=Keith M. Jackson Hall,
Washington State University's broadcast center on the WSU campus in Pullman honors Jackson, a 1954 WSU
grad, dedicated journalists and sports broadcasting icon. The hall is part of
the WSU Edward R. Murrow College of Communication.
=At WSU the Keith and Turi
Jackson Excellence Fund is used at the discretion of the dean of the Murrow
College of Communication. This fund was established by Jackson and his wife,
Turi Johnsen Jackson, WSU Class of 1952.
WSU GRAD Keith Jackson, folksy
voice of college football, dies at 89
Story below by Mike Kupper,
LA Times, 1/13/2018
Keith Jackson, the folksy
voice of college football who for decades weaved backwoods wit through Saturday
afternoon ABC broadcasts, has died. He was 89.
Jackson died Friday night,
according to media reports.
In a 52-year broadcasting
career, Jackson covered a wide-ranging array of sports for radio and TV,
including a rowing competition in the former Soviet Union, but he was best
known as ABC’s voice of NCAA football — and for the homespun phrases he used in
reporting it.
To Jackson, linemen were not
guards and tackles, they were “the big uglies.” Running backs didn’t drop the
ball, there was a “fuumm-bull!” Of an undersized player, he might say, “He’s a
little-bitty thing, a bantam rooster. But he’s young. If he keeps eatin’ his
cornbread, he’ll be man-sized some day.”
And, of course, there was
“Whoa, Nellie!,” his signature phrase.
Or was it?
Strangers in restaurants,
airports, stadium parking lots and downtown streets would sidle up to Jackson
and bellow, “Whoa, Nellie!” Jackson, however, always maintained that he might
have — might have, mind you — used the phrase a time or two early in his career
but that mostly it was the work of impersonators, primarily Roy Firestone, who
were responsible for the spread of the phrase.
“This ‘Whoa, Nellie!’ thing
is overrated,” he said frequently. “There were all kinds of stories going
around. People said I had a mule in Georgia named Nellie. Well, we had a mule
in Georgia, but her name was Pearl.”
Despite his protests,
however, Jackson enthusiastically proclaimed, “Whoa, Nellie!” in a beer
commercial late in his career.
So entrenched in college
football was he, though, that ABC wouldn’t let him retire the first time he
tried. He announced before the 1998 season that it would be his last, that, at
70, he was tired of getting on airplanes. But he was back in the booth in the
fall of ’99, the network having lured him with a promise of keeping him close
to his Sherman Oaks home by restricting his assignments to the Pacific time
zone. He finally called it a career after describing the Texas-USC national
championship game at the Rose Bowl in early 2006.
If Jackson was highly
regarded by viewers and listeners, and he was, he was at least equally
respected by many coaches.
“He’s my hero,” former Iowa
coach Hayden Fry once told the Associated Press. He stands for all the good
things associated with college football.” Added Penn State’s Joe Paterno,
“Keith Jackson and college football. You can’t say one without the other.”
Jackson was born Oct. 18,
1928, in Carrollton, Ga., about 50 miles west of Atlanta, not far from the
Georgia-Alabama border. He practiced broadcasting as a youngster growing up on
a farm there — “My grandma once told my mama, ‘The kid’s walking crazy around
the cornfield, talking to himself.’ I was calling ballgames.” — but it wasn’t
until he was in college at Washington State that he saw it as a possible
career. And, at that, he sort of fell into it.
By then, it was the early
1950s. Jackson, after graduating from Georgia’s Roopville High School, where he
played on the championship basketball team, had served a four-year overseas
stint in the Marine Corps and was attending Washington State in Pullman, Wash.,
on the GI bill, studying criminology and political science. The school had its
own radio station and as Jackson listened to a student broadcast of a football
game, he thought, “I can do better than that.”
He said as much to the
professor in charge of broadcasting, was handed a tape recorder and told to go
cover something. He chose a basketball game at Pullman High as his first
assignment. “They turned the lights out at halftime,” he recalled for the
Seattle Post-Intelligencer in 1999. “I didn’t have the foggiest idea what to
do, so I just told stories.”
Whatever he did impressed
the professor, and the world lost a budding criminologist, gaining a future
sports broadcasting legend. By 1952, Jackson was calling Cougars games on the
school station and, after graduating in 1954, went to work at KOMO, a new ABC
affiliate TV station in Seattle, combining sports and news broadcasting.
His proudest achievement
there was accompanying the University of Washington rowing crew to Moscow,
where he did the first live sports broadcast from the then-Soviet Union,
despite serious hassles over equipment, censorship and accessibility to the
rowing site. Afterward, local press people told him he’d been lucky, that
contemporaries who’d tried to buck the Soviet system had disappeared.
Jackson joined the ABC radio
network in 1965, freelancing TV assignments, then settled in permanently at ABC
when Roone Arledge needed someone to call a parachute-jumping segment for “Wide
World of Sports” in 1968.
ABC quickly put him on
college football and the fit, as Jackson might have said, was pret’ near
perfect. After announcing his retirement in 1998, he was honored wherever he
went to work games. At Michigan, for instance, former coach Bo Schembechler
presented Jackson with an autographed helmet and a Michigan jersey at halftime
while the marching band spelled out, “THANKS KEITH.”
Jackson, of course, had his
opinions on developments in the sport that he loved — he favored a playoff
system over the postseason bowl system, for instance — but on the air, he kept
them to himself, concentrating on the action. His broadcasting philosophy was a
simple one: “Amplify, clarify and punctuate, and let the viewer draw his or her
own conclusion.”
“If I’ve helped people enjoy
the telecast, that’s fine,” he insisted. “That’s my purpose.”
He was roundly criticized —
unfairly, he said — for ignoring an ugly incident in the 1978 Gator Bowl game,
during which Ohio State coach Woody Hayes punched Clemson player Charlie
Baumann after Baumann had intercepted a pass near the Ohio State sideline.
Recalling the scene for the
Atlanta Journal Constitution in 1999, Jackson said, “ ... the fact of the
matter is, I didn’t see [the punch because the sideline was crowded with
players and officials]. ... If people go back and listen, I said, ‘Let’s look
at the tape and see what happened.’ But we didn’t see the tape because the
network was nickel-and-diming the operation at that time with a bunch of green
kids and the tape was in New York, which did not feed to us in the booth. I saw
[the punch] for the first time at noon the next day on NBC.”
Jackson rose above that
incident, later winning an Emmy and being inducted into two sportscasting halls
of fame. Besides college football, he worked college and pro basketball games,
major league baseball, auto racing, summer and winter Olympics and, in 1970,
was the first play-by-play announcer for the NFL’s “Monday Night Football.”
It was college football,
though, that set him apart. As Paterno said, “You always know it’s a big game
when Keith is there.”
While at Washington State,
Jackson married another student, Turi Ann Johnsen and she survives him, as do
their children, Melanie Ann, Lindsey and Christopher, and grandchildren.
#
