Meet Tommy Marshall, lead hauler among ESPN College Gameday tour team truckers

Tommy Marshall: They're going to turn on University, I'll stop traffic, then you got to swing pretty wide over into the oncoming lanes and then turn right down here. And then I'm going to stage five tractor trailers or staging, lighting, and sound.

Once I get a couple of them dumped, which will be relatively quick, then I can go over and retrieve mine and accompany our generator operator and then we can get... Now we're going to have to face this way, so what we'll probably do is go up there, I'll spin them around and then park because we have Expandos and we blow out. … But so we'll do that and we'll get them set up and powered up, and that way we have a pretty good jump on tomorrow.

Todd Dills: The voice you heard there describing some traffic directing along University Avenue at the Alabama campus in Tuscaloosa was that of Game Creek Video hauler Tommy Marshall, lead driver every fall for a crew of seven rigs that make up quite a unique trucking niche. If you've been to overdriveonline.com this week, you'll likely know that Marshall is the lead hauler for the mobile television production of ESPN's College Gameday broadcast which airs every Saturday throughout the fall, ahead of the day's football games, live from a different university site each week.

I'm Todd Dills, and today on Overdrive Radio we'll drop into some of Overdrive news editor Matt Cole's detailed reporting around the operation with Marshall in the production studio truck for Game Creek Video and several operators from few different companies dedicated to the production. That includes West River Light and Sound and longtime trucker Gerry Glass. It's Glass's initial contact that led the opportunity Cole got to spend with Tommy Marshall, the rest of the crew in Tuscaloosa two weeks back. Glass got in touch with me with what he flagged immediately as a weird call on Labor Day. That Monday, the crew was prepping to head to Tuscaloosa to stage on the University of Alabama campus. Would I be interested in seeing what they do firsthand? Gerry Glass asked me.

Overdrive is headquartered in Tuscaloosa, of course, but I live in Nashville, Tennessee. However, I knew just the right guy for the job. Overdrive news editor Matt Cole is an Alabama grad himself. He delivered with a detailed look at the mobile TV trucking niche. He was on hand for their initial unloading two days later, Wednesday, and parts of set up the following days too with Tommy Marshall as a guide. Marshall and crew do a great deal more than just drive in such production, of course. In fact, driving might be the least time-consuming part of the whole affair depending on whatever university location Gameday chooses week to week. Here's a little taste of some of the ancillary activities with Cole setting up Marshall to tell part of the story of how he came to be the lead cook and proprietor for the Gameday crew’s Roadkill Grill.

Matt Cole: Yeah, so when he started driving for Game Creek Video and doing the College Gameday tour about 20 years ago, one Friday afternoon, I think it was one of the first weeks he was on the tour, he went and bought a bunch of meat and stuff and grilled out for everybody. The other drivers, the engineers, and technicians, everybody that was around building the Gameday set and everything.

And one of the, I don't remember if it was somebody with his company or if it was somebody with ESPN, somebody higher up came to him after that and was like, "Hey, is this something you would want to do or that you would mind doing every week for us?" And it turned into a weekly thing. So every Friday now, basically, after all the sets are built and they're just waiting on the shows to start Friday and Saturday, they've got, I think you said five different grills and they're grilling a ton of meat and they buy all the sides.

Tommy Marshall: Well, from that point on, the operations producer said, "Tommy, you want to do this every Friday?" I said, "I'm not going to buy it every Friday," but he goes, "No, no, no." He says, "We'll pay for it." He said, "But everybody enjoyed it so much and it's just a camaraderie thing." And so then since we started doing it every week, I thought, well, we'll come up with a name. I was driving down the road and one of the guys said, "Hey, watch out for that roadkill? And I went, roadkill, roadkill, roadkill grill. Roadkill grill. You kill it, we'll grill it. So that's how that happened and we've been that ever since.

Todd Dills: After a break for a word from Overdrive Radio’s sponsor, Howes, we'll hear much more from Tommy Marshall. Likewise, Cole. He's out this week at the Guilty by Association Truck Show in Joplin, Missouri in the area around 4 State Trucks there. How many owner operators are out at the show? What's the mood and what's certainly been a challenging year thus far for so many small business truckers? Well, stay tuned for answers.

