Bring it On
Armed with talent, drive and a remarkable ability to self-critique, FOX 11 sportscaster and Cage Talk host James Koh is a man on the rise.
by STEVE HAN
photos by MARK EDWARD HARRIS
Get better. Fox 11 sportscaster James Koh lives by those simple words, and they may help explain how he became a four-time winner of the Emmy Award, the television industry’s equivalent of Hollywood’s Oscars, even before he joined Fox Broadcasting Company’s West Coast flagship station last year. Koh is Fox 11’s sports reporter and anchor, and the host of Cage Talk, L.A.’s only local sports TV show on mixed martial arts, which comes on when there’s a (free-to-air) UFC fight on Saturdays.
“Every single day, I wanted to get better,” said Koh, speaking of his early years breaking into the broadcasting industry. “That’s still how I am.”
Frankly, the 33-year-old hasn’t been on television that long. He started in 2008 at local news station KBAK in Bakersfield, Calif., working as a journalist and fill-in anchor. Two years later, he assumed the same duties at KSWB in San Diego, until Fox 11 nabbed him in March of last year.
In the news business, which is heavily competition-driven, Koh is rising at a rate that’s pretty uncommon. “It’s a big jump for him,” Fox 11’s news assignment manager Carol Breshears said, as thisKoreAm reporter was waiting to watch Koh’s 5:30 p.m. Sunday sports segment from Fox 11’s West L.A. studio. “It’s very, very rare for someone to go from Bakersfield to a big market like L.A. in this business in just five years.”
On set, Koh’s a downright live wire. Sporting a bow tie and glasses, he takes a jab at USC football coach Lane Kiffin, after the famed football program’s stunning loss to lowly Washington State last month. He scorns Kiffin for his “amateur” and “awful” play calling.
It’s hard to believe that 10 years ago, the thought of talking sports on the airwaves never crossed Koh’s mind. After graduating from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2002, Koh settled in the Bay Area and worked in insurance and high-tech sales. “I was making great money in a great city,” Koh said.
But as hard as he tried to convince himself he was having a great time, deep inside, he wasn’t happy.
“I just wasn’t doing what I was meant to be doing,” he said. “Then I was watching Sports Center, which is what I watch every night. I thought, ‘I want to do that!’”
And so began the transformation of James Koh, from salesman to sportscaster.
By 2003, he started looking around for broadcasting jobs in the hopes of moonlighting at a radio station while holding down his sales gig. That’s when he learned that KNBR in San Francisco was looking for a production assistant, which he later found out is the “least glamorous position in broadcasting.”
So much for his Cal degree, Koh’s initial duties were getting coffee and making copies for sports talk radio host Larry Krueger. But Krueger helped Koh work on his radio demo tape at the station, which Koh later sent out to hundreds of stations for a job.
Six months after joining KNBR, Koh got a call from a radio station in Havre, Montana. KPQX told Koh that he could be its news reporter and high school basketball play-by-play man, but only under one condition: He would also have to deejay country music. Koh, who never before listened to a lick of country music, gladly accepted, and a week later, he packed up and drove out to Montana in his Honda Accord.
“I was loving life, man,” Koh recalled of his days at KPQX. “People there thought it was a trip meeting me because they only heard my voice on radio. Then they’d be like, ‘You’re friggin’ Asian?!’ I mean, how many Korean country music DJs could there have possibly been? So I do take pride in that.”
Koh said he worked “crazy, weird hours” on an annual salary of $20,000, but relished every minute of riding the airwaves in the Great Plains.
“It was weird, you know? I had no friends, I had no money,” Koh said. “I was alone in some random place in Montana. It made no sense! But I was having the time of my life.”
After just eight months in Montana, KIBS in Bishop, California, came calling for Koh’s all-in-one skills. There, he also served as country music DJ and called play-by-play at high school football and basketball games.
“He was just what we were looking for,” said KIBS news director Arnie Palu. “James called himself the ‘Korean Cowboy,’ and his easygoing personality fit in well on country radio. KIBS is a small mom-and-pop place, and you have to get along. James had a really likeable personality, and it really came over on the air.”
But ultimately, having fun was one thing, and chasing his dream was another. Koh wanted to break into television. So, he decided to go back to school, studying broadcast journalism at USC.
“As much as I loved sports and what I was doing,” Koh said, matter-of-factly, “I was a kid with a ton of ambition and a ton of drive. I come from a family where failure wasn’t really an option.”
Born in Seoul, in 1980, Koh immigrated to the U.S. with his parents, Doo Young and Hyung Bun Koh, at only seven months old. The family first settled in Houston, Texas, and moved to Diamond Bar, California, when James turned 10.
“When you’re in Houston, and you’re the only Asian guy within a 10-mile radius, you don’t even realize that you’re different until you’re 7 or 8,” Koh said.
“But I think I picked up my speech pattern when I was there. I grew up in Texas and lived there. So I tell people that’s probably why I sound like a middle-aged white guy, you know?”
Koh’s parents wanted their son to become a lawyer, and perhaps that seemed within reach when he majored in legal studies at Berkeley. But he knew that wasn’t his calling. Truthfully, he wasn’t sure what was at the time.
“I don’t think I wanted to be anything growing up,” Koh said. “I never really thought about being anything because nothing really spoke to me.”
