Of Mikes and Men

If you are white and have ever played basketball, you know how boring playing basketball against other white people can be. So we compensate, pretend. That explains why, on nearly every white playground, some kid is always giving a running commentary on the court action. In my neighborhood, Tim McCormack was the play-by-play man.

McCormack would pretend he was Bill Russell. I always was “the hapless defender.”

McCormack’s commentary would go something like this: “Stephenson misses. Russell goes high to rake another rebound. The crowd is going wild. (Here he would take the ball to the back line and whistle insanely.) “Listen to them. Alright, Russell has the ball engulfed in that hot right shooting hand. He’s going to try a long one . . . but no. He drives past the hapless defender and puts two in the bank.”

Once a group of black players needed another man for their three-on-three game. “I’ll take the gray dude,” one of them said, pointing to me. By this time, I considered my color-man commentary I often bounced off Tim to be quite polished. “Gray dude has the ball,” I’d say. “He breaks into a clearing, gets behind a screen and . ..”

“Hey man, why don’t you just shut up,” one of my two teammates interrupted. It was not a mild rebuke. But I took it in stride, perhaps realizing even then what Texas Ranger broadcaster Dick Reisenhoover would tell me years later, “I feel you’ve done a good job if you make 70 per cent of the people happy,” he says.

Consumers of local radio-TV sports news know it is not absolutely critical that play-by-play announcers be former collegiate lettermen in order to develop a deep understanding of sports, its inherent drama and the performers. Too few announcers locally and nationally know what they are talking about. They learn how to describe a game from other announcers, often heroes whom they elevate to celebrity status. Too easily, they fall into self-set traps like, “Staubach really threaded the seam of the zone on that one.” It sounds good. But what does it mean? And doesn’t that “seam” change every play? And are you so certain that side of the defense was playing a strict zone and not some combination?

Sportscasters like to guffaw and say, “Well, I’m really only talking about little boys’ games.” The image of little boys, never grown up, fits none of the local sportscasters I interviewed. Some may have grown up too fast, or by accident; grown up smiling that toothpaste grin while looking down the barrel of a 13-week contract.

Sportcasting is show-biz, pure and simple. On-camera anchormen suffer with pancake makeup, hairspray, color-compatible wardrobes and a constant fear that the next A.C. Niel-son rating can send them packing. “It’s a personality test all the way,” one former newscaster concedes.

But it is not without rewards that go beyond the ego trip. The money is good, very good.

Nobody openly discusses the various provisions of local sportscasters, but a consensus of knowledgeable TV types suggests the going price for a top man is in the $30,000 to $40,000 a year range.



When Vern Lundquist, 34, resigned at Channel 7 in Austin, the station manager there bid him farewell with these encouraging words: “Oh well, there’s not much demand for a four-eyed sportscaster anyway.” Viewers like their sportscasters the way John Wayne likes his women -pretty and shallow.

Now Lundquist is probably the biggest draw in Dallas. WFAA-TV has tried to move his spot around to grab maximum audience and for a while, settled him right in the 10:30 spot head-to-head with Johnny Carson’s monologue. “Hell yes, he’s a draw,” said one Channel 8 authority. “My only criticism of him is that if things don’t go his way, he gets really puffed up. Still, he’s really a good piece of property. That’s for sure.”

About two minutes before he was scheduled to go on camera, Lundquist grabbed his flashy sportcoat and almost matching tie (he dresses like a Corvette salesman) and looked for late-breaking sports news spewing from the wire service teletypes. He was wearing that joyful grin usually found on sly poker players. “Let’s see,” he says, shuffling through the papers in his hand, “I’ve got a minute forty of the Cowboy-Redskins game film and a minute forty…” One of the production crew assures me that this flippancy is not pretended for my benefit. “No,” he says, “Vern comes in here flexible enough to ad-lib for five minutes. He’s a real pro. Almost all of this is off the top of his head.”

Several people have rapped Lund-quist as “a management boy” because he has a close relationship with Dallas Cowboy General Manager Tex Schramm. Some say that this, combined with his Cowboy radio shtick carried on KRLD, limits the former ministerial student.

“I don’t worry about that,” Lund-quist countered “It really bothered me when I first started doing the KRLD thing. But no player has ever told me I’m ’management’s’ lackey. And I’ve had some real screaming matches with Tex on the phone. He’s never taken me to task for an opinion. But when he thinks my facts have misrepresented .. . well, we’ve had some real screaming matches.”