Speaker 4: Want a squeaky clean fuel system for your diesel, today's your lucky day. Use Howes Diesel Defender with IDX4? The strongest, most effective cleaning agent you can find in a fuel additive. Destroy the toughest carbon deposits and clean your entire fuel system in just three treatments with Howes Diesel Defender. A clean fuel system means optimal performance and increasing your fuel economy by 5% or more guaranteed, Howes Diesel Defender for every diesel.

Todd Dills: You can find out more about Defender at howesproducts.com.

I spoke to Matt Cole at the end of the afternoon of Thursday, September 21 as owner operators were getting parked up at 4 State Trucks and the surrounding area in Joplin, Missouri, for a bit of an update on how things were looking on site at one of the absolute biggest gatherings of the trucking community the nation over.

Matt Cole: Yeah, officially get started tomorrow. Today was kind of the unofficial first day. There's a ton of trucks out here. There was pre-registration and I didn't hear an official number, but I heard from a couple of competitor entrants that 750 was around the pre-registration number. Drivers could still show up through the end of the day Friday, if I'm not mistaken and register.

Todd Dills: I know you've been there. You were there the last time they did this two years ago in 2021, right?

Matt Cole: Yep.

Todd Dills: How does it look compared to that?

Matt Cole: I don't think there's as many trucks here yet. Like I said though, they're still filing in all day today. Some areas I walked to this morning that were more basically empty were getting pretty full by the time I left this afternoon, so it's definitely filling up.

Todd Dills: Anything you can tell us about the spirits people are in out there? I know it's always a pretty festive event at Guilty By Association at 4 State Trucks there, but what's the mood among the folks you talked to today?

Matt Cole: Everybody's pretty happy to be at a truck show. I think there's a lot of concern about business in general, but the truck show kind of gives an opportunity for people to kick back for a couple of days and pal around with some buddies and just enjoy some camaraderie among the trucking community when they get back out on the road early next week, I imagine.

Todd Dills: What are you hearing about the business point of view? Did you talk to anybody at length about what they're seeing in terms of rates and/or just work to be done out there?

Matt Cole: As far as rates, pretty much the same thing we've been hearing for the last several months. They're not too great, and with fuel prices going back up, that's obviously a concern for several people that I've talked to today and I'm sure many others, and it seems like freight availability is still struggling as well. I talked to a few people that it's not uncommon to have to deadhead several hundred miles to get to a load that pays decent or to get to the load at all.

Todd Dills: Get over to overdriveonline.com/business for several reports this week of market conditions for owner operators of late, including a report from owner operator business services firm ATBSs early week session, charting revenue cost and income performance for the last year. There are at least some signs ATBS felt that we've truly hit the market bottom for rates. We might sit here for a good while, but analysts there felt real improvement by spring next year could be in the cards for the broad market. I asked Matt Cole for a few highlights among his conversations with owners and operators out at the show. Here's what he had to say.

Matt Cole: Several of the trucks I saw today were more along the patriotic theme.

I spoke to one driver … he's a company driver actually for CRST, but he's got their only wrapped show truck. It's the American Patriot wrap, which honors military veterans and tries to promote trucking for military veterans. So that was cool. He got the truck last year and he's pretty much been given free rein to customize it how he wants to as well, so pretty interesting to see what he's done with that so far.

Todd Dills: He's a military veteran?

Matt Cole: A U.S. Army veteran. He was in, I think he said from 2003 through 2011 and had two tours in Iraq.

Matt Cole: An owner operator leased the CRST. He has his truck dedicated to POW/MIA and it's not wrapped, but he's got several indicators on the truck that it's to honor prisoners of war and missing an action veterans and it's a pretty interesting theme. There's skulls all around the truck and it's a pretty unique take on what we typically see in trucking to honor military, and veterans, and POW/MIA. Obviously, it just about like any truck show. If you're a fan of Peterbilt 379s, 389s, and Kenworth 3900s there's plenty to see.