Koh, however, has long had an interest in sports. His brother Albert nicknamed him “Score Whore” because of his incessant need to check game scores, wherever he is. He also initially alarmed his now-wife Sharon when they first met, and she discovered the multitude of fantasy football and baseball teams he managed every year.
“Man, it’s a little bit embarrassing” Koh said. “When I met her, I think I had four fantasy football teams, three baseball teams and three basketball teams. At a certain point, she was like, ‘Dude, listen. This is too much. It’s too much.’ So I went from four to two football teams. And from three baseball teams, I was down to one … until work got me into a couple more.”
As a boy growing up in the 1980s and ’90s, Koh was particularly into following pro wrestling, and idolized the likes of the Ultimate Warrior and “Stone Cold” Austin. His childhood passion for pro wrestling transitioned into his interest in MMA. And it would be his knowledge of mixed martial arts that enticed Fox 11 news director Kingsley Smith to make Koh the host of Cage Talk, which started in March.
“What I love about sports is that it tells you so much about the human character,” Koh said. “It’s true reality television, because you’re in a pressure cooker situation. And you only find out about people’s character in pressure situations. If there’s no pressure, it’s easy to be fake.”
Although Koh’s rise has been rapid, that’s not to say breaking into the television business was an easy process. After earning his master of arts in broadcast journalism in 2008, he landed his first TV news job at KBAK in Bakersfield, which was a challenging region to cover. Koh recalled strangers randomly hurling racial epithets at him when he was out covering a story.
“Sometimes, I was like, ‘Why am I subjecting myself to this crap?’ But you know what, man, I’m so locked in. I don’t really let that stuff bother me for very long.”
Koh, after all, was too busy earning an Emmy, the Associated Press Reporter of the Year honor and the Golden Mike Award. In addition, Koh got to work under the tutelage of Doug Barden, then-KBAK news director, who helped jumpstart his TV career.
Koh was the station’s weekend photographer when he first met Barden, who promoted the former to a reporter after only a couple of months.
“I looked at James’ tape and resume, and his credentials and talent were already there,” recalled Barden, who is now a news director at KSBY in San Luis Obispo, Calif. “I clearly remember asking him, ‘Why are you not hired yet?’ He said he just needed a shot. So I told him he can start immediately. It was a no-brainer.”
From then, Koh walked into Barden’s office every week with a video of his story. “Rip it apart for me,” he told Barden.
Barden’s typical response? “That was borderline terrible, but there’s something in there.” That kind of criticism didn’t discourage Koh, it motivated him.
“A lot of reporters are too insecure to handle feedback,” Barden said. “James wasn’t one of them. Even when I went a little light on him, he expected more. If I didn’t push him hard, I almost think he would’ve lost respect for me in the long run.”
Two years of Koh’s persistent hard work in Bakersfield was rewarded with a job offer from San Diego’s KSWB in 2010. Although he was only in San Diego for a little over a year, he would earn his three other Emmy Awards there, two for sports reporting and another for video journalism. One of those two stories featured the emotional journey of 8-year-old Haven Shepherd, a girl who runs a triathlon on prosthetic legs; Koh still considers the piece one of his most memorable stories.
“James is an anomaly,” Barden said. “He reinvented the way multimedia journalism is done. Nowadays, not only do I show his work to my reporters, I see other reporters coming to me with his work. He revolutionized visual storytelling.”
Since joining L.A.’s Fox 11 last year, he has hit the ground running. Cage Talk, which Koh calls his “baby,” is Southern California’s only local talk show on MMA, coveted content for Fox after the network bought the rights to air UFC fights in August 2011.
After he interviewed the likes of boxer Mike Tyson and UFC lightweight champion Anthony Pettis on the show, talks are currently under way to make it a permanent weekly program on Fox 11, Koh said.
Koh acknowledges that there are still only a handful of Asian American sportscasters on television, Rob Fukuzaki on ABC7 in Los Angeles and Michael Kim of ESPN’s Sports Center being two of the more well-known ones. It’s one of the reasons he couldn’t quite imagine himself in the position while growing up.
“James told me this one time when we were on commercial break during the newscast,” said Fox 11’s Liz Habib, who co-anchors Sunday’s newscast with Koh. “He said, ‘There weren’t many Asian Americans doing this when I was growing up. So I want to try and be a role model now.’ I just thought that was really cool.”
So although Koh claims that he’s “a pretty laid back dude,” he’s also very serious about the responsibility he feels to break stereotypes about Asian Americans (yes, we do know our sports) and do the best job possible as an on-air journalist.
“I do this incessant self-criticism. I’ve got to look at everything,” said Koh. “How does my makeup look? How does my friggin’ bow tie hang?
Am I stuttering? What’s my presence like? I mean, all this stuff, and we haven’t even talked about content. Did my story even make sense tonight? Did I tell it in the best way possible? Did the best visuals go into that story? It’s like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall.”
Koh says he has no long-term game plan for his career, that he’s not the type that sets those types of goals. But, certainly, his own formula seems to be working out pretty well so far. “Like I said, every single day, I just wanted to get better,” Koh said.
“And I found myself in these jobs. That’s all it was.”
This article was published in the October 2013 issue of KoreAm. Subscribe today! To purchase a single issue copy of the October issue, click the “Buy Now” button below. (U.S. customers only. Expect delivery in 5-7 business days).
