I used to find it ‘cute’ how my older friends would wax poetic about their sports heroes growing up.
Old men sitting around talking about Mickey Mantle and Sandy Koufax with smiles on their faces, taking ax handles or lead pipes and standing recalling the days “he used to wave the bat just like this, then he’d lift his front leg…” It was as if their minds were movie projectors and their bodies were their screens.
I loved sports, so I enjoyed those times and those people. But I also was raised by older parents who impressed upon me the value of spending quality time with older people and listening to what they have to say.
But in each and every one of those cases, those greats of their sports had passed away. Their ability to hit a ball or run it down, to pitch it or throw it to an open receiver had been erased from all but the memories of men like these.
Those guys have been on my heart over the last couple of weeks as I mourn the loss of two of the people who shaped my life as a broadcaster from afar.
First came the loss of Dick Enberg at Christmas time.
Enberg was like a glass of chocolate milk: smooth and easy and right for any occasion.
He was as versatile as they come. He accompanied us to 10 Super Bowls. He was on the mic for John Elway’s drive in Cleveland, and Earnest Byner’s fumble in Denver. He teamed up with Merlin Olsen to be a broadcasting team for the ages back in the 1980s.
He was the rock of stability between Al McGuire and Billy Packer as a new era of college basketball was ushered in when Ervin “Magic” Johnson’s Michigan State Spartans beat Larry Bird’s Indiana State Sycamores in the NCAA National Championship game almost four decades ago.
His graceful presentation was a perfect fit for NBC’s coverage of Wimbledon. He is the personification of the “strawberries and cream” that are sold throughout the All England Club grounds. He made us get up early on a summer weekend to eat “Breakfast at Wimbledon.”
And he spent his summers broadcasting baseball, most recently for the Padres.
Enberg was everything you wanted from a broadcaster: he was fair, fun, consistent and he delivered his best performances in the biggest moments.
Then last weekend we lost Keith Jackson.
His resumé includes Olympic coverage, Major League Baseball and professional football.
Jackson was the original play-by-play announcer of Monday Night Football.
It was his voice that expressed stunned disbelief as light-hitting Yankee short stop Bucky Dent lofted a fly ball toward left field and it disappeared into the netting at Fenway Park in the 1978 baseball playoffs.
It was his voice that we heard as Eric Heiden skated to Olympic Gold.
But when you and I think of Jackson, there is only one memory of him that we all have and will forever have stored in the warehouses of our minds – college football.
On crisp fall Saturday afternoons and evenings, America would turn on their televisions for the biggest college football game of the weekend. Each and every Saturday they were greeted to that game by the same voice who enthusiastically welcomed us with “Hello everybody, I’m Keith Jackson.”
He was serious about his craft of relaying the happenings of the game to us, but he did it in a way that made you think you were watching the game with your uncle. He had unique, back-road mannerisms that everyone in the country could relate to.
He called linemen “ big hosses” and “big uglies” and described stadiums as saucers. He was the one who nicknamed the Rose Bowl the “Granddaddy of them All,” and now the press box at the Rose Bowl bears his name.
And then there was “Whoa Nellie!” His signature utterance, which he says was what his great grandfather’s way of getting on himself for doing something wrong, is one of the most imitated phrases of all time.
Jackson was a master story teller, and he called a game like he was telling a story, with people of all ages and genders gathered around his chair to hear the tale.
Keith Jackson was the gatekeeper to the pageantry of college football, and every Saturday he swung that gate open wide to one and all.
Enberg and Jackson were men who were elite in their profession, and while they had their own approaches to broadcasting games they had two significant characteristics that we all (no matter what our lines of work might be) should strive for. They both worked hard to make the broadcasts easy to consume, and they never put themselves ahead of the game they were calling. They knew their role and they played it to perfection.
And now, they are both gone – their voices silenced.
So those guys, the ones sitting around talking about their heroes … I have a new perspective on what those times and those men were all about.
I used to think that it was all about a love of sports. Now I understand it was those guys’ way of trying to preserve the memories of their youth and avoid the reality of their own march toward mortality.
