The voice of the Atlanta Braves for nearly forty years passed away on Friday.
Ernie Johnson Sr., part of the broadcast team for Braves games from 1962 to 1999, passed away on Friday at age 87 due to congestive heart failure. He had been in hospice care for five days.
Johnson spent nearly a half-century with the Braves. He played for the team when it was based in Boston and later, Milwaukee, and briefly served as their public relations director before joining the broadcast team in 1962.
In 1966, the team’s first year in Atlanta, he became the play-by-play voice of the Braves. He would continue in that position through 1999.
Johnson Sr. is the father of Turner Sports broadcaster Ernie Johnson Jr., with whom he worked Braves games as a father-son broadcast team in the mid-1990s.
Johnson Jr. had been covering the PGA Championship for Turner Sports, but will miss the final two days of the event.
(Information from Turner Sports, atlanta.braves.mlb.com [1], [2])
