Signed Off

Legendary sports broadcaster Keith Jackson, who retired about a dozen years ago, was labeled by The Sporting News "like Edward R. Murrow reporting on World War II, the voice of ultimate authority in college football." He combined inteligent analysis, a deep vocabulary and the right dash of down-home phrasing to sell his brains as just another fellow watching the game and telling you what was going on. Jackson died Friday evening at 89.

Stories about his career note that he called a lot of games besides college football, including the events at several Olympics and a long stint at ABC's Wide Word of Sports. But the gridiron was the place where he will be remembered best, a voice from past days that could give you the impression you were still watching students who happened to play football for their school or college. In the later days of his career he mostly called games on the west coast where he lived, although he was brought in for special occasions like the 100th meeting of Michigan and Ohio State in 2003 as well as the centenary of the OU-Texas game in 2005. One of my sports-watching pleasures was hearing the voice of Keith Jackson call a game with my college's team, the year the Northwestern University Wildcats won the Big 10's berth in the 1996 Rose Bowl following their improbable 1995 season.

Jackson's idiomatic speech and surprisingly broad source material was one of the many reasons to enjoy listening to him do a game. He once said that he was never afraid to turn a phrase, whether it meant quoting "Shakespeare or Goethe." Kirk Herbstreit wouldn't know Goethe from Gerta, or why he would want to quote him in a game featuring college students. Jackson was one of the only people I heard to regularly pronounce the second "o" in "sophomore." Young men of my acquaintance in college, engaged in some thoroughly sexist male gazing upon our fairer fellow students, once broke up when one of our number adopted Jackson's booming baritone to say, "Look at that walk, and only a soph-o-more! Whoa Nellie!" The young lady in question was too far away to hear him, but she did hear us break up and demonstrated her opinion of our maturity with a properly dismissive eye-roll.

There's nothing that says a modern sportscaster couldn't have the education and flash the erudition of Keith Jackson from the broadcast booth, and you'd think with so many channels carrying games these days someone would. If you wonder why they don't, I guess you'd have to ask the people who hire them.