Keith Jackson, legendary sports broadcaster, dies at 89

“This ‘Whoa, Nellie!’ thing is overrated,” he said frequently. “There were all kinds of stories going around. People said I had a mule in Georgia named Nellie. Well, we had a mule in Georgia, but her name was Pearl.”

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, that, 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-University of Southern California national championship game at the Rose Bowl in early 2006.

If Jackson 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 told the Associated Press. He stands for all the good things associated with college football.”

Penn State’s Joe Paterno said: “Keith Jackson and college football. You can’t say one without the other.”

Jackson was born Oct. 18, 1928, in Carrollton, Ga., about 50 miles west of Atlanta, not far from the Georgia-Alabama border. He practiced broadcasting as a youngster growing up on a farm there — “My grandma once told my mama, ‘The kid’s walking crazy around the cornfield, talking to himself.’ I was calling ballgames.” — but 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 basketball team, had served a four-year overseas stint in the Marine Corps and was attending Washington State 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-Intelligencer 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, gaining 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 Washington rowing crew to Moscow, where he did the first live sports broadcast from the Soviet Union, despite serious hassles over equipment, censorship and accessibility to the event site. Afterward, local journalists told him he’d been lucky, that contemporaries who’d tried to buck the Soviet system had disappeared.

Jackson joined the ABC radio network in 1965, freelancing 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. After announcing his retirement in 1998, he was honored wherever he went to work games. At Michigan, for example, former coach Bo Schembechler presented Jackson with an autographed helmet and a Michigan jersey at halftime while the marching band spelled out, “THANKS KEITH.”

Jackson, of course, had his opinions on developments in the sport that he loved — he favored a playoff system over the postseason bowl system, for example — but on the air, he kept them to himself, concentrating on the action. His broadcasting philosophy was a simple one: “Amplify, clarify 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 ignoring an ugly incident late in the 1978 Gator Bowl game, when Ohio State coach Woody Hayes punched Clemson player Charlie Baumann after Baumann had intercepted a pass near the Ohio State sideline.

Recalling the scene for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 1999, Jackson said that 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 with a bunch of green kids and the tape was in New York, which did not feed to us in the booth. 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, was the first play-by-play announcer for NFL’s “Monday Night Football” on ABC.

It was college football, though, that set him apart. As Paterno said, “You always know it’s a big game when Keith is there.”