Tuesday, July 18, 2000
One Chance Meeting, One Hall of Famer
Brennaman was ABA announcer
By Scott MacGregor
The Cincinnati Enquirer
![[Marty]](http://reds.enquirer.com/img/photos/2000/07/marty_72x101.jpg)
Marty Brennaman |
Marty Brennaman could have been Marv Albert. Well, maybe Marv Albert without the bizarre behavior and bad toupee. If not for a chance meeting between baseball executives, Brennaman might have become one of the great broadcast voices in the NBA.
Brennaman was 31 years old in the winter of 1973-74, happy to be broadcasting professional basketball for the Virginia Squires of the now-defunct American Basketball Association. He did Triple-A baseball for the Tidewater Tides to keep busy in the summer.
Even though basketball was his primary job, he enjoyed baseball a bit more.
Tidewater general manager Dave Rosenfield ran into Dick Wagner, the Cincinnati Reds' assistant GM, as they were leaving baseball's winter meetings in 1973. The Reds were looking for a radio broadcaster to replace Al Michaels, who had left for the San Francisco Giants. Rosenfield recommended Brennaman.
Brennaman sent an audition tape — three innings of a Tides- Rochester Red Wings game, the only game he had on tape — as a courtesy to Rosenfield.
It was the last audition tape he would ever need.
Twenty-six years later — all of them with the Reds — Brennaman will be inducted into the broadcasting wing of Baseball's Hall of Fame when he receives the Ford C. Frick award Sunday.
“I hired Marty and Al Michaels. I'm 2-for-2,” Wagner joked.
If not for the chance meeting between Rosenfield and Wagner, where would Brennaman be now?
“I don't know,” Brennaman said. “I really believe I was good enough as a professional basketball announcer to have continued. When the ABA merged with the NBA, I think I could have gotten a job. I had made enough of a reputation as
a basketball play-by-play guy.”
Brennaman had never hung his reputation or interest on one sport, though. He was a fan of all sports, and at first wanted to do as much of them as possible.
“That was a little naive, and I realized later it's impossible,” he said. “I was just so enamored with the business, I never consciously said I wanted to specialize in one sport.”
But the baseball seed had been planted years earlier, as a boy growing up in Portsmouth, Va., in the 1950s.
Baseball was king then, and radio its royal trumpet. Brennaman heard the call when he was 12, listening to games all day and all night, the old cliche of the kid falling asleep to the call of a game played in some far-off place such as Brooklyn or Chicago or St. Louis. Brennaman's favorite announcer was Nat Albright, who re-created Brooklyn Dodgers games from an Arlington, Va., studio. Brennaman never knew the difference. He would lie in bed with the lights out, dreaming of Brooklyn's Ebbets Field.
“Growing up in that era was wonderful,” Brennaman said. “There was no (baseball on) television to speak of, so you had no frame of reference. It was just letting your imagination run wild, thinking how green the grass was, what some of these guys looked like.”
Brennaman grew up and went to a small liberal arts college in Virginia, Randolph Macon, but his desire to be a broadcaster led him to transfer to the University of North Carolina. In January 1965, he graduated with a radio/TV degree and took a job as a TV news anchor in High Point, N.C.
After six months, he got into radio in Salisbury, N.C., where he sold advertising time and broadcasted high school football and American Legion baseball. He left there for Norfolk, where he did the Squires, Tides, William and Mary football and Virginia Tech football.
“I've never been a guy that got into this business for the money,” Brennaman said. “I've never been a goal-setter, but when I graduat ed from North Carolina, my goal was to do play-by-play.”
His first time doing it in Salisbury was a nightmare, stuck in the middle of a crowded high school football press box, with all the writers and coaches and hot-dog sellers listening to his inauspicious debut.
When he first applied for the Reds' job, Brennaman didn't care much if he got it. There were 220 other applicants.
Back in Cincinnati, Wagner would sift through the tapes early each morning, bored with most of the applicants, even some who were in the big leagues. “Radio was very important to us, because we had a big network with a lot of cities,” Wagner said. “It was far more important to Cincinnati than to a lot of other clubs, because we didn't have as much TV.”
When the Wagner's list got down to 10, Brennaman got interested.
“At that point, I decided I really wanted the job,” Brennaman said. “I thought, "Maybe I've got a legitimate shot at this. “Short of working for a network, which has never been my aspiration, broadcasting baseball is the highest calling in my profession.”When the Reds narrowed their choices to three, they called Brennaman and asked for more audition material. In January 1974, they arranged an interview when he was going to be in Indianapolis doing a Squires-Indiana Pacers game.Brennaman arrived in Cincinnati on a Thursday, and Wagner and Reds director of broadcasting Jim Winters took him to dinner at the Maisonette. On Friday, Brennaman toured Riverfront Stadium and met with other club officials, including general manager Bob Howsam.
Brennaman went back to his hotel late in the afternoon to pack for a 6:30 flight that evening to Indianapolis. He figured the Reds would call in a few days.
Instead, they called immediately and offered him the job.
“They said they liked my enthusiasm, they liked my voice, and liked the fact that while I was working by myself, I was able to keep a consistent bit of chatter without an incredible amount of dead air,” Brennaman said. “After I got the job, I was told one of the prerequisites was that the person had to have a voice that wore well with the people who were listening every night.”
Brennaman got back to Virginia on Sunday morning. The Reds called again that evening, and he accepted the job.
On Feb.1, 1974, he reported for his first day of work as a Cincinnati Red. His first game was March9, a spring training exhibition in Bradenton, Fla., pairing him with longtime partner and friend Joe Nuxhall for the first time.
In the first inning of his first regular-season game, April 4, 1974, against the Braves at Riverfront, Brennaman called Hank Aaron's 714th career home run. A few weeks later, after a Reds win, he spontaneously introduced his signature call, “And this one belongs to the Reds.”
On July 23, 2000, he goes into the Hall of Fame.
“He was, and is, a first-class announcer,” Wagner said.
This one belongs to the Reds.
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NBA could have been home for Marty
