Anyone who has ever seen a local news broadcast during a winter weather event knows the drill — a meteorologist inside showing you the radar, at least one reporter live from a vehicle talking about road conditions and one (or several) reporters on the street, telling you just how cold it is in their location and advising you, the viewer, to stay home.
But one intrepid sports reporter stuck on winter weather watch in Waterloo, Iowa, decided to throw in a little snark with his outdoor updates.
Mark Woodley of NBC affiliate KWWL made several hilarious quips throughout the hours-long morning show he was tasked with helping on Dec. 22. After (finally) wrapping his live hits, Woodley decided to put together a supercut of his snarkiest moments throughout the day.
"This is what you get when you ask the sports guy to come in to cover a blizzard in the morning show," he captioned the post.
"I normally do sports, uh, 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 and go stand out in the wind and the snow and the cold and tell other people not to do the same," he quips at one point the video. "I didn't even realize that there was a 3:30 (show) also in the morning until today."
At another point, he jokes he wished he could have been inside a car doing updates on road conditions.
"That thing's heated," he says. "The outdoors is currently, uh, not heated."
Immediately, his hilarious winter weather reporting went viral and as of press time, had nearly 20,000 likes on Twitter.
Woodley, who is originally from Iowa and very much used to winter weather, tells TODAY.com he can't believe this is what he's internet famous for.
"Of all the things that I thought I'd be known for in my life, crotchety old weather reporter was not on the list," he laughs to TODAY.com.
He explains that like many businesses, KWWL has been short-staffed lately. Woodley was enlisted on Tuesday to help the morning show team on Thursday after most of the sporting events were canceled as a result of the weather.
"Nobody told me what I was doing," he tells TODAY. "Now I thought maybe I'd be in studio or out in the car or something — not outside when temperature is pushing in minus 40 with the wind chill!"
He says some people online have been questioning the station for putting him outside in the cold, but explains that he was only "30 feet from the door of the building" and only outside for about six minutes at a time.
"I'd come in for 10 minutes, be outside for six minutes," he says. "So I mean, I did have a warm spot pretty close to where I was."
Woodley says he was live 14 times in a three and a half hour span and the supercut video was taken from all of those hits. He notes that they do take the storm "very seriously" but he's just "always been a kind of snarky person."
"You know, it's kind of been my personality and I guess it came out," he laughs. "But I'm shocked with what's happened last few hours."
His tweet has been seen by people around the world and retweeted by the likes of Judd Apatow — who called Woodley a "legend" —as well as sports commentator Rich Eisen and sports personality Rex Chapman.
Woodley says he's going back to his usual evening schedule and sports coverage soon enough but will — like more than 100 million others across the U.S. — be stuck in the freezing weather until the winter storm passes.
The powerful storm is bringing heavy snow, strong winds and dangerously cold temperatures to the central United States and disrupting holiday travel across the country. As of Thursday evening, thousands of flights have already been canceled.
The weather event is expected to become a bomb cyclone on Friday and conditions are predicted to worsen through the rest of the week.
As for Woodley, he jokes that despite being a born-and-raised Midwesterner, "every year, this time of year comes around, we're like, 'Man, why do we live here?' And then next year, we're still here."
"I’ve spent 46 years in weather where the air hurts your face. So I don’t know if I’m the smartest person but I’m still here," he laughs.
