The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Voice of college football, legendary broadcaster dies
Jackson, who was 89, covered a wide variety of sports.
Keith Jackson, the folksy voice of college football who for decades weaved back- woods wit through Satur- day afternoon ABC broadcasts, has died. He was 89.
Jackson died Friday night, according to ESPN and other media outlets.
In a 52-year broadcasting career, Jackson covered a wide variety of sports for radio and TV, including a rowing competition in the former Soviet Union, but he was best known as ABC’s voice of NCAA football — and for the homespun phrases he used in reporting it.
To Jackson, linemen were not guards and tackles, they were “the big uglies.” Running backs didn’t drop the
ball, there was a “fuummb ul l !” Of an undersized player, he might say, “He’s a little-bitty thing, a bantam rooster. But he’s young. If he keeps eatin’ his cornbread, he’ll be man-sized someday.”
And, of course, there was his signature phrase, “Whoa, Nellie!”.
Or was it? Strangers in restaurants, airports, stadium parking lots and downtown streets would sidle up to Jackson
and bellow, “Whoa, Nellie!” Jackson, however, always maintained he might have — might have, mind you — used the phrase a time or two early in his career but that mostly it was the work of impersonators, primar- ily Roy Firestone, who were responsible for the spread of the phrase. Despite his protests, however, Jackson enthusiastically proclaimed, “Whoa, Nellie!” in a beer commercial late in his career.
He was so entrenched in college football that ABC wouldn’t let him retire
the first time he tried. He announced before the 1998 season that it would be his last, because, at 70, he was tired of getting on airplanes. But he was back in the booth in the fall of 1999, the network having lured him with a promise of keeping him close to his Los Angeles Oaks home by restricting his assignments to the Pacific time zone. He finally called it a career after describing the Texas-Southern California national cham-
pionship game at the Rose Bowl in early 2006.
If Ja c kson was highly regarded by viewers and listeners, and he was, he was at least equally respected by many coaches.
“He’s my hero,” former Iowa coach Hayden Fry once said. “He stands for all the good things associated with college football.”
Penn State’s Joe Paterno said: “Keith Jackson and col- lege football. You can’t say
one without the other.” Jackson was born Oct. 18, 1928, near Carrollton, about 50 miles west of Atlanta, not far from the Georgia-Ala- bama border. He practiced broadcasting as a youngster growing up on a farm there — “My grandma once told my mama, ‘The kid’s walk- ing crazy around the corn- field, talking to himself.’ I was calling ballgames.”
It wasn’t until he was in college at Washington State that he saw it as a possible career. And, at that, he sort of fell into it.
By then, it was the early 1950s. Jackson, after graduating from Georgia’s Roopville High School, where he played on the championship bas- ketball team, had served a four-year overseas stint in the Marine Corps and was attending Washington State Univer- sity on the GI Bill, studying criminology and political science. The school had a radio station, and as Jackson listened to a student broadcast of a football game, he thought, “I can do better than that.” He said as much to the professor in charge of the broadcasting program, was handed a tape recorder and told to go cover something. He chose a basketball game at Pullman High as his first assignment. “They turned the lights out at halftime,” he told the Seattle Post-In- telligencer in 1999. “I didn’t have the foggiest idea what to do, so I just told stories.” Whatever he did impressed the professor, and the world lost a budding criminologist but gained a future sports broadcasting legend. By 1952, Jackson was calling Cougars games on the school station and, after graduating in 1954, went to work at KOMO-TV, a new ABC affiliate in Seattle, combining sports and news broadcasting. His proudest achievement there was accompanying the University of Washing- ton rowing crew to Moscow, where he did the first live sports broadcast from the Soviet Union, despite serious hassles over equipment, censorship and accessibility. Afterward, local jour- nalists told him he’d been lucky — contemporaries who bucked the Soviet system disappeared. Jackson joined the ABC radio network in 1965, free- lancing TV assignments before settling in permanently at ABC when Roone Arledge needed someone to call a parachute-jumping segment for “Wide World of Sports” in 1968. ABC quickly put him on college football, and the fit, as Jackson might have said, was pert-near perfect. His broadcasting philosophy was a simple one: “Amplify, clar- ify and punctuate, and let the viewer draw his or her own conclusion.” “If I’ve helped people enjoy the telecast, that’s fine,” he said. “That’s my purpose.” He was roundly criticized— unfairly, he said — for ignor- ing an ugly incident late in the 1978 Gator Bowl, when Ohio State coach Woody Hayes punched Clemson player Charlie Baumann after Baumann had intercepted a pass near the OSU sideline. Recalling the scene for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 1999, Jackson said because the sideline was crowded with players and officials, “the fact of the matter is, I didn’t see (the punch). If people go back and listen, I said, ‘Let’s look at the tape and see what happened.’ But we didn’t see the tape because the network was nickel-and-diming the operation at that time . ... I saw (the punch) for the first time at noon the next day on NBC.” Jackson rose above that incident, later winning an Emmy and being inducted into two sportscasting halls of fame. Besides college football, he worked college and pro basketball games, Major League Baseball, auto racing, Summer and Winter Olympics and, in 1970, he was the first play-by-play announcer for NFL’s “Monday Night Football” on ABC.