Two years ago, Lundquist took what he calls, “a calculated gamble.” He passed up a job offer with a Los Angeles television station and took a simultaneous offer with KRLD to begin radio broadcasting Cowboy play-by-play. Lundquist says he wanted the exposure, because his ultimate ambition is network broadcasting.

Channel 8 was not ecstatic with Lundquist’s KRLD free-lancing, but “after a long argument,” Vern was allowed to sign with the radio station. This year Lundquist was signed by ABC for two regional football telecasts. The network subsequently increased that to eight games and Lundquist is presently considered ABC’s third or fourth ranking play-by-play man on the national level.

I interviewed Vern Lundquist for more than an hour and only once did he utter the broadcaster’s number one unholy syllable, “uh.” I asked him to rate the competition and Vern replied, “I’m only going to say that I’m glad Tom’s at Channel 4 and, uh, Doug’s at Channel 5.”



“Uh, Doug” is Doug Vair, 25. He is at least an improvement over pretty Boyd Matson, who is now sportscast-ing at a Los Angeles TV station which claims the second largest audience in the nation.

One non-broadcaster said, “Uh, Vair, just looks sneaky, that little the-canary’s-gone smile out of the side of his mouth. If he told me the Rangers won 3-2, I think I’d call the paper and check it myself.”

Channel 5 Sports Director Ron Spain disagrees. “I think Doug comes across pleasing to the eye and knowledgeable about sports,” Spain said. That was about all he had to say. Spain answered at least one-third of my questions with, “I’d rather stay away from that question,” or “I’m not going to comment.”

Spain, 31, is the only sports television broadcaster in town who does not anchor the nightly six and ten o’clock sports editions. His weekend newscasts are by mutual agreement, he says, and the arrangement gives him more time to work on sports features. Others say he is too nervous on camera and once, when Matson was on vacation, Spain reportedly prepared his material three days in advance. “He may be the most conscientious guy around,” said a former Channel 5 employee, “but what’s older than yesterday’s sports news?”



Everyone in Dallas has a favorite story concerning Channel 4’s Tom Hedrick. The one most often told goes something like this: Hedrick was doing the play-by-play for the Rangers, when Minnesota’s Doug Thompson came to the plate. Hedrick said the Twins were real high on this young fella for three reasons. Number one, Hedrick explained, he’s got a good glove. Number two, he can handle a bat. And number three, he’s got leukemia.

No one is lukewarm toward Hedrick. Two of the Cowboy veterans said they “really trust” him. But another Cowboy says Hedrick “is a joke, man. I’m not going to waste my breath.”

“Tom is a good guy and nice fella,” said one play-by-play man. “But he can talk you into a hole. Even worse, he’s got a telegram from everybody saying what a good job he’s done. Name dropping can be irritating.” (In our interview, Hedrick waited until his third sentence before telling me that Gale Sayers had devoted two pages to him in a new book).

Hedrick, 40, says he decided to try sportscasting after several of his friends at Baker University (Baldwin, Kan.) suggested he would be great at it. Undoubting, Hedrick drove a few miles to Lawrence, the nearest market. “I told the station manager I wanted to be a sportscaster and a good one. I told him his station was good and that I wanted to start right there.”

Well, he is aggressive.

“I’m the only guy in town who went out (to Cowboy practice) today and talked with Lee Roy (Jordan).” The Cowboy linebacker had told Dallas News sportswriter Bob St. John the day before that some of the Cowboys were not giving 100 per cent. Hedrick got a follow-up, a common event in the radio-TV business.

Hedrick was formerly the play-byplay man for the Kansas City Chiefs, and later the Cincinnati Reds. He is full of Pete Rose, Hank Stram and Johnny Bench stories and admits he sometimes misses handling play-byplay action. (In fact, when Cincinnati failed to renew his contract, part of the reason Hedrick chose Dallas over other offers was because Channel 4 had included the Ranger baseball telecast in his contract package. He lost that when the station gave up telecasting the Rangers.)

Two things Hedrick does not believe in are heavy criticism of players and booing by the fans. He claims he once told Howard Cossell, “You’re as obnoxious in person as you are on camera, and I didn’t think that was possible.” He doesn’t like Cossell’s style, saying, “I don’t rip the guts out of other men.”

Hedrick contends “you should never boo a man you can’t outdo.” Then he related a story about Roger Staubach claiming he received “a play from heaven.” Hedrick says Dallas “has been terribly hard on its quarterbacks and when they boo Roger, I remembered that story. Believe me, I’ll never boo number 12.”

