Keith Jackson, the definitive voice of college football, died Friday at 89.
Jackson worked NBA games for ABC from 1970-73, including the 1972 and 1973 NBA Finals alongside Bill Russell. He was part of ABC’s Major League Baseball coverage from 1976-82 and again in 1986, working all or part of the 1977, 1979 and 1981 World Series. He called college basketball games with Dick Vitale (“I think you’ll see a more subdued Vitale” he said in a bit of wishful thinking in 1988), worked an assortment of events for ABC’s Wide World of Sports (log rolling and other odd events one might have seen on Cheap Seats), and was the lead voice of the USFL for that doomed league’s three-year existence.
Yet he is by far most identified with college football. He first called college games while at Washington State in 1952 and began doing so nationally in his first full year with ABC in 1966. He replaced Chris Schenkel as ABC’s lead play-by-play voice in 1974 (he had previously supplanted Schenkel on the NBA), a position he would keep for the next 32 years.
Even as he worked other sports, college football was his top priority. In a move that would be unheard of now, he would take weekends off during the baseball playoffs — including during the World Series — to work college games. He became known for his unique style, cultivated from his Southern upbringing. Fellow broadcasters, including ABC colleague Al Michaels, would on occasion “drop a Keith Jacksonism into a broadcast.”
It doesn’t have to be “hoss” or “hoss and a half.” An announcer can use expressions such as “Merciful goodness, six points just went a-wastin’,” or “They’re rockin’ and a-sockin’ and a-whackin’ and a-crackin’,” or even the alltime Jackson favorite, “Fum-buuuullll!!!”
Jackson’s style was not always beloved (Tony Kornheiser referred to him as “tortuously folksy” in a column about his 1988 Olympics work), but it became part of the fabric of college football. So too did his calls of some of the sport’s greatest plays, from Kordell Stewart‘s Hail Mary to Vince Young‘s run.
Over the years, Jackson occasionally found himself with one foot out of the ABC booth. He walked away from ABC after his contract expired in January 1986, a move motivated by the network’s acquisition by Capital Cities. The acquisition had left him and many others wondering about their futures. (A New York Times headline summed up the environment succinctly: “At ABC, the Reaper’s Season Arrives.” Or as Kornheiser put it: “Capital Cities took one look at Roone Arledge‘s payroll and ordered a flame thrower. … So much on-air talent has gone flying out the window, you’d think Capital Cities was auditioning human cannonballs.”) In that environment, Jackson’s lack of a new deal — and no doubt some lingering distrust from his MNF experience — led him to leave on his own terms.
He was lured back after just three months, and spent another 12 years with ABC before retiring at the end of the 1998-99 season. Despite a season-long farewell tour, ABC was able to lure Jackson back again with the promise of a reduced workload that would keep him close to his California home.
Jackson worked a diet of Pac-10 games for the next seven seasons, calling the national championship when it was on the West Coast in 2003 and 2006. His final broadcast was the 2006 Rose Bowl, still the most-watched college football game on record (dates back to 1991).
In all of his years with ABC Sports, Jackson called just one event for another network — the 2005 Holiday Bowl for corporate sibling ESPN. He was, as The New York Times‘ Richard Sandomir called him in a 2006 article, “[o]ne of the last of the pure ABC voices.”
[Sources include ESPN.com 1.13, NYT 1.13, NYT 8.11.2006, SI 12.9.1974, 2.9.1987, Washington Post 2.17.1980, 3.26.1986, 2.25.1988]
