How many times have you watched a local news report about bad weather — be it a hurricane or a blizzard — and felt sorry for the poor reporter standing outside, getting the brunt of it? Sports reporter Mark Woodley of Waterloo, Iowa, station KWWL-TV, embodied all those long-suffering reporters on Thursday when he got yanked into reporting on the snow instead of athletics.
“This is what you get when you ask the sports guy to come in to cover a blizzard in the morning show,” Woodley tweeted, along with a video of his work.
In the clip, Woodley notes he was enlisted to cover the winter storm with all sporting events — his usual beat — canceled. He was called in five hours earlier than he normally would even wake up, he said, “to go stand out in the wind and the snow and the cold, and tell other people not to do the same.”
“I didn’t even realize that there was a 3:30 also in the morning until today,” he said.
Woodley was pretty self-aware, urging viewers to “tune in for the next couple hours to watch me progressively get crankier and crankier.”
He also jealously pointed out he didn’t get to drive the station’s Storm Chaser vehicle.
“That thing’s heated,” Woodley said. “The outdoors currently is not heated.”
Woodley couldn’t immediately be reached for comment, but he told TODAY he got to go in and out of the heated station, and was only outside in the cold for six minutes at a time. And as a native Iowan, he’s not unfamiliar with freezing temperatures. Still, he had to go live live 14 times in a three and a half hour span, and the temperature in Waterloo was close to 40 below with the windchill.
Still, his viral fame is now such that his own station wrote a feature on his grumpiness for their website.
“Of all the things that I thought I’d be known for in my life,” he told TODAY, “crotchety old weather reporter was not on the list.”
