Crystal Wise
After close to three decades of steady employment in an industry he loves, Newy Scruggs found himself in a professional place in which he had no experience.
Job insecurity.
It’s not a fun place to be knowing management has put a scope on you, and it’s difficult to fathom in Scruggs’ case especially considering he is the popular, widely favored face of NBC5 sports coverage. He is the station’s top sports anchor — his title is sports director — during the prime viewing newscasts of 6 p.m. and 10 p.m. weekdays. On Sundays, he hosts the Emmy Award-winning “Out of Bounds” after the local evening news.
And he’s accomplished, too. An abundant supply of Emmy Awards hardware testifies to that.
Yet, only a few years ago, Scruggs says, a management figure at NBC5 had an agenda and at the top of it was starting anew with the preeminent sports personality at the station.
“I had a guy here who was trying to fire me, the news director,” says Scruggs to me while we sit in the station’s green room after the 6 p.m. newscast. “He ended up firing a lot of people, people who had been longtime employees. And, so, then you start to say to yourself, ‘OK, you know your name's on the chopping block, what do you do?’”
It didn’t take him long, only the shortest period of reflection, to realize he had a wide skills gap to bridge if he expected to land on his feet in the event of a layoff or termination.
Knowing that and the facts of life of bills to pay and mouths to feed were enough to bring about a serious case of angst.
“Some people went into public relations,” he says. “I knew I didn't want to go into public relations. And besides, I knew it deep down … what skills do I have? Outside of talking on radio, I have none.”
Scruggs survived his brush with the grim reaping news director. Rather than more separation packages, it was the director himself who wound up in front of the figurative firing squad, Scruggs says.
“To the relief of a whole lot of us here in the building,” he says in passing.
That eventuality, though, did nothing to change the reality that if Scruggs lost his job, for whatever reason, he had to fix the skills gap.
“I told myself I would never be in this position again.”
And, so, he did.
Last year, Scruggs walked across the stage at TCU with something as valuable as any one of his Emmy Awards, save for perhaps the very first: an executive MBA from the Neeley School of Business.
“I had to figure it out; I needed a toolbox. You need a toolbox in case you have to pivot,” Scruggs says. “That's what Kevin Davis was always talking about. Kevin was a recruiter for TCU. He had been on me for like six years. I'd gone to some of the informational meetings, and I'm like, ‘This fits, this works.’”
Scruggs, born into an Army family in the former West Germany, grew up the way military families do — all over the place, including a stint in Killeen at Fort Hood, which has undergone a rebrand, today Fort Cavazos.
He had a love-at-first-sight encounter with broadcasting as an 11-year-old in Savannah, Georgia. He was in the acclaimed Savannah Community Choir, and the director also had a radio talk show. E. Larry McDuffie invited Scruggs to come along to the station.
“That was it,” he says of the epiphany of career.
Scruggs attended University of North Carolina at Pembroke, a choice he made primarily because “you get to touch the equipment before your senior year.”
He was a month into his senior semester when he got his first real studio job. The TV station he was shooting high school games for on Friday nights suddenly needed a weekend anchor.
Turns out, he was already on staff.
“Nobody wants the job,” he says. “I said, ‘I’ll do the job.’”
He was, in turn, he jokes today, the richest guy on his college campus making $300 a week. That began what is today a more than 30-year career in broadcast journalism.
The career is much like that of the Army. You make a lot of stops.
Over the years, Scruggs has worked in Florence/Myrtle Beach, South Carolina; Austin; Cleveland, and Los Angeles.
From L.A., he moved into the Dallas-Fort Worth market with a job at KXAS, the first of its kind in Texas and the Southwest when Amon Carter founded the station in 1948.
Scruggs accepted the job and then immediately had buyer’s remorse. He was 29 years old. He was associating with Shaquille O’Neal, Kobe Bryant, and many of the Los Angeles Dodgers, he says.
“I’m living a good life,” he says. “I had a good life. And I was like, ‘I don’t want to do this.’”
In the end, his conscience and honor — and his agent — convinced him to follow through. A lot of people were counting on him.
“I said, ‘I'll be a person of my word, I'll do this for four years.’ And then I’ll come back.”
That was going on 25 years ago. Funny how things often work out.
Change is a pesky little thing. But also often a very good thing.
So, while this idea of going back to school seemed a very good idea, it had been 30 years since Scruggs darkened the door of a university classroom or lab, or whatever they call them these days.
“I'd never used Microsoft Word. I've never used it,” Scruggs says. “I didn't have to in my job. Never opened a cell spreadsheet. Didn't know how to make a PowerPoint. My then 14-year-old, she's now my senior in high school … I'm filling out the application, I said, ‘OK, they say I gotta do a PDF and upload it. You know how to do that?’ So, the 14-year-old, so she makes the PDF and uploads the application.”
Rather than a termination over his head, he says he got nothing but support from station management, who embraced Scruggs’ desire to build his professional toolbox.
“When I enrolled, people would always ask, ‘Why are you here, why are you doing this?’ I tell them why I’m here and then tell them the things I didn’t know.”
He recalls with gratitude one of his classmates traveling from Waxahachie one day simply to walk him through Word. “I mean, there's no lie. I didn't know how you centered something.”
It was merely one example of the collaborative learning environment of the program, he says.
“The beauty of all of this is I didn't know,” he says. “And I think in some ways that may have endeared me a little bit to some of my classmates. They have this thought of, oh, you see this person [a television personality and make assumptions]. That's why I like to tell people, you need to separate them from showbiz.”
Scruggs’ presence in the program also sparked an old-fashioned day of show-and-tell. His peers — and his professor — wanted to see his most recent Emmy Awards. He obliged.
Scruggs had won in the Sports Anchor category for “Call Newy Scruggs Mr. Football.” A second was awarded in Sportscast for “Dak Save the Day Against Belichick’s Patriots,” a segment Scruggs produced and directed.
Professor Gregg Lehman was said to have had to do some coaxing, Scruggs did so. It undoubtedly broke up the curriculum in Regulatory Environment for Entrepreneurs and Executives class.
The experience at TCU, you can tell, has been more transformative than I had presumed. But that’s what education is supposed to be, right?
I had asked him about how difficult it was to balance his time between his professional life and school.
“Me?” he says.
He proceeds to tell me about Monica Martin, a classmate who, as deputy chief, also happens to be the highest-ranking Black woman in the history of the Fort Worth Police Department.
She is also a single mother. Talk about juggling fire.
Martin missed a Zoom call for an assignment and came back to class begging her classmates for forgiveness.
“She's like, ‘I'm letting the team down.’ And we're like, ‘Monica, we're your teammates. We're not judging you. Our goal is to help you get across this stage.’”
He’s moved to tears talking about her dedication to her family, her city, her business school teammates, and herself.
It all makes one wonder if we’re being a little hard on the grim reaping news director. After all, none of this would have likely happened had he not shown up carrying a sheath around his office.
“I think many times people who are high achievers like to say, ‘I'm always trying to continuously learn,’” Scruggs says. “But how dedicated are we truly to that statement. I felt I needed to be better at following that up. A lot of us like to say, we will be comfortable being uncomfortable. But most of us never truly really apply that to our lives.”
