Life After TV: Greg D. Hammond

Greg D. Hammond was born and raised in Jackson, Tennessee.

He spent his years in grade school playing football and running track and after playing those sports and watching them on TV he thought about being on the screen to tell the world more about each sport.

“You know growing up watching sports, watching wrestling, watching television, thinking you know television might be fun", says Hammond.

Hammond attended Jackson State Community College after graduating from South Side High School.

During the first week at Jackson State he enrolled in a TV production class which then introduced him to his first tv job opportunity.

“I just, I want to shadow the sports guy, so I worked in production, but it wasn’t long. I walked back to the news room, introduced myself to the sports guy, at the time it was Eric Wydell. He said yea, sure", he explained.

Hammond worked at the local station from 1999 until 2003 in production then moving into the role of sports director not too long after.

After graduating from Jackson State and The University of Tennessee at Martin Hammond was ready to leave west Tennessee.

“Anyone who works in the business know you put a lot of feelers out there and a lot of times you’ll get a letter in the mail. So you open it, thanks for applying for this job, but unfortunately, so I got a lot of those. So, in October of 2003 I received a call from a tv station in Lexington, Kentucky", says Hammond.

Hammond was a sports reporter in Kentucky for four years, he covered a range of sports from football to horse racing but then news started to change.

Hammond explains, “ready for something more, ready for something different, ready to move, ready to move and it just wasn’t anything out there. This was around the time where tv stations were going from 2 man sports departments to one or three man sports departments to two.”

Hammond decided to go back to school and get a teaching degree. He wanted to teach and coach.

"During that same time, he says by the way call Mr. Arnold at Southside I told him you were coming back home. So, I call Mr. Arnold and he tells me about this program that wasn’t at southside when I was a student, so it was brand spanking new. It had only been around one semester before he called me. So now I had this opportunity to take my communications degree. Step off a tv set on a Sunday and go teach at Southside High School on a Monday.”

He is still with the Jackson Madison County School System now, but he works directly with the superintendent and deputy superintendents as the chief of staff and public information officer.

“Life after TV, you get a lot of ‘Hey I know you, you’re the sports guy’, ‘ You were taller on TV’, those kinds of things. It’s funny. It will kind of just happen at random moments", he says.