Todd Dills: And lots of variations on those, I'm sure, out there.

Matt Cole: Absolutely. Yeah. Not too many hero trucks, but there are a few sprinkled in there and pretty interesting to see what drivers have done with some of those as well. There's antiques all over the place. I talked to one owner, he has a Kenworth W925 on the show lot and it's an impressive truck. He said he bought it a few years ago and pretty much had to rebuild it from the ground up. Wasn't his intention initially, but it just kind of turned into a project that he's done a beautiful job with it.

Todd Dills: That would be a 1963 W925, and you can find a picture of that overdriveonline.com/custom-rigs in the gallery of owners rigs Matt Cole posted Friday, September 22. And as usual with any such show, and particularly this one, you can expect much, much more in the weeks to come for Overdrive's Custom Rigs video series and plenty else. And if you're in Joplin, I do hope it's truly a good time. Now back to Tommy Marshall, hauler for Game Creek Video and lead driver for ESPN's College Gameday touring live broadcast on scene for the college football week two game between the University of Alabama Crimson Tide and the University of Texas Longhorns there.

Tommy Marshall: I started in entertainment in 1976, in the music industry. I wore a lot of hats. I did a lot of jobs. Ended up becoming a lead driver for a rock and roll band, your biggest rock and roll bands in the world. That's how me and Jerry met. I've known Jerry, we toured together for 30 some years.

Matt Cole: Who'd you work for back then?

Tommy Marshall: A company called Upstaging out of, well, it used to be Mundell in Illinois. It's still a suburb of Chicago. Worked for Janko for a while, but I toured with bands for 28 years. The music industry was really starting to change pretty drastically in the mid-nineties. I didn't like the direction it was headed, so I thought, "Man, I have to do something else." But after you do something for almost 30 years of your life, it's like, well, what do you do?

So a buddy of mine jumped ship and he said, "Man, you got to get into mobile television." All right. So I applied for the company he was actually working for, but they had just built a new mobile TV studio. They said, "Man, it'll be a year before we build another one." A couple of days goes by, I get a call from them and they said, "Hey man, call this guy. His name is Mike Cunningham, company's Game Creek Video." I said, "What the heck's a Game Creek Video?" And they said, "Best mobile company in the industry." I've been there ever since. I've been there for 20 years. I'm the most senior driver there. The owner of our company, Pat Sullivan, his father was the founder of the New England Patriots. And so our company, Game Creek, we provide the mobile TV studios for all your networks.

I mean, we have competitors obviously, but Game Creek Video, I've been assigned to College Gameday for like 20 years, but we have trucks that do Fox, CBS, NBC, Major League Baseball Network. We do them all and we broadcast everything from sporting events, college and professional, to we do the Grammys, the Oscars, the Emmys, reality shows. We'll broadcast your kids' birthday if you pay us. But yeah, I've been truly blessed in my life doing, like I said, being lead driver for your biggest bands in the world and working with the best people in the world and that's where we're at. I'll never leave Game Creek, because the company, Pat Sullivan and his sons, it's the greatest company you could ever ask to work for.

Todd Dills: Well, they've got this operations about seven trucks generally speaking on the Gameday tour, but he also mentioned that there's some bigger operations that require certainly more trucks than just seven or eight that run Gameday.

Matt Cole: He was talking more about the concert music side of the business. Some tours can have 30, 40, 50 trucks. Game Creek Video, and there's several other companies, he didn't mention them by name, but they're doing college football, NBA, major league baseball, NFL, college basketball, just you name it. And reality TV, any sort of live TV where production is required on scene somewhere. That's the type of stuff they're doing. And Game Creek Video itself, I think they have 70 or 80 trucks.

Tommy Marshall: Having eight semis on this is much easier than having 20, 30, 40 trucks in rock and roll.

Matt Cole: I could imagine.

Tommy Marshall: But the challenge of this is we're on university campuses unlike the trucks at Game Creek that do NFL stadiums, let's say stuff like that, NBA, whatever, you have asphalt everywhere you go.

