Meet the Mastermind Behind Gone Fishin’
A conversation with the Photoshop wiz responsible for Inside the NBA’s most notable segment.
The Golden State Warriors’ Game 7 takedown of the Oklahoma City Thunder Monday night marked the end of the Western Conference Finals, and with it the end of TNT’s NBA coverage for the 2015–16 season. That means no more Inside the NBA, and therefore no more Gone Fishin’, Inside’s most recognizable segment, in which host Ernie Johnson and analysts Charles Barkley, Kenny Smith and Shaquille O’Neal bid farewell to an ousted team by Photoshopping its players’ (and celebrity fans’) heads onto random fishermen. Not the most highbrow material, but it’s a fun segment on the most fun sports program we’ve got—the perfect way to encapsulate the fact that sometimes we take sports too damn seriously.
“It’s become a staple of what we do every playoffs,” says Jeremy Levin, Inside’s producer. “Once a team is eliminated, we send them fishing. We try to add different layers to it every year. Now it’s just this kind of naturally occurring thing. These pictures get posted on Twitter, and people see all the layers and hidden gems that you can see throughout the picture, which is hilarious.”
The guy who does the actual Photoshopping is Alex Houvouras, a Senior Broadcast Designer and Associate Producer at Turner who’s been artfully placing the heads of basketball players on stock images of people fishing in oceans and lakes for over 10 years now. We spoke with Houvouras to learn more about why the segment has resonated with viewers for so long.
Cycle: How did Gone Fishin’ originally become a thing?
Alex Houvouras: Kenny [Smith] had been on the show a couple years before I got there, and he had been saying for a long time that when he was playing for the Rockets, they were in a series against the Suns, and the way Kenny described it, the mascot was running around the floor and he had a fishing pole. At the end of the fishing pole was a sign with the logos of the teams that the Suns had already eliminated. Kenny was fired up in the huddle and said, “We’re not going fishing!” And they ended up coming back and winning the series.
So he brought that with him to broadcasting when he started working for the show. A couple years later I started working for the show and I was thinking of visuals for when the guys were talking about things on-set, and when we got to the playoffs I came up with a couple visuals. The first one I made was when George Karl was coaching, and it was just Kenny and George Karl. It kinda took off from there.
Cycle: What’s the process of creating the images like?
AH: For years I’ve been looking up who’s from what cities, and what celebrities attend some of the games there, so I try and mix in players and celebrities from the towns to give it something fun. And then it’s a lot of Photoshopping. Some of them can take a couple hours — I try to include little in-jokes, and put things on their t-shirts or drop little nuggets in the background for people. Sometimes they’re just for friends of mine. But yeah, just a lot of Photoshop.
Cycle: Have any favorites?
AH: My favorite is when you can get a reaction from the internet — that way I know I’ve done a good job, if the internet’s reacting to it. We did a Lakers one that had Kobe on a boat with Jack Nicholson. And then there was D’Angelo Russell with spying equipment and one of those huge parabolic mics, like he was trying to hear Kobe on his boat. That got a big reaction. I’ve done a couple of the Knicks — I always like doing the Knicks and Lakers because there are a lot of opportunities for jokes. Last year we had the Knicks’ yacht on complete flames, and Carmelo was doing a cannonball off the boat because they had just been a tire fire for so long.
Cycle: How’d you wind up working at Inside the NBA?
AH: I was freelancing there because they wanted graphic support, which is just straightforward stuff like cutting out images for the game. I had a lot of downtime, and with all the downtime I had I started making these pictures to send to my friends backstage. One day Tim Kiely, the executive producer, he could see my monitor, and he said, “What’s that? Can we use that?” I thought he was kidding. And then it got to where they were asking for things, and then they started planning things out, and it just kinda grew. It’s just basically a bunch of guys sitting around poking fun at each other. The fun thing about the show in general is that Jeremy and Tim, their attitude and Charles’ attitude is that it’s not just about sports — it’s sports and having fun.
Cycle: Have you had to explain any of the references to Charles, Kenny and Shaq?
AH: I did one on the Heat the other day, and I have a friend that I grew up with who lives in South Florida and he’s a huge Heat fan, so I slipped him into the background. And the guys know I’m gonna slide things in, so now they’re looking and they’ll say, “Oh, who’s that guy in the background?” Normally they wouldn’t even notice, but of course they noticed this guy. And someone was like, “Oh, that’s Alex’s friend Butter.” I didn’t plan on them noticing it, but after all these years, they’ve started picking up on it.
Cycle: When you were younger did you ever think you’d one day get paid to Photoshop celebrities’ heads onto random fishermen?
AH: [Laughs] No. I wasn’t in broadcast or graphic design—I actually was a fine arts major doing painting and drawing. I didn’t even know that there was a broadcast design job that existed in this world. I’ve been really lucky to get where I am. I was trying to explain to my parents what I do for a living, and my dad was like, “You write jokes?” And I said, “Dad, remember all those stupid pictures I’d get in trouble for drawing in school? Well, that’s what they pay me to do now.” He was like, “Oh. Good for you, son.”
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Images courtesy of Turner Sports
