Bob Robertson 2014 Interview With
Keith Jackson
It is must listen radio.
Robertson's broadcast partner, Bud
Nameck, captured the moment in this photo and in a tweet:
How cool! Bob Robertson with Keith
Jackson in the booth. #LegendaryRadio #GoCougs pic.twitter.com/gPFQ8gTeNr
— Bud Nameck (@budname) September
14, 2014
Listen to the interview below, on
iTunes
or here
…………
Larry Stone: Bob Robertson’s
interview of Keith Jackson was filled with emotion, mutual respect
Wed., Jan. 17, 2018, 3:49 p.m.
By Larry Stone Seattle Times
SEATTLE – It was an encounter that
would never be forgotten by those who heard it, one broadcasting titan
interviewing another, immersed in mutual respect and awash in tenderness.
The year was 2014, the occasion was
the dedication of Keith M. Jackson Hall at Washington State University’s Edward
R. Murrow College of Communication.
Bob Robertson, the immortal (and
eternal) Bob-Rob, voice of WSU for decades, was interviewing Jackson, who honed
and nurtured his legendary announcing career as an undergraduate in Pullman.
They were a mere four months apart in age – 86 at that time – and to Robertson,
it felt in some ways like a valedictory.
“It was an interview from the
heart,” Robertson said.
Of course, the poignancy was
enhanced last week when Jackson, a 1954 Washington State graduate, died at 89,
an age Robertson will reach in March. But even back then, at halftime of the
Cougars’ game with Portland State, sitting in a broadcast booth in the press
box, the emotion sizzled over the airwaves.
It ended with a tearful Robertson
pointing out the players were coming back on the field, and the band was
beginning to play. And a few moments later, he was practically sobbing as he
signed off.
“I don’t know about you,” Robertson
said to Jackson, “but every time I hear the band at a football game, I get all
choked up.”
“Me, too,” Jackson replied. “I cry
like a baby when they play the anthem.”
Looking back now, Robertson realizes
there was more going on than just that. Bud Nameck, the Cougars’ play-by-play
announcer at the time, noticed Robertson had begun to get misty when Jackson
mentioned his wife, Turi Ann, whom he said he met in Pullman, “under the willow
trees of the old golf course … we’ve had 63 wonderful years together. We’re
good for another four or five years, I’m pretty sure. We felt this (event) was
the punctuation mark to a life that was well-lived and thoroughly enjoyed.”
Robertson’s wife of 59 1/2 years,
Joanne, had died a couple of years earlier, “and Bob to this day misses her
immensely,” Nameck said. “Back then, of course, it was even fresher. And I kind
of got the feeling Bob thought that might be the last time he talked to Keith,
and that was emotional as well.”
“I think it was the whole
situation,” Robertson reflected. “We were getting on in years. I had lost my
wife prior to that. I think it was a mutual respect for what we had done. It’s
hard to say. It was a very touching interview. Not just, ‘Where did you work in
1965?’ ”
What fascinates me is the
commonality of their careers, and the vast divergence. They overlapped once, in
the late 1950s, when Jackson was the radio voice of the Seattle Rainiers at the
same time Robertson was doing their television games. They sat in side-by-side
booths at Sicks’ Stadium.
Robertson would never leave the
Northwest, while Jackson, after his 10-year stint at KOMO television, would of
course move on to become the legendary voice of college football for ABC, along
with visible roles in the Olympics, NBA, MLB and even as the original
play-by-play man of “Monday Night Football.”
“Our careers in a sense were
parallel, although he got to the very top of the business,” Robertson said.
“But we were the same type of person. If it was there, we’d broadcast it –
hydro races and all the crazy things we tended to do in those days. We had a
similarity there. And he was a fine human being.
“Not a great number of times, but a
few, Keith would be doing the television of a game I was broadcasting on the
radio for the Cougars. Our wives would commandeer an empty booth and visit
during the game, and then we’d go our separate ways. There was a sameness, but
a kind of regal difference to what he did.”
Robertson had chances over the years
for a higher-profile job with a major league basketball or baseball team, but
the timing was never right. And the tug of the Cougs was always too great. If
there’s any wistfulness over Jackson’s national prominence, Robertson has
hidden it well. And there should be none – BobRob might be the most beloved
Cougar of them all.
What Robertson and Jackson also
share is a reverence for the Palouse and the university that wound up shaping
both of them. In that interview, Jackson marvels at how much the campus has
changed, but while soaking in the halftime pageantry and the view on the
horizon, he concludes, “Who wouldn’t want to go to a school like that?”
Robertson, meanwhile, keeps churning
along. He still has a role on the Cougar broadcasts, as he has since 1964,
absent a three-year stretch from 1969-71 as, yes, the Husky announcer. A
University Place resident, Robertson continues to call Sunday home games of the
Tacoma Rainiers with Mike Curto, as well as about 35 games of the short-season
Class A Spokane Indians with Mike Boyle. And once again this year, Robertson
plans to work a few high school games from the basketball state tournament for
Spokane radio.
Quit? It barely crosses his mind,
even as his 90th birthday pulls into view.
“I suppose I could,” Robertson
mused. “I don’t know if I’d be very happy if I quit. Every year at the end of
the football season, it runs through my mind. The trips are getting harder. It
used to be a thrill in the old days getting on an airplane. I’d put on a suit
and tie. Now I hate going to an airport. I never want to see another airport if
I can help it.
“I don’t want to quit. On the other
hand, I don’t want to go on until everyone feels sorry for me struggling to
perform. I’d hate to have that happen. If Joanne were here, she’d be able to
tell me if it’s time or not. She’s not here, so I have to sense it for myself,
or maybe my friends will tell me.”
I’m here to say: It’s not time.
Jackson tried to quit once, but eventually was lured back for several more
years, finally hanging up the mike for good in 2006.
Let’s flash back to that interview
in 2014, when Jackson and Robertson reflected on how good the “good old days”
had been.
“We set a foundation and we set a
level for young people, hopefully, to follow it and have values, and remember
the playing field belongs to the players and the coaches, not some
round-bottomed announcer trying to make a name for himself,” Jackson said.
Jackson added that the luncheon for
the new broadcasting building in his name was fun, “but it’s more fun to see
you, Bob.”
“I’m here,” Robertson replied. “I’m
still here.”