Certainly, all this seems consistent with the Christian ethic that Hedrick faithfully follows as a member of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. However, some stories I heard left me skeptical. I asked Hedrick if it was true he once left a black cameraman standing in the hall of the Petroleum Club while Tom himself went back to his table and finished lunch.

“I’d rather not get into that,” Tom replied, still smiling through his pancake makeup,” because it’s on a personal basis. We handled it man to man.”

All of this in-house haggling shouldn’t affect Tom’s on-camera popularity with the viewers, and, to be fair, Hedrick does have a following.

Hedrick has been working at disadvantage for months against Channel 8. Lundquist is allowed almost twice as much time on the 6 p.m. news to deal with sports in 8’s one-hour format. But Hedrick claims he enjoys “a unique position in that I am not beholden to anyone” (meaning beholden to Cowboy or Ranger management because of play-by-play or talk show contracts). “For that reason, people like Landry can’t wanbangle me the way they do some guys in town.”



The non-network sports job offering the biggest salaries and highest mortality rate has to be major league baseball broadcasting. One recent criticism of these announcers, in all parts of the country, is that they act as Chamber of Commerce cheerleaders for their teams.

Sports announcers in general, and baseball announcers in particular, were accused of ignoring negative aspects of their home teams’ performance, because of pressure from owners, managers and sponsors. Such complaints got so persistent a Congressional investigation was called to probe the charges. The hearing turned up little or nothing to support the allegations of payoffs and threats and the like.

Channel 4’s Norm Hitzges, 30, knows sports and sports journalism better than any other broadcaster in town. He asks tough questions and finds fresh angles.

Hitzges usually starts the camera rolling and sticks the mike right at Reggie Jackson or whomever and pow! “When Norm asks a question,” says one football writer, “you better have your belt buckled.”

Hitzges, a published poet and active free-lancer for CBS, says his rapport with athletes does not suffer because of his no-holds-barred methods. “No,” he says, “more and more athletes realize we have a job to do. And for me, the other way just doesn’t work.”

One observer contends Hitzges “has been crapped on by Channel 4 for three years. I don’t know why he stays.” On the other hand, Hitzges does not offer listeners the pleasing “golden throat” voice associated with the electronic media. One co-worker claims that Norm’s high-pitched voice is the only thing keeping him from a big network job.

Few people, even in the business, deny that some sports announcers are the gung-ho, Pollyanna types. They explain, it is the nature of these men to relate the positive and play down the embarrassing. “Of course, I want to see my team win,” said one announcer. “But I don’t ignore their play if it’s sloppy.”

If the Rangers’ duo of Dick Reisen-hoover and Bill Merrill seem to ignore sloppy play, it might be because they are too busy reading letters from Betty Jane Listener in Amarillo, who claims she never misses a Ranger day game.

Two years ago the City of Arlington purchased the broadcast rights from then-owner Bob Short. Arlington agreed to pay radio station WBAP a flat fee for airing each Ranger game. And there are some in the business who claim only the fierce loyalty of Arlington Mayor Tommy Vandergriff saved Merrill and, perhaps, Reisen-hoover, from the unemployment ranks. “Vandergriff is a first class guy,” one writer said, “and when all this criticism came at the two announcers, I think he just got his back up and that was it.” (Vandergriff once aspired to become a radio announcer.)

The nicest thing anyone told me about the Ranger broadcast team was, “I think generally they are on a par with guys I see in other markets.”

Reisenhoover, 43, was rated as a “capable” and “solid” professional broadcaster by many. But as one well known sportscaster said, “This stuff gets around in a hurry. I can see Dick (at the mike), but this Merrill, sheesh.”

Reisenhoover’s career had a rather odd genesis. While a basketball coach at a Childress high school, he began lugging a tape recorder to the sideline bench and offering running commentary of the action on the field. He turned the recorder off at time outs and half time and when upbraiding officials. The tape was played at a local radio station the day after games.

Later, Reisenhoover went to Ama-rillo and eventually was named both sports and news director. In 1970, Reisenhoover came to Dallas’ Channel 4 and the next year began doing the 26 Ranger games. Within two years, the Ranger’s lost their top radio broadcasters, Don Drysdale and Bill Mercer. Now Reisenhoover is number one.