Matt Cole: Dedicated lots for you.

Tommy Marshall: That's right. You have TV compounds.

Whereas here, my bosses get with the university officials and they figure out where we're going to go, and then they ask me to put five pounds of crap in a one pound sack. So I just had to look at it and see if that's possible to do. Typically, walk on average, Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays about 40,000 steps.

Yeah, my most has been 43,000 on one given day.

Matt Cole: Wow. So your job's not the typical truck driving job.

Tommy Marshall: Absolutely not. It is kind of funny. I've driven 48 years of my life, almost 4 million miles. I've never driven any freight. You were like, "What?" Well, I kind of fell into the rock and rollings, three of my best friend's band called McGuffey Lane. They were huge. Got signed with Atlantic, we toured with Charlie Daniels, Marshall Tucker, The Allman Brothers, everybody.

And so that's how I started. I was actually going to Ohio State and I was going to school for business management. I was working at a Fisher Body Plant in Columbus, Ohio, and GM was paying tuition and books. I thought, "Well, that's a good job. I'll just work here."

Well, I hated the thought of going into that plant for 30 years of my life. Fortunately, I've been on the show 20 years, and that with my 28 years in rock and roll, I've been to every arena and stadium in the country a hundred times. I've developed good relationship, good rapport with all your operations managers at these various venues. We've been here so many times, like Alabama prime example. We know all the people. We know exactly what we need to do.

All I need is their grace, and since they know me so well, they know that they tell us what real estate we have to work with and they just walk away. They just let me do it.

So all we wait on is like today, we normally start at noon on Wednesdays, but some places we have to wait till faculty gets out of here, wait till the student body gets out of here because we have a lot of vehicles.

And so it was a 5:00, 5:30 ish kind of thing. Just let traffic die down. Once that occurs, we have a pecking order. Obviously, the first things you have to unload every week is your roof truck, the truck that hauls the roof for the stage and stuff. Then you got the truck that hauls our barricade, our bike rack. That's the second truck. The third truck, typically, is another West River truck, which is Nigel. He has some of the unusual stages, the Zotron, a few things like that. Then after that, then we dump him, but more times than not, I'd say 90% of the time we can park me. I'm generally the first one to park. The last West River truck is electronics. Everything that goes on the stage, stuff like that. We generally, he's the first one to load out. He's like the last one to load in because we like to keep that safe and out of the way.

Matt Cole: Sure. West River, they have four trucks. The Wednesday afternoon that I was there, he brought in three of those four first because they had most of the actual stage equipment. The fourth truck, I think, was more lighting and electronics stuff they wouldn't get to until Thursday. The last one we heard on the audio, I believe that was the Go Vision truck, which also has a lot of the electronics, but he was just getting that truck kind of parked where it needed to be for the next day. But typically, on a Wednesday, Alabama is one that when you read the story, you'll see, generally, they like to start around noon on Wednesdays to start getting on campus and unloading trucks.

But University of Alabama, where they were that week is one of the universities that prefers they wait until later in the day to give faculty and students more time to get away from that general area so they didn't get started until about 5:30 that afternoon, and it made for a later night for them, of course, but it seems like most of the guys on that tour have been doing it a long time, and they're pretty efficient. They know what they're doing. For sure. I was there Wednesday evening when they started, and then I was there part of the afternoon on Thursday when the set was probably three quarters built.

It's definitely hectic around there. They're all busting at trying to get everything done in time. This season, they have added a new Friday show, the Pat McAfee Show, and he does his... At least for the first couple of weeks of the season, they've been doing his show on the Gameday set on Friday afternoon. There's been a little extra need for them to get everything done quicker because everything pretty much has to be set up by the time his show starts Friday morning.

Tommy Marshall: We built the studio for McAfee to broadcast from NRB unit here. It hauls our gear. Once it gets here and gets parked, we offload it and then build the studio in there. Uplink truck, obviously, from the stage, from the set, the camera, it's fiber optic and it'll go into the side of my trailer. It goes out of there, over here. He'll hit a bird, I don't know, 40,000 miles up in the air, whatever it is. That signal will be sent down to Bristol, Connecticut, ESPN headquarters. They'll take peek at it. If they like it, they bounce it back, goes to your house. That's all done in seven seconds.

