Windsor native awarded Emmy for Olympic coverage
When Glen McLaughlin dropped out of Riverside high school in Grade 9, he didn’t envision his career path including an Emmy Award for his role in NBC’s 2016 Olympic coverage of beach volleyball on Rio de Janeiro’s famed Copacabana Beach.
However, the Windsor native is now scouting around his home for a place to put the prized golden statue after being honoured in the category of outstanding technical team remote for his role as a technical supervisor.
“It’s the highest achievement you can get working in TV,” said McLaughlin, who now lives with his Windsor-born wife Geraldine in Oakville.
“It’s a real honour receiving this recognition and great to be part of the team that won.”
McLaughlin received the award in mid-July and was surprised the shimmering figurine is as weighty as the accomplishment of winning it.
“It’s heavy and it’s big,” said McLaughlin, who brought the statue to Windsor in August to show his friends and family.
“I think I’ll put it on the baby grand piano in the living room.”
It’s the 58-year-old’s first Emmy in his varied career.
McLaughlin’s technical and production skills have seen him involved in everything from the Stanley Cup Finals to record production with stars such as Shania Twain, Rush and Motley Crue to drama, TV and film.
Currently, McLaughlin is working on the next season of Pythons’ Pit, a kinder, supportive high school version of Dragons’ Den.
His next scheduled major events will be the 2018 Winter Olympics and the Asian Games next August in Jakarta, Indonesia.
McLaughlin’s resume also includes the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics, NHL, NBA, Major League Baseball, CFL, World Junior Hockey Championships, AHL, 2015 Pan Am Games, John Paul II’s Canadian tour in the mid’80s, major concerts and the production of the annual New Year’s Eve broadcast from Toronto’s Nathan Phillips Square.
On the news side, McLaughlin has worked on the G8 and G20 summits in Canada.
“It’s something different every day,” said McLaughlin of why he loves his job.
“It forces you to think every day. It forces you to meet challenges and have a contingency plan in place to deal with anything.
“After an event is done, it’s the smiling faces and the positive comments from people who have been entertained or by what you’ve helped produced.”
Though he couldn’t know the pathway, McLaughlin has known the end destination he’s wanted to reach since he dropped out of high school as a 15-year-old.
He took a lot of criticism for the decision, but he was never afraid to move to the beat of his own drum.
“I followed my passion, which was the entertainment industry,” said McLaughlin, who has freelanced his skills since leaving CBC in 2002.
“I was a musician to a certain degree, but the first time I played (in public) I realized I had stage fright. I couldn’t play in front of people because I was too much of a perfectionist.
“Instead I went into technical support and worked in the background.”
Thought he rejected the structure of a ’70s high school education, McLaughlin never rejected learning. He eventually got his high school equivalency from St. Clair College.
Now the former high school dropout has 11 professional designations, degrees and diplomas.
Among his collection is a Masters of Business Administration and Bachelors of Education and Technical Education from Queen’s University.
“I saw high school as a cloning factory,” said McLaughlin, who created and taught the communications technology program at Catholic Central Secondary School during his sabbatical from CBC in the mid-’90s. “School just wasn’t offering the pathway I wanted.”
After going to St. Clair he started a music degree at the University of Windsor, but switched to London’s Fanshawe College to become a recording engineer.
He credits the contacts he made as being responsible for overseeing the entertainment at the Bob-Lo Island Amusement Park for 13 years as providing his big career break.
“Even after I got hired by CBET (Windsor) in 1981, I still worked at Bob-Lo,” McLaughlin said.
“I was responsible for 95 per cent of the entertainment.
“I got to work with Woody Herman, Buddy Rich, Lionel Hampton and those big bands. It’s always building relationships that lead to the next project.”
Eventually, McLaughlin headed to Toronto where he eventually became the senior operations manager for CBC’s Ontario plants and was a consultant on the corporation’s world-class Glenn Gould recording studio.
It was there McLaughlin designed a 96-track digital recording system for record producer Mutt Lange that was used on Twain’s smash-hit album Come On Over.
“I’ve been fortunate to work with over a thousand artists on some projects that have won Junos and been nominated for Grammys,” McLaughlin said.
Looking back over a career that has taken him around the globe, McLaughlin can see some irony in the kid who was such a perfectionist he couldn’t take the pressure of stage fright but now handles the even greater scrutiny of a worldwide television audience.
“We march to the tune of the show must go on and it must be perfect,” said McLaughlin, who has worked more on larger events for U.S. networks in recent years.
“The events are planned out but that’s when you get to be creative. Identifying things they’re not aware of.
“There’s pressure, but we’re all experienced people prepared to adjust.”
Working in such a pressurecooker environment requires a release valve.
McLaughlin finds his in physical activity. On Labour Day, he joined two of his old Windsor buddies kayaking from the head of the Detroit River to the old Bob-Lo dock in Amherstburg.
The trio then cycled back to where they started, covering the 100-km round trip in eight hours.
“I do that about five or six times a year,” McLaughlin said.
“Detoured over to see my old elementary schools (St. Rose, St. Louis). We needed a couple of extra kilometres to get over 100 for the day.”
Even on a day off, the perfectionist in him won’t let McLaughlin shake the habit of going the extra mile.
It’s the highest achievement you can get working in TV ... It’s heavy and it’s big ... I think I’ll put it on the baby grand piano in the living room.