When asked about last years’ constant and irritating letter reading, Reisenhoover defended, saying, “Don’t forget, before last year, the Rangers had lost 205 games over the last two years. We wanted the fans to feel more involved. And we used a lot of reference to our fans. We won’t be doing that as much this year.”

No matter what your personal feel-ings are regarding the competence of the Ranger broadcast crew, the facts are that the broadcasts themselves are becoming immensely popular throughout the state. This year, a total of 18 radio stations will be added to the radio network, up 16 from last year. Sponsors will be paying almost 40 per cent more for some commercials; the television ratings showed an almost 50 per cent jump in total audience.

Merrill often has been criticized for his constant use of cliches and for substituting words like “bobbles” for errors and “platter” for home plate. One sportwriter in town insists that Merrill is still around because “he works cheap.” Several people assured me that Merrill, 50, is paid less than $15,000 for the year. But as one writer reminded, “You know, 99,999 out of 100,000 broadcasters would give their right arm to do a team broadcast like that. I don’t blame him for working at a hell of a lot less than the other guy.”

Reisenhoover does make an attempt to talk with lots of players and sometimes adds an appropriate anecdote. Merrill lacks experience, but seemed to improve in the latter part of the season. Hopefully he has spent some time listening to his tapes during the off season.

There is something intimidating about interviewing a radio-television personality by telephone. When you can see some celebrity in the flesh, you can spot his flaws. But these broadcasters make their living with that voice and when they get on the phone and say, “Tom, this is Frank Glieber,” you know that’s Frank Glie-ber. You begin to feel like a reporter interviewing a famous pianist who talks with his hands.

Frank Glieber, sound citizen, model father, well-known and well-to-do broadcaster, came to Dallas’ radio station WRR in 1956, having graduated from Northwestern University. He began as a “stacks of wax, mounds of sounds” disc jockey who also filled in on news and sports. It was some years later before he settled into the Cowboy scheme as the team’s “voice.”

He is a big deal now. He works a lot out of his North Dallas home, complete with custom-built studio and a UPI sports wire in a spare closet. After we talked, Glieber still had to call KRLD to obtain, via telephone, tapes of material he would use on his five morning sports shows the next day. “I’ll get up about 5:30,” Glieber said. There seemed to be a whoopee in the comment.

Glieber’s wife died tragically more than a year ago. She drowned in the Bahamas. Now, the 40-year-old broadcaster refers to himself as “something of a bachelor father.” KRLD built the home studio to allow Glieber to spend more time with his three children when he is in town. During the football season, Glieber travels almost constantly, broadcasting NFL football games in cities all over the country. Rarely does he do the Cowboys’ TV games, since some of the other NFL club owners complained it was “unfair for the Cowboys to have their own announcer,” Glieber said.

With the exception of a two-year stint in Cleveland as the voice of the Browns and television sports director, Glieber has been the dominant and best known Dallas sports broadcaster for the last 15 years. Many local contemporaries consider him to be the best.

Not long ago, Glieber was offered Tom Hedrick’s job at Channel 4. One former employee of the station said, “Channel 4 is always saying that sports isn’t that important. But then they turn right around and offer Glieber twice what Hedrick is making.” The offer included option to prerecord the 10 p.m. sports broadcast for replay while Glieber sat comfortably before the hearth at home. Thus, twice the pay and half the time. Glieber was tempted by the offer and so pleased with its contents that he carried it around for several days, according to one source.

But KRLD was determined to keep their sports director and upped its contract ante and tossed in some good fringe benefits, including the studio and an up-front cash bonus of $10,000. Glieber says the story is “true to an extent,” but he says the money was compensation for his negotiating the Cowboys broadcast contract for the station. The games generate a lot of advertising revenue for the station.

Over the years, Glieber has developed a warm relationship with both Tom Landry and Tex Schramm. He mixes with Landry socially and does the Cowboys’ coach’s pre-game TV show. As for Schramm, Glieber says the former CBS vice president, “is partly responsible for anything I have accomplished. He helped by putting his foot in a lot of doors for me.” KRLD is the local radio outlet for the CBS Network.

No doubt, Tex genuinely likes and respects Glieber. Schramm, a journalism major at the University of Texas, learned his public relations well. I asked Glieber if the Landry-Schramm relationships ever make it difficult for him to take the Cowboys’ management to task. He replied, “Frankly, I can’t remember taking Tex to task or Landry either, for that matter.”