Todd Dills: How close is his truck to the stage? What does that whole scene look like as they're setting it up?

Matt Cole: I think it varies based on which campus and how much space they have to operate in. But on Alabama's campus, there was probably 50 yards between his truck and the stage. And so basically, a fiber optic cable runs from the stage to Tommy's truck, and it's where the production is housed. There's all the production equipment in there. And then from Tommy's truck, he feeds it into the satellite truck, which like he just described. It beams the signal up to the satellite, it's sent back to ESPN headquarters in Connecticut, and then if they're happy with it, it goes out to everybody's television set.

Todd Dills: Certainly not your garden variety trucking here, right? Clearly, Marshall stays out all season long he says, for the most part. He may get by his home in Columbus a little bit, but this is a full-time tour for the folks involved in this for a full season of college football. But I mean, there's not a whole lot of driving necessarily involved in it, eh.

Matt Cole: No, not at all. I point out in the story, week one of the college football season, Gameday was in Charlotte, North Carolina. I was there during week two in Tuscaloosa, which that's only about 450 miles. The third week they were in Boulder, Colorado, and I think I looked that up on the map, it was like 1200 miles or so. So not terribly far distances between these. The biggest challenge, occasionally, if they happen to be in Miami, Florida and the Gameday the next week is somewhere on the West Coast, they may have to bring in a team driver but.

Tommy Marshall: Once I start in the fall, end of August, mid end of August, I typically don't go home until football season's over. Go home a couple of weeks, do the bowl games, and then the week after I start Gameday basketball. So I'm almost out six to seven months, unless with the exception, if we do Ohio State University where I live, I go home. Or if we're passing through, I'll go home. Now, as a rule of thumb, they will allow us to, they want the drivers to have their home time because they believe very much with the balance of life. It's not just work. You have to have your family life too. And so they try really hard. They'll fly you home eight to 10 days a month, and they try exceptionally hard to make sure that happens each and every month.

At Game Creek Video, we are paid salary, very nice salaries, and once you're staff with us, you have all the benefits and all that, all the insurances and 401K, and they pay all our expenses, hotel rooms, as well as rental cars, as well as flights. They give us approximately 10 days off a month, plus I've been there so long, I got over a months paid vacation, and so I'm paid, I mean, I don't have to leave the house and I get paid 365 days a year, so that's nice.

I mean, that's not true, but I mean, if they didn't have anything for me to do, Pat's got enough to pay us all the time.

Tommy Marshall: But yes, we're blessed to get paid very, very well. ESPN and everybody, Casey and everybody, they really show their appreciation. They do whatever they can. If I need something, they're right there. Whether it's rental cars, or picking something up, or grills, or whatever they do. I mean, to me, it's just all about friendship and family, but that's very much appreciated, and I know that we all have each other's backs. It doesn't matter. I've done it in hurricanes and everything else, and you just do what you got to do.

Matt Cole: Right. Well, being on a tour like Gameday, you could be in Tuscaloosa this week. Y'all could be in LA for a USC game next week. So as far as the driving part, you got here on, y'all were here Tuesday afternoon, you're starting to set up Wednesday. On a cross country trip like that, what would it look like?

Tommy Marshall: If we can do it legally, we do it. Oh, well, we do everything legal, but I'm saying if we don't have to bring in team drivers, all right. If it's too far, if we're in Miami, Florida, University of Miami, we have to go to Eugene, Oregon that's pushing it. So we look at the mileage, we look at the weather, and depending on what time we can get out, and we might arrive five or six hours later than normal, but if we don't particularly care to have team drivers, just because its added weight, it's more stress. It's just an inconvenience.

Not that I don't like my fellow drivers, but now if I look at it and run it a few different ways and I can't do it, then I just call the office and we just round up 17 drivers and they fly in and off we go. The show's big enough now that, typically, we try and start off loading trucks, parking and powering them up, setting them up, offloading them at noon on Wednesdays. It's all company drivers, but what they've done when I first started, you had to do what we call freelance.

