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Sports announcers covering diffrent sports?

D

danderson6500

Leading Participant
I remember Frank Gifford not only doing NFL games, but also other sports like skiing on "Wide World Of Sports" at ABC

Another example of this would be Keith Jackson, since he did sports other than CFB.

I remember Dick Stockton doing a NHL game between Washington and Florida on FOX in 1995.
Are there any other examples of announcers doing sports that they didn't cover normally?
 
danderson6500 said:
I remember Frank Gifford not only doing NFL games, but also other sports like skiing on "Wide World Of Sports" at ABC
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Gifford did a lot of different sports besides football: Basketball, Olympics, various things on Wide World of Sports, including Evel Kneivel's jumps.

Another example of this would be Keith Jackson, since he did sports other than CFB.
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He also called NBA games in the 1960s, and was the first play-caller (replaced by Gifford after a year), on MNF in 1970.

I remember Dick Stockton doing a NHL game between Washington and Florida on FOX in 1995.
Are there any other examples of announcers doing sports that they didn't cover normally?
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OK, starting with the obvious:
Jim Nantz -- NFL, college basketball, golf.
Joe Buck -- NFL, MLB
Howard Cosell -- NFL, boxing
Curt Gowdy -- Just about everything
Al Michaels -- Everything
Dick Enberg -- Everything that Michaels didn't cover. :D

The point here is that most good play-callers (not always ex-jock game analysts, but there were some) were versatile. They could call many different sports and do them well. Most, if not all of them that were on network TV were able to do much more than one sport.
 
Stockton regularly calls NFL football and Major League Baseball. He was the TV voice of the Red Sox for several years. Jackson, in addition to football and basketball, also was the lead announcer on ABC's Monday Night Baseball.
 
I remember Jackson doing game 6 of the 86 NLCS on ABC. I was surprised, since i thought they'd would have used Don Drysdale instead.
 
Jim McKay would be another example- he did figure skating, horse racing and golf for ABC as well as being main host of Wide World Of Sports.

Jim Lampley did the same thing, covering a ton of sports for ABC.

Tim Ryan did skiing, college basketball and the NFL for CBS, as well as boxing.

Don Criqui did college basketball for NBC as well as being NBC's golf voice for a while before Vin Scully.

Terry Gannon has done college basketball and figure skating for ABC. He also has done football too.
 
Very few broadcasters have gone an entire career without at least dabbling in secondary sports.

Verne Lundquist did Football, basketball and golf for CBS.
Jack Buck did baseball and football for multiple networks.
Tom Hammond was originally hired to do horse racing at NBC, but he has broadcast a wide variety of professional and Olympic sports through his long tenure there.
 
Here's all I can think of off the top of my head that hasn't already been mentioned yet:

Vin Scully (MLB and NFL)
Gary Thorne (NHL and MLB)
James Brown (NFL, NBA, NHL)
Ian Eagle (NFL and NBA)
Jim Hughson (NHL and MLB)
Eli Gold (NHL, NCAAF, NASCAR)
 
Sean McDonough has done MLB, NHL and NFL, college basketball and football, and PGA golf. Marv Albert has done all four major pro sports leagues, plus boxing, tennis and horse racing.
 
KeithE4 said:
Howard Cosell -- NFL, boxing
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He also covered a few Kentucky Derbies for ABC. As a longtime racing fan, I could tell immediately that he had no real knowledge of the sport either from a sporting or betting aspect. His commentary consisted of overblown hype for only the best-known jockeys and trainers -- plus the horses that were getting media attention leading up to the race -- and hardly a word about any of the other competitors, human or equine.
 
Al Michaels back in 1989 he covered the World Series when the Loma Prieta quake struck and ABC Sports, ABC News had to switch to KGO-TV's feed of the Breaking news event to get a picture what really happened that day.

Although I know that Al Michaels was Better known for Sunday Night Football and Monday Night Football he also did Olympics for NBC Sports and also NBA Finals for ESPN/ABC before Michaels moved to NBC.
 
RadioPatrol said:
Al Michaels back in 1989 he covered the World Series when the Loma Prieta quake struck and ABC Sports, ABC News had to switch to KGO-TV's feed of the Breaking news event to get a picture what really happened that day.

Although I know that Al Michaels was Better known for Sunday Night Football and Monday Night Football he also did Olympics for NBC Sports and also NBA Finals for ESPN/ABC before Michaels moved to NBC.
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If you're a good play-by-play announcer, you should be able to do news. Here in the Bay Area, and I suspect nationally, there's a trend to have the sports anchors also anchor the news some of the time. Both KGO-TV and KNTV here do that.
 
