Buddy Martin Blog: Is Play-by-Play Announcing A Lost Art? Just The Facts, Please. (Thank You, Mick!)

For over a century my family has been dialed into radio, three generations worth.

"It was such a comfort to hear the familiar voices of John Ferguson on LSU, or Larry Munson on Georgia or even John Ward on Tennessee over the singing of the radials. I miss that..."

My last name should have been Marconi. Maybe I didn’t invent radio, but my family has consumed the airwaves for nearly a century like Sand Hill Cranes swooping into a migratory pattern. I was born with one ear next to my dad’s giant Zenith console where at pre-school age I began listening to the Lone Ranger, Buck Rogers, The Green Hornet and eventually the live WWII news on short-wave from London.

As a pre-teen, I discovered that by shimmying up a tall Australian pine out my window with an antenna wire I could connect with KMOX St. Louis from which I pulled in the voices of Harry Caray and Jack Buck out of the air announcing Cardinals baseball. The images in my mind were – still are – spectacularly delicious. Stan Musial was King Kong, because Harry told me so. I’ll never forgive TV for betraying me in later years by revealing, in full disclosure, that Stan The Man was human.

And then I was introduced to Otis Boggs’ Gator football broadcast. It was beautiful music to a 12-year-old, who would often don his green moth-eaten sweater stuffed with wash cloths for shoulder pads, stiff-arming chairs and tables for the touchdown.

By puberty I was hooked. Otis pronounced the punts of Fred Montsdeoca as “booming sparrels” (even though they were normally end-over-end on purpose). The biggest challenge for Otis was to make Bob Woodruff’s team at least SOUND like it had an offense. It was his voice which started my path down the road of Gator football story-telling and writing.

I love radio. My family is three-generations deep in it. My dad was a sometimes announcer at Ocala’s first radio station, WTMC, and he was a huge fan of ham radio – even built receivers in his bedroom. Dad was hooked on radio to a point where later in seniorhood he would sleep with earphones so he could listen to Larry King’s late night show on the Mutual Radio Network.

I started a sports radio show in my twenties at Ocala’s WMOP and 30 years later formed a concept for a company startup, flipping the format from Country to Sports talk. My son was a producer at age 21. My younger brother Bill has been the co-host of the popular Morning Cruise on JOY FM for 30 years.

Sadly I have almost had to say goodbye to this theatre of the mind. In the digital age, the role of radio has been diminished. I am certainly complicit. Three years ago my son Brenden convinced me to pull the plug on my terrestrial radio show in favor of streaming The Buddy Martin Show live. Looking back, it was a necessary move because its future was so cloudy. But I am still rooting for radio and have a new friend attempting to start a Florida sports radio network. Lawdy, I wish him well. I really do.

Not meaning to romanticize what could be a dying medium, but for those us who once climbed into our treehouse with a crystal set to dial in the far away voices of KDKA Pittsburgh, it was heaven. We connected to our world adventures the way kids today do with their cell phones.

Finding the sweet spot on the AM dial at night and overcoming static on the car radio was the first version of channel surfing. To hear far away football and baseball games, like my friend Frank would say, “if you ain’t hearing static, you ain’t listening to radio.”

Once I became a sportswriter, while driving Saturday nights from a day game in the SEC, it was such a comfort to hear the familiar voices of John Ferguson on LSU, or Larry Munson on Georgia or even John Ward on Tennessee over the singing of the radials. I miss that.

That’s not what concerns me today, however. I fear radio has lost its way in broadcasting/telecasting sports events. I’m fed up with the modern play-by-play announcers’ betrayal of their mission.

I have listened to and watched sports for a year now when I wasn’t Zooming in an interview and I am near a point of hysteria about announcers mistaking their roles as talk show hosts. And yes I understand the philosophy of entertaining the audience during a boring game and not redundantly telling them what they’re seeing. But neither should it be ignored.

When is the last time you yelled at the TV because it never told you the player who committed the foul, or recovered the fumble or gave you proper down and distance?

I’m to a point where I have turned down the sound of all Florida games and listened to the radio broadcasts, even if it was 7 seconds ahead of the TV. I used to do it on occasion. Now every game. When it’s not a Florida game I just have to grin and bear it. There are exceptions, like when Karl Ravetch and Jimmy Dykes deliver on story lines spiced with colorful rhetoric. But they never stray too far from the script.

When I want to see or hear a Gator broadcast, Make Mine Mick please. (UF photo)

For a while I was just so happy to have sports back during the Pandemic that I was willing to overlook this annoyance, but almost every game now my hackles go up again. Even allowing for the fact that the announcers are not onsite and trying to create a narrative while looking at a monitor, I cannot forgive the malfeasance, misfeasance and any other kind of “feasance” of these Announcers Gone Wild.

Give me the damn score, down and distance, who made the foul, who got the rebound, who made the key block, the name of the kicker and why the third-string right tackle is on the field. To quote the old TV show Dragnet, “just the facts ma’am!”

I want to put in my vote of thanks for Mick Hubert, whose voice has connected us to Gator sports for 30 years. I have never been more appreciative of his mechanics, clarity and responsible broadcasting. As for the others, I don’t care where you had dinner last night, whose charity you’re proud to be a part of or if it’s the birthday of your second grade teacher. Save it for your class reunion, or maybe make a call to the Paul Finebaum Show, which, by the way, I enjoy listening to daily.

For seven years I did local radio in my hometown, news mixed with sports. Now I've gone all digital with The Buddy Martin Show weeknights at 9 on Facebook Live.

(EDITOR’S NOTE: Senior columnist Franz Beard is under the weather this week. His columns will resume soon. GatorBait would also like to issue our condolences to Associate Editor Chad Ritch on the loss of his mother Betty.)