It has been busy here the last couple of weeks, so I didn’t have a chance to play tribute to Pat Summerall, one of the greats of sports broadcasting, who passed away at 82 last week due to heart failure. A former placekicker for the New York (football) Giants, he was most famous for teaming with John Madden on NFL broadcasts in the 1980s and 90s. Summerall was the Count Basie to Madden’s Lester Young; he didn’t say much, but he knew just when to chime in with the right notes of inspiration for the soloist. (For a thorough overview of Summerall's career, see Bruce Jenkins’s eulogy/history at SI.com.)
Tennis fans of a certain age also remember Summerall as a stalwart of CBS’s U.S. Open coverage for many years. For anyone who followed the game in the 1970s and 80s, the clip above, where you can hear Summerall with his regular partner in the booth, Tony Trabert, might make you believe you’re traveling back in time. Voices, like music, can do that. At least they can do that for me. Images from the past remind me of how something looked, but sounds bring back the feeling that I had when I was watching them. Hearing Summerall talk about Bjorn Borg’s “steely blue eyes,” and watching McEnroe and Connors strut and fret around Louis Armstrong Stadium, I find myself shivering with that old U.S.-Open-in-early-September sensation. It’s a feeling, more than anything, of tension. Not only did the matches seem momentous to me in those days, when I was 11 and 12 and 13, but the tournament will alway be tied up in my mind with the first days of the new school year. When the Open came around, and you heard Summerall’s bourbon-smoothed baritone beaming in from the concrete jungle of New York City, you knew summer was over. Serious business, on and off the tennis court, was about to begin again.
I’m not sure if he says these words in this clip, but the catchphrase that I remember best from Summerall was inspired by Connors and his annual antics in the Big Apple. Any time Jimbo had the house rocking at the Open, Summerall amped things up for the viewers at home by drawing out his full name: “James...Scott...Connors” he would boom, as Jimbo wriggled and gyrated and shouted after smacking a backhand pass down the line. By identifying him so precisely, the implication was that nobody else could do what the inimitable Jimbo had just done—he was one of a kind, just the way his mama had raised him.
(Another late great broadcaster, Harry Kalas of the Philadelphia Phillies, used the same trick with that team’s star of the 1980s, Mike Schmidt. After each of his home runs, he became, in Kalas’s Voice of God intonation, “Michael...Jack...Schmidt.” Usually, when someone—i.e., your mom—calls you by all three of your names, you’ve done something bad; it’s obviously the opposite when a sportscaster does it.)
Summerall’s presence alone added to the importance of the Open. With him in the booth, tennis took its place, however briefly, as a major American sport. Mike Tirico does something of the same thing for ESPN’s Wimbledon’s broadcasts now, but as much as I like Tirico...he isn’t Pat Summerall, a man who could carve a moment in stone with the mellow sound of his words. Most important, Summerall didn't get in the way of the action; that's the first, and perhaps most often forgotten, duty of any commentator.
A sports broadcast is an art form. A tennis match on TV isn’t just two guys alone on a court, the way we like to think it is. It’s a theatrical production, with sets and lights and dozens of cameras and a couple of people creating a soundtrack in a commentary booth. Summerall, who was, despite his name, the Voice of Fall in both tennis and football, gave the Open a distinctive sound. It was restrained enough for this mostly restrained sport, but capacious enough for the version that was played in New York each year. Many of us remember those days as special ones in tennis, and Summerall played his part in making them feel and sound that way.
I can still hear him saying “James Scott Connors,” with a little extra snap to each of the words, 30 years later. I can still the see the crowd, still see the jittery Jimbo and his hated rival McEnroe stamping around in mid-meltdown. I can still feel the particular late-summer mix of excitement and nervousness that I felt then. A good voice can do that to you. RIP.
