Emmy- winning sportscaster who crafted poignant essays
Jack Whitaker, an Emmywinning sports broadcaster for more than three decades whose specialty was elegant, graceful commentaries, first for CBS and later for ABC, died on Sunday at his home in Devon, Pa. He was 95.
His death was announced by CBS Sports.
Mr. Whitaker was a thoughtful white- haired figure who covered just about every niche in the sports world — from the first Super Bowl to Secretariat’s victory in the Belmont Stakes, as well as baseball, golf and the Olympics. In 1961, he became the host of the anthology series “CBS Sports Spectacular,” and he began covering the PGA Championship and the Masters in the early 1960s.
But he was perhaps best known for his essays about sports. He received an Emmy in 1979 as “outstanding sports personality” and a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Sports Emmy Awards in 2012. “I know that I’m regarded as The Talking Head,” he told Sports Illustrated in 1977. “I’d like to be exactly that and say something that people will remember or get excited about. I’d like to bring sports into the thinking process.”
Mr. Whitaker reserved his greatest passion for golf. Covering the 1982 British Open at Troon, Scotland, for ABC’s “World News Tonight,” he wove historical imagery into his account of golf’s origins on the Scottish links.
“Through all the years, the British Open has changed very little,” he said. “The biggest addition has been the tented city, looking like Henry V’s camp at the Battle of Agincourt. Here you can buy among other things lawn mowers, cashmere sweaters and Champagne, which is replacing tea as Britain’s national beverage. But basically the British Open is the same as it was in 1860 when they first played it down the road at Prestwick. Playing in the British Open is like reading American history at Independence Hall or studying opera at La Scala. It’s golf at its most simple, its most pure, its most magnificent.”
Jack Whitaker was born on May 18, 1924, in Philadelphia. He was enthralled by college football as a teenager, attending the Penn games at Franklin Field and listening to play- by- play from around the nation.
Mr. Whitaker began doing color commentary for Philadelphia Eagles games in 1956, then became the team’s play-by-play broadcaster in 1960, when the Eagles won the NFL championship.
Mr. Whitaker became the play- by- play broadcaster for New York Giants football games in 1965, and he was part of the CBS broadcast crew at the first Super Bowl two years later. He teamed with Baseball Hall of Famer Frankie Frisch as the backup duo for baseball’s game of the week, and anchored Kentucky Derby coverage.
He covered Secretariat’s 31length victory in the 1973 Belmont Stakes — he called it the most dominant individual sports performance he had ever seen — and witnessed the filly Ruffian’s fatal breakdown in her 1975 match race at Belmont with Foolish Pleasure. It inspired this passage: “A false step here and the years of planning and breeding and training and loving came to an end. A horse with speed and stamina and heart. A horse, like the Bible says, ‘ whose neck is clothed in thunder.’”