It amazed me how ABC couldn't find a replacement for Cosell on boxing- they tried Jim Lampley, Keith Jackson, Chris Schenkel, and Al Trautwig on boxing before they got Dan Dierdorf to do it.

ABC also used Gary Bender on baseball, and he didn't do too good of a job either.
 
danderson6500 said:
It amazed me how ABC couldn't find a replacement for Cosell on boxing- they tried Jim Lampley, Keith Jackson, Chris Schenkel, and Al Trautwig on boxing before they got Dan Dierdorf to do it.
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Cosell divorced himself from boxing after the Holmes-Cobb butchery in 1982. At that time, ESPN had Randy Gordon, a very knowledgeable boxing man, doing its Top Rank series along with Sal Marchiano. Why couldn't either have moved over to ABC instead of plugging ABC's play-by-play "stars" or a retired NFL player into the network slot? Schenkel was too nice a guy to be doing boxing, and Jackson had no feel for the sport at all. I don't remember Trautwig's boxing work at all. Lampley was very good and did a lot of boxing for HBO later on. Maybe they should have just made him the ABC boxing voice after Cosell quit.
 
LKellerIII said:
If you're a good play-by-play announcer, you should be able to do news. Here in the Bay Area, and I suspect nationally, there's a trend to have the sports anchors also anchor the news some of the time. Both KGO-TV and KNTV here do that.
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Wasn't VanAmburg mentioned as the former KPIX sports anchor in the 1960's before ABC got him to KGO-TV to anchor Channel 7 Newscene because ABC moved Roger Grimsby from KGO-TV to WABC-TV to do the news cast in New York. As far as I know Van Amburg was hired to take over Grimsby's seat as host of Channel 7 Newscene in San Francisco.

Interestingly most of the sports announcers I'm aware of have backgrounds as being athletes or coaches. Example Azubuike of the 2006-2007 of the Golden State Warriors he's now a NBA Pundit for NBC Sports Net Bay Area during Warriors games.

Mark Jackson a former Golden State Warriors coach is also now a NBA Pundit for ESPN.
 
The interesting thing is when ESPN started using their talent on ABC, they got better announcers. For example, Mike Tirico as ABC's golf host, getting some of the ESPN guys to do CFB, and also getting Patrick and Theismann on the "other" wild card game, and Bob Jenkins on NASCAR.
 
danderson6500 said:
The interesting thing is when ESPN started using their talent on ABC, they got better announcers. For example, Mike Tirico as ABC's golf host, getting some of the ESPN guys to do CFB, and also getting Patrick and Theismann on the "other" wild card game, and Bob Jenkins on NASCAR.
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I forgot about Charley Steiner, who was fantastic on ESPN boxing. But he had his eyes on bigger things and wound up as a baseball p-b-p guy for the Yankees, then the /Dodgers.
 
RadioPatrol said:
Wasn't VanAmburg mentioned as the former KPIX sports anchor in the 1960's before ABC got him to KGO-TV to anchor Channel 7 Newscene because ABC moved Roger Grimsby from KGO-TV to WABC-TV to do the news cast in New York. As far as I know Van Amburg was hired to take over Grimsby's seat as host of Channel 7 Newscene in San Francisco.

Interestingly most of the sports announcers I'm aware of have backgrounds as being athletes or coaches. Example Azubuike of the 2006-2007 of the Golden State Warriors he's now a NBA Pundit for NBC Sports Net Bay Area during Warriors games.

Mark Jackson a former Golden State Warriors coach is also now a NBA Pundit for ESPN.
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It was before my time in the Bay Area, but yes - (Fred) Van Amburg was the sports anchor - at KPIX, I think. He was also a DJ on 610/KFRC when it had an MOR format, before becoming a Bill Drake Top 30 station.
 
CTListener said:
Cosell divorced himself from boxing after the Holmes-Cobb butchery in 1982. At that time, ESPN had Randy Gordon, a very knowledgeable boxing man, doing its Top Rank series along with Sal Marchiano. Why couldn't either have moved over to ABC instead of plugging ABC's play-by-play "stars" or a retired NFL player into the network slot? Schenkel was too nice a guy to be doing boxing, and Jackson had no feel for the sport at all. I don't remember Trautwig's boxing work at all. Lampley was very good and did a lot of boxing for HBO later on. Maybe they should have just made him the ABC boxing voice after Cosell quit.
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When he ran ABC Sports, Dennis Swanson had some odd choices for PBP on some sports, but he hit it right on others.
 
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