If I ever hear the voice of God, I believe it will sound like Keith Jackson.
I can only hope that angelic voice won’t be saying, “Hold the phonnnnne!,” a staple from the colorful, venerable sports broadcaster who left this Earth on Friday at the age of 89.
To any college football fan who came of age in the 1970s, the 80s or even the 90s, Jackson was college football, our Saturday afternoon folksy and homespun guide to the best the sport had to offer for more than 50 years.
Jackson meant perhaps even more to those of us with southern roots, a fellow Georgian whose deep voice and distinctive cadence made the accent and drawl more nationally well accepted.
Younger fans today, who fell in love with sports after the founding of ESPN, have no idea what it was like to wait for Saturday afternoon and the one college football game we got to see each week.
There was no College Game Day. No Big Ten Network. No mid-week games featuring smaller schools so desperate for TV attention they are willing to play on Tuesday nights (see today’s Mid-American Conference).
There was Saturday afternoon. And there was Keith Jackson. It didn’t matter who did the games with him, a lengthy list of analysts that included Bud Wilkinson, Ara Parseghian, Frank Broyles, Lynn Swann, Bob Griese and Dan Fouts among others.
As long as we had Jackson, we had college football. And it had us.
Jackson was the voice of our autumn. He was as comfortable as a warm September sweater. As familiar as an October evening bonfire. And as delicious as a November Thanksgiving meal.
Jackson, though he also did pro football, the Olympic Games, pro basketball and Major League Baseball, will always be the voice of college football. If you are too young to remember that, more’s the pity.
He named The Big House. He made us appreciate The Big Uglies. He made “Whoa, Nellie!” — a quote he later attributed to his dirt farmer grandfather back in Roopville, Ga. — a national catch-phrase before there were such things.
Jackson, a Marine before going to college, learned his craft by listening to the great sports radio storytellers, learning to paint pictures with his amazing words before those pictures were available on TV screens around the world. It’s a lost word-perfect art.
It didn’t matter which teams were playing, where the games were being played, or where we were, for that matter, as long as Jackson was the voice welcoming us into the packed stadium, from Columbus to Tuscaloosa or State College to Pasadena.
When I learned of his death, I was surprised to learn it had been more than a decade since Jackson called his last game, the 2006 Rose Bowl that served as the national title game between USC and Texas. It was fitting his last play-by-play came in the bowl game he coined, “The granddaddy of them all.”
Perhaps Jackson knew what was coming. That game was the last college football game for ABC Sports as a separate corporate division. It was integrated with ESPN the following summer. Frankly, sports in general, and college football in particular, hasn’t been the same since.
At age 77, after a career that included 16 Sugar Bowls and 15 Rose Bowls, Jackson officially announced his retirement on April 27, 2006, noting he “didn’t want to die in a stadium parking lot.”
Even before then, Jackson had slowed, choosing only to broadcast games near his home on the West Coast. He saw the end of an era coming.
“It’s a year-by-year thing with me, that’s all I can tell you. … The PAC-10 contract exists through 2011, but I’m pretty sure by 2011, I will have become the shop steward of the International Porch Sitters Union and I won’t worry about it,” Jackson said.
The stories coming from that heavenly porch today must be amazing.