Glieber dismissed the apparent conflict of interest by saying he feels a good broadcaster, like a good referee, does a good job only when he avoids personal notice or controversy (Cos-sell notwithstanding, I suppose). Still, much of the material in Glieber’s sports reports are editorial comment; it is difficult to imagine that in the last 15 years neither Landry nor Schramm deserved to be unloaded on.

The answer might be that Glieber is not as knowledgeable about sports as it might seem. After all, he is only a broadcaster. We expect the News’ Randy Galloway or Merle Hereford to ask Billy Martin why he yanked a pitcher. We would not read the Times Herald’s Blackie Sherroo. if he offered only four-times-a-week fanny kissing. But from a broadcaster with, supposedly, the same access to the same sources, we are told the play-by-play commentator’s job is only to “paint a picture of the action.”



As a journalist, there is one other aspect of Frank Glieber I find irritating. He sees nothing wrong with taking tape recordings from Tom Landry’s weekly press conferences and inserting his own questions over the voices of other journalists. In other words, the Herald’s Frank Luksa might fling a tough question concerning Calvin Hills’ WFL signing, but the KRLD listener hears Glieber ask Coach Landry, “What impact on morale will the signing of Calvin Hill.. .” Glieber dismisses this by saying “it would take two hours” of his 15-minute radio show to attribute the questions to their rightful owner. Besides, he explains, there is “only one lousy mike” hooked up for the conferences.



Of his tennis and golf broadcasts for CBS, Glieber jokingly admits knowing nothing about the sports. He even had to consult a local tennis pro to learn how to keep score.



Glieber makes his mark by being a good, dependable play-by-play man who quickly absorbs a myriad of facts about the players on the team he is to broadcast. Despite his ability to talk excitement into a game, Glieber also knows when to shut up. A good example of this was the time broadcast partner Alex Hawkins noted that Miami’s Jake Scott was playing despite two broken and heavily-casted hands. Said Hawkins: “When Jake goes to the restroom, I guess that’s when he finds out who his real friends are.” Glieber sat, biting his lip, silently praying for the next snap of the ball.



But credit KRLD with being truly sports conscious. The station broadcasts the Cowboys games, SMU sports, WCT action, the Byron Nelson Classic and all sorts of sports talk shows. The number two sports man behind Glieber, Al Wisk, probably would be number one anywhere else, to quote a favorite broadcasters’ cliche. About the only person more complimentary of Wisk’s potential is the 25-year-old broadcaster himself.

Glieber hand-picked Wisk after listening to more than 250 audition tapes supplied by broadcasters all over the country who wanted a job at KRLD. If the hard working Wisk has one fault, it is that he is considered to be conceited by many of his cowork-ers. Perhaps he only seems hard to work with through the eyes of older, less successful station residents. But no matter. The 1972 Michigan graduate already has achieved a popular following as a talk show host and Cowboy radio color man.

Why, as a Cowboy color man, he has a following is difficult to determine. Wisk is not the most enlightening commentator, and he seems to dig a large portion of his comments from the media kit.

Many of Wisk’s color commentary problems undoubtedly come from lack of experience. With some exceptions, he did a fine play-by-play job during the last Cleveland-Dallas game; he is very much the vigorous interviewer and inventive show host.

Last baseball season Kansas City’s ace pitcher Steve Busby tossed his second no-hitter. Wisk saw this information on wire reports and aggressively called the Royals’ clubhouse. “Yea,” Wisk told me gleefully, “I said, ’Give me Busby’ and he came right to the phone and I taped the interview. You know, I could just see him leaving the swarm of other reporters to answer the telephone.”

KRLD is paying Wisk a moderate $15,000 salary for doing mostly what Glieber is too busy for or uninterested in. But Wisk may eventually be a broadcasting superstar. His talk show is the brightest sport spot in town.



A few days ago, Randy Galloway, the knowledgeable baseball writer for the News, complained that stations here assign too much importance to quality voices rather than sports savvy in their announcers. “I think they’d even listen to me and my Grand Prairie twang if I had something to say.”

The problem, of course, is that local radio and television stations are afraid to experiment. They fear that a controversial sportscaster might turn off some viewers.

But somebody in town should try something. They have that 6:30 p.m. time slot open, a spot which is assigned to the stations to encourage locally produced broadcasts. Why not give somebody like Hitzges or Lund-quist that half hour a couple of times a week to lay some heavy stuff on us?

Of course, if they want new blood in the market, if they want somebody really unorthodox, well, there’s always good old Tim McCormack.