Mark Woodley goes viral for bomb cyclone blizzard report
He wants to stick to the day job — and was really frosty about it.
A local TV sports anchor in Iowa is going viral for his hilarious on-air complaining about being forced to get up in the early hours to cover the “bomb cyclone” — at one point grousing about how “the outdoors currently is not heated.”
“This is what you get when you ask the sports guy to come in to cover a blizzard in the morning show,” KWWL’s Mark Woodley tweeted alongside a clip of his sarcasm-filled performance viewed more than 5 million times by Friday.
His cranky commentary in the early hours Thursday started when a host in the warm, dry studio in Waterloo asked: “Mark, how you feeling out there?”
“Again, the same way I felt about eight minutes ago when he asked me that same question,” Woodley replied, his voice dripping with displeasure at having to pretend to be a good sport outside in the cold.
“I didn’t even realize that there was a 3:30 also in the morning until today,” he quipped — noting he also usually worked from the comfort of the studio.
Woodley acknowledged that he couldn’t do his usual gig in the warm studio covering sports because “everything is canceled here for the next couple of days.”
“So what better time to ask the sports guy to come in about five hours earlier than he would normally wake up, go stand out in the wind and the snow and the cold and tell other people not to do the same,” he said.
“Tune in for the next couple of hours to watch me progressively get crankier and crankier,” he warned.
“Can I go back to my regular job?” he asked at one point, suggesting his colleagues “added an extra hour to this show just because somebody likes torturing me.”
“It is just getting colder and colder,” he said, quipping how “the outdoors currently is not heated.”
At one point, he gave viewers good news and bad news.
“The good news is that I can still feel my face right now. The bad news is I kind of wish I couldn’t,” he said.
Many of the 5 million who viewed his tweeted video suggested that his hilarious performance could end up backfiring in the very way he wanted to avoid.
“Big mistake, Woodley. You shouldn’t have been so good at this,” fellow TV sports reporter Grant Galarneau-Becker told him, while another, Kyle Clark, said: “This is a masterpiece. Welcome to your new job.”
Fox sports writer Sam Amico told him that “perhaps sadly for you, you have now become far and away my favorite weather reporter.”
Iowa sports reporter Owen Siebring, meanwhile, complained that he had “no idea how hard you’re making the rest of our jobs.”
“Now every news director wants their sports reporter to go out into the cold, in hopes of going viral,” he wrote.