Category: News and Views
Legendary sportscaster Curt Gowdy dies at age 86
By Michael Hiestand, USA TODAY
Curt Gowdy, who died Monday, made his broadcasting debut calling high school
football in his native Wyoming in 1944.
He went on to a career that included calling the first Super Bowl in 1967
and receiving the Peabody Award in 1969.
Gowdy
He broadcast big events across the sports spectrum decades before cable TV
and the Internet, when TV ratings were much larger than they are today.
Those
events included calling 16 Major League Baseball All-Star Games and 14 Rose
Bowls.
"He's certainly the greatest play-by-play person up to this point that NBC
Sports has ever had," NBC Sports chairman Dick Ebersol said Monday. "He
literally
carried the sports division at NBC for so many years on his back. ... He was
a remarkable talent, and he was an even more remarkable human being."
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Gowdy, who was 86 and suffered from leukemia, died Monday in West Palm
Beach, Fla., where he had a home.
In 1951, Gowdy became the main play-by-play voice on the Boston Red Sox
broadcast team. He left the Red Sox in 1966 for a 10-year stint with NBC's
baseball
Game of the Week.
Gowdy, who worked for ABC, NBC and CBS in a career that stretched into the
1980s, was also an announcer on one of the most memorable miscues in
sportscasting
history — NBC's so-called "Heidi Game."
In that 1968 American Football League game, the New York Jets led the
Oakland Raiders 32-29 with 1:05 left when NBC cut away from the game for a
family
movie about a Swiss orphan.
The Raiders scored two touchdowns in nine seconds to win, and Gowdy had to
re-create touchdown calls on tape for use on NBC later that night.
The ensuing hubbub, as angry fans blew out NBC's switchboard, helped raise
the AFL's profile before it had merged with the NFL. And it made
broadcasters
more hesitant to cut away from live sports events.
Gowdy, whose son Curt Gowdy Jr. was a longtime ABC Sports producer before
moving to the New York Mets Network, also hosted ABC's long-running American
Sportsman
series.
One 1990 show in that series involved taking then-president George H.W. Bush
fishing for bonefish and tarpon in Florida — and not catching anything. But
Gowdy said afterward, "The president said it's like Woody Allen's old
saying, '90% is just being there.' "
George Bodenheimer, president of ESPN and ABC Sports, said in a statement
that Gowdy "was a pioneer in our business and set the highest of standards
for
everyone in sports broadcasting. His many contributions to ABC, as host of
American Sportsman and other ABC Sports programs, are indelible."
But Gowdy, when he was enshrined in baseball's Hall of Fame in 1984 as a
Ford C. Frick Award winner, suggested he didn't see himself as an industry
giant:
"I never took myself too seriously. An announcer is only as good as
yesterday's performance."
Gowdy also broadcast 13 World Series and 16 All-Star games and was the man
who dubbed the Rose Bowl "The Granddaddy of Them All" after the Cheyenne
Frontier
Days rodeo in his native Wyoming.
Former Red Sox player John Pesky, speaking to The Associated Press from Red
Sox training camp in Fort Myers, remembered Gowdy as "a peach of a guy."
Pesky
said Gowdy was always in the clubhouse before games and always eager to
talk.
"He was really easy to speak to," he said.
The award-winning broadcaster began his career in Cheyenne, Wyo., in 1944
standing on a milk crate, giving a football play-by-play in subzero
temperatures.
By 1949 he was calling games for the New York Yankees and two years later he
began calling games for the Red Sox.
The Curt Gowdy State Park was established in Wyoming in 1971.
Gowdy is survived by his wife, Jerre; daughter Cheryl Ann; sons Trevor and
Curt Jr.; and five grandchildren. A funeral is scheduled for Saturday at
Trinity
Church in Boston, with a private burial to follow.