If imitation really is the sincerest form of flattery, then
Keith Jackson is perhaps the most flattered broadcaster ever to sit in a booth.
A versatile play-by-play man who has covered everything from baseball to boxing,
his distinctive Southern twang is most associated with college football. He
took the ABC announce booth every football Saturday for more than 30 years,
during which his trademark “Whoa, Nellie!” became the stuff of legend.
“There
isn’t a football announcer in the world that at some point or another doesn’t
try to imitate Keith Jackson,” says former ABC Sports VP Dennis Lewin. “That’s
the greatest compliment you can have, when everybody’s taking a little piece of
you and imitating it.”
“Keith
became the gold standard for the announcing of college-football games,” says
legendary ABC/NBC producer/director Don Ohlmeyer. “Some of his phrases have
become the stock and trade of the business. He’s the standard by which others
are measured.”
Born on a
west Georgia farm in 1928, Jackson grew up listening to sports on the radio and
riding a horse to school. He spent four years in the U.S. Marine Corps before
enrolling at Washington State College, where he suggested to a member of the
broadcast-school faculty that he might do a better job calling the school’s
football games than the current talent. That faculty member handed Jackson a
tape recorder and asked him to prove it.
Prove it he
did, beginning with his very first broadcast, a 1952 WSC-Stanford football game
on the 5,000-W campus radio station.
After
graduating in 1954 with a degree in speech communications, Jackson spent 10
years at KOMO radio in Seattle before joining ABC in 1964. He
did his first college-football play-by-play for ABC in 1966 and soon thereafter
became known as the nation’s college-football voice.
“When I was
a boy, we didn’t have all this pro stuff,” he says. “All professional sports of
any consequence were located in the big cities in the North, so those of us who
enjoyed the game of football followed college football.”
Jackson
enjoyed college football on the air for more than 30 years, drawing viewers in
with his folksy style of announcing. His entertaining and original lingo
immediately won fans over, no matter what school they supported.
“Not only
is he a classically talented football play-by-play announcer, he’s got that
quality that you can’t teach people: he’s very likable on the air,” Ohlmeyer
says. “He’s got one of the great sets of pipes in the business.”
Jackson
always captured the atmosphere and pageantry of the game, punctuating his
enthusiastic play-by-play with endearing terms like “the big uglies,” referring
to linemen, and the unparalleled “Whoa, Nellie!” With Keith Jackson in the
booth, a football game immediately became an event.
“It was
always fun to be in Keith’s presence in a college-football town the night or
two before the game,” says former ABC Sports producer/director Doug Wilson,
“especially when you were up in the Northwest, where he went to college. He
walked on water up there.”
Jackson
never strayed from his Southern roots, however, keeping stardom at arm’s
length. Whenever road life brought the ABC Sports team to Los Angeles, he
always invited the entire crew to his home for a cookout.
“Keith is
as down-home, great a human being as you’ll ever come across,” Lewin says.
“Everybody who ever worked with Keith would run through a wall for him, because
he would do it for you.”
Despite his
Mr. College Football moniker, Jackson’s repertoire was not limited to the
gridiron. He also called NBA and college basketball; Major League Baseball,
including eight World Series; boxing; auto racing; and the USFL. He was the
first play-by-play announcer on Monday
Night Football, and he was the voice of the 1972 Olympics during the Mark
Spitz show. All together, he called 10 Summer and Winter Olympic Games and was
a regular on ABC’s Wide World of Sports,
for which he traveled to 31 different countries.
“I haven’t
missed anything except ice hockey,” Jackson says. “And they didn’t have ice
hockey in the South when I grew up.”
Jackson now
resides in Sherman Oaks, CA, with his wife of 55 years, Turi
Ann Johnsen. He has not been to a football game since his final broadcast, the
2006 Rose Bowl.
“I was in
the business 54 years,” he says. “I only had two real jobs, one wife, and no
debts, which proves I don’t know a damn thing about show business.”
Perhaps
not, but, in six decades broadcasting sports, Jackson has proved he knows
plenty about being a husband, father, friend, coworker, and as likable an
announcer as has ever taken the microphone.
