose through the football ranks. Now they are about to win the biggest game of their lives.
“Not bad for a couple of grape pickers,” Flores remembers them talking.
The anecdote, which is less than a minute, gives a glimpse of Flores’ journey and adds an emotional development that can be lost if the speakers, mindful of time limits, rush into a long list of shout outs.
“Last year, it was like, ‘if I only have seven minutes, I’ll just say thank you,’ so we lost a little bit of the storytelling, which we love,” Markman said. “The emotions, the stories, the real feelings, we don’t want to lose that.”