Garden City to Nashville
He started with a piano, a trumpet, and a newsroom.
John was born in 1952 in Garden City, New York, the son of a nurse and a textile-chemist father. He started piano and trumpet at six, studied communications and music at North Carolina State, and took his first serious broadcast job at WSM in Nashville.
John has called WSM a very serious news organization, the place where he learned pretty much everything about journalism. He also crossed paths there with a young Oprah Winfrey.
The television years
Newsrooms, sports trucks, red carpets.
Local news led to CBS and NBC. John anchored coverage of the Tour de France from 1983 to 1986, US Open tennis, and Olympic gymnastics, and received an Associated Press award for investigative journalism.
In 1986, he joined Entertainment Tonight. For ten years, he co-hosted one of the most recognizable shows in television.
Roundball Rock
The hotel answering-machine song that would not go away.
In 1989, John had a melody in his head and no way to write it down before morning. So he called his own hotel answering machine and hummed the hook into the phone. That melody became Roundball Rock, the NBA on NBC theme.
The song kept living through basketball, an SNL parody, YouTube, and a generation of fans who could still hum it. In 2025, NBC brought it back.
The music
Four gold albums, eight million records, one long thread.
John's music career includes four gold albums, eight million records sold, and a Grammy nomination for Best Pop Instrumental Album. His Live at Red Rocks performances became PBS staples and helped raise more than $7 million for public television.
In 2018, he was inducted into the North Carolina Music Hall of Fame. The music never disappeared; it kept finding new rooms.
2015, and what changed
The reason the health advice became personal.
In 2015, I was diagnosed with metastatic prostate cancer. I was told I might have eighteen months. I am more than ten years past that day now, and I still live with treatment as part of my life.
I've talked publicly about the ugly parts because pretending otherwise would be dishonest. I was angry. I drank too much. I nearly lost my marriage. Connie is the reason I am still here, and I do not say that lightly.
That experience changed the way I hear every piece of health research. I do not want hype. I do not want miracle language. I want the practical idea that might help somebody get through tonight, talk to their doctor, sleep a little better, or take the next right step.
Intelligence for Your Life
A team that reads the research and throws out the hype.
Intelligence for Your Life began as a weekend radio show in 2000 and became daily in 2003. Today it airs on more than 350 stations, and John was inducted into the National Radio Hall of Fame in 2019.
The work is simple: read the research, throw out the hype, and hand people the part that matters.
Family
The center of the story.
John has been married to Connie Sellecca since 1992. Their daughter, Prima, is part of the family story behind the work, the faith, and the determination to keep going.