Pat Summerall has passed away at the age of 82 at his home in Irving, Texas, the Dallas Morning News reported.
The former NFL player worked for CBS as its play-by-play announcer at the U.S. Open from 1968 to 1993. He and analyst Tony Trabert were frequent and admired voices in living rooms across America.
In his book, “On and off the Air”, Summerall said he picked up tennis as a junior at a two-court public park in the rural town of Lake City, Florida. He claimed to have won a high-school level tournament because he was “speedy and had a good serve.” He recounts a time that he hitchhiked 320 miles to a state tournament in Ft. Lauderdale and reached the final.
“Pat Summerall set the standard for play-by-play announcers regardless of sport,” Ed Goren, the former president of Fox Sports who worked with Summerall at CBS and Fox told the Dallas Morning News. “If he was an athlete, you’d call him a team player. Pat always deferred to others in the booth. He worried about the broadcast never about his own role. He had a Hall of Fame career.”
In an interview with the Chicago Tribune in 1991, Summerall, who also broadcast football and other sports, compared tennis players to other athletes.
“Football players are much more accessible and more willing to talk,” said Summerall. “Tennis players, because it's such an individual sport, are in their own little world. They have their own entourage. Particularly the successful ones. That's always been a problem in tennis.”