Curt Gowdy was such a prized and versatile sports broadcaster in his prime that the NBC and ABC television networks simultaneously shared his talents. And he was such a professional that he made the arrangement seem routine. Casual, even.
That was the fly fisherman in him, and the Wyoming, too.
For all the great sports moments he narrated to the nation, from World Series drama to Super Bowl fireworks to the slippery slope of the Olympic ski jump, Gowdy never sounded like anything more than a close and trusted friend at the microphone.
PHOTO: AP
"I tried to pretend that I was sitting in the stands with a buddy watching a game, poking him in the ribs when something exciting happened," Gowdy said in 1984 at the time of his induction into the National Baseball Hall of Fame. "I never took myself too seriously. An announcer is only as good as yesterday's performance."
Gowdy, 86, died Monday after a long battle with acute leukemia, surrounded by family in his Palm Beach, Florida, home.
He had lived in Palm Beach since 1988 with his wife of 56 years.
For so revered a sports celebrity, a personal pal of Ted Williams and a TV fishing partner with US presidents Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush, Gowdy was consistently approachable. Tom Twyford, executive director of the West Palm Beach Fishing Club, remembers inviting Gowdy, the winner of 13 Emmy awards for television broadcasting excellence, to consider coming on his local, five-minute fishing show on WPTV-Channel 5. Gowdy did, several times, and with the same enthusiasm he brought to American Sportsman, the ABC outdoors show he created and produced for 20 years until his retirement in 1985.
Curtis Edward Gowdy was born July 31, 1919, in Green River, Wyoming. When he was 6, the family moved to Cheyenne, where his father, Edward Curtis Gowdy, taught him an appreciation for fishing and hunting in America's wildest and most beautiful regions.
Cheyenne was where he called his first sports event -- a six-man high school football game on an unmarked lot. The year was 1943 and Gowdy, recovering from the spinal operation that ended his goal of becoming a fighter pilot, was stunned to find only a pair of soapboxes at the field -- one with a microphone on it and another for him to sit on.
There were no rosters or uniform numbers, so he made up the names of the players, using those of guys he knew in college or the Army Air Corps.
His salary for the day was US$5, but the job led to a US$30 weekly salary at a Cheyenne radio station and later an opportunity to call University of Oklahoma football for a station in Oklahoma City, where he met his future wife, Geraldine "Jerre" Ophelia Dawkins, a graduate student at the university.
While in Oklahoma, someone heard Gowdy calling Texas League baseball and forwarded his name to New York, where he became Mel Allen's broadcast partner on Yankees games in 1949 and later as the radio voice of the Boston Red Sox from 1951-1966.
"When I would be doing the Rose Bowl, the Super Bowl or the World Series," Gowdy later said, "I would think back to that vacant lot and those two soapboxes and realize how lucky I was to get started in broadcasting."
For 10 years, beginning in 1967, Gowdy was NBC's top announcer on the baseball Game of the Week -- a Saturday afternoon national broadcast that for millions was the only way to see a televised game in the days before cable TV overkill and satellite dish saturation.
He also worked American Football League games with Al DeRogatis. At the time, the AFL was a start-up proposition and considered inferior to the NFL.
All that changed in 1969 when Joe Namath guaranteed the New York Jets would beat a powerful Baltimore Colts team coached by Don Shula in Super Bowl III. The Jets came through at Miami's Orange Bowl stadium, and Gowdy got a further career boost because of the ratings. Soon the leagues merged, and Gowdy got in on that, too.
"That game really changed the outlook of pro football and was probably the greatest upset of all time," he said.
Many Miami Dolphins fans remember the epic postseason game Gowdy worked on Christmas Day, 1971. The Dolphins and Chiefs played into the second overtime period at Kansas City before Garo Yepremian won it for Miami at 82 minutes and 40 seconds, the longest game in pro football history. Gowdy recalled it years later in his famed matter-of-fact style.
"There was a full moon and when Yepremian's kick tumbled through the goalposts, it was the quietest I ever heard a packed stadium," Gowdy said. "It was eerie. They just packed up their seat cushions and left."
Another of Gowdy's TV gems was the "Heidi Game" of 1968. The New York Jets led the Oakland Raiders 32-29 with 1:05 remaining when NBC cut away from the game for the national broadcast of a family movie about a Swiss orphan girl. Somehow the Raiders scored two touchdowns in the space of nine seconds to win the game, a bit of information that was lost to the world amidst all that yodeling. Gowdy was hurriedly directed to recreate the touchdown calls on tape for use later that night -- a makeup call of sorts for angry callers to NBC.
No problem for Gowdy, of course. Early in his career he mastered the art of recreating baseball games on radio using bits of information transmitted by teletype to the studio.
"Hey, I had a time," Gowdy told the Palm Beach Post in 2000. "So wonderful. I can't find words. I married the most beautiful girl in Oklahoma."
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