They wanted to see if you could drive, if you fit in, if you're a team player, if you can cut the hours. Some people don't like to be away from their house, and so now we don't have freelance. We call them contractors, and what Game Creek does is it's typically word of mouth, because with us, we can get 5,000 applications because people would love to drive these trucks, but rather than wasting their time and our time, because I mean, there's a lot of great drivers in the country, but there's a lot of them that they want to do the bare minimum, just do enough to get paid, keep their jobs.

A lot of them in this... I've said this for 48 years, if I issued out driver's license, about 65% of the country wouldn't have one because they all think that they're greatest drivers in the world, but they're absolutely horrible.

They're frightening. That's one thing that we screen very much at Game Creek because my mobile unit right there is $14 million. Okay? All our mobile units are extremely expensive, and just if you own Game Creek, if you're Pat Sullivan, you want to just put Joe anybody behind the wheel, and so we have them fly up and they'll take a test drive, and it's just with some of the people in our transportation department, we call them driver supervisors that are up there. And one of my dearest friends is one of our, well, both of them, we have two, and John Boucher is a great, he used to be a driving instructor.

He used to own 12 of his own trucks. But when he came to Game Creek, I don't know, 15 years ago or something, he spent his first three or four weeks with me, so I taught him the Game Creek way of doing things. He's never forgot that, and he's very, very gifted. And so if you come up and they're giving you a shot, you'll ride with John or you'll ride with Scott Dolly, the other supervisor, and if they think you're skilled enough and have passed that portion of it, now they'll work you into the schedule. You would talk to Kevin Kennedy, who is our transportation director. Ben Cote, the assistant, and Stan Legasse. You'd put those guys, you'd get with them. Stan would schedule you to do maybe work on an AB unit, which I'm a single unit, but the game trucks are Game Creek, and they're an AB unit. So you would ride... Typically, I think what they do is they'll have you do team drives with our NASCAR trucks and stuff like that and get feedback from those guys, see if they're pretty good drivers, but it's not just the driving.

That's what a lot of people don't understand. If you're willing to learn, I can teach you any of this stuff, but it's more your attitude and your personality because out here, you don't know who you're talking to.

I mean, it could be the CEO. I've met the CEO of Disney. I've met so many network vice presidents and governors and just everybody over the years, you don't know who you're talking to. Some of them just look like you and I, man. I mean, they're not all fancy tidied up, and so you want people that you know aren't going to offend anyone or say the wrong things, and you either have that skill or not. That's nothing that can be taught. You either have a personality or you don't.

Some people absolutely hate that. That's why a lot of drivers, they love driving because they don't have to deal with anybody.

Matt Cole: Yeah. Bump a dock and...

Tommy Marshall: There you go.

Matt Cole: Hook the trailer and go on.

Tommy Marshall: That's exactly right. But in entertainment, whether you're in the music industry, or sports, or mobile television, whatever, that's not true. And again, there's some of our drivers that prefer... They wouldn't be talking to you.

But I've been kind of gabby my whole life and I don't have an issue at all with talking to people and explaining things. But again, that's just, you either have that type of personality or you don't.

Todd Dills: Here's a big thanks to Matt Cole for spending time with Marshall and the crew and for bearing with one old Georgia football fan here. I know it was kind of a cool experience to get to hang out with folks and cover this operation, but I do have to say that I'm sorry your team lost.

Matt Cole: Yeah. It hasn't been the greatest season for Alabama fans so far.

Todd Dills: You can read much more about Marshall and meet all the operators that are part of the tour via Cole's big feature from earlier in the week at overdriveonline.com. I'll post a link to it for sure in the show notes wherever you're listening. Overdrive Radio is on Apple and Google Podcasts, SoundCloud, and Spotify, overcast.fm, and many, many others, including world-famous overdriveonline.com/overdrive-radio. Here's a big thanks for listening. Give feedback or tips for me directly use our podcast message line at (615) 852-8530.