One
of the early influential American radio sports broadcasters,
Bill Stern
was elected to the National Sportscasters
and Sportswriters Hall of Fame in
1974 and the American Sportscasters
Hall of Fame in 1984.
In addition to broadcasting a spectrum
of events that included boxing
championships, the Olympics, and major
college football games, Stern hosted
the popular NBC network radio sports
series, Sports Newsreel, for many years. From 1940
to 1952, 13 consecutive years,
he was the top-rated national sports
commentator in the Radio Daily Magazine poll of U.S. radio editors.
Among Stern’s vast and impressive
credits that began to accrue in the mid-
1930s are the broadcast of the first professional
baseball game (New York versus
St. Louis) and the first televised
sports event (a Princeton versus Columbia
baseball game).
Stern first became a sports announcer
at NBC in 1935, where his entertaining
and sometimes controversial
Sports Newsreel was popular fare. He
left NBC in 1953 to join the ABC network
and later became sports director
of the Mutual Broadcasting System.
Stern was familiar to moviegoers as the
voice that narrated MGM’s News of the
Day newsreels for 15 years.
As a college football player at Penn
Military College and musician, young
Stern organized a jazz orchestra and
toured college campuses and movie
houses. At the age of 25, he was named
the first stage director of New York City’s newly built
Radio City Music
Hall.
Two years later, NBC radio hired
Stern after a brilliant audition and fired
him 48 hours later, following an askew
attempt at self-promotion. He took an
announcing position at a Louisiana radio
station, but soon after, en route to
covering a regional football game, he
barely survived an auto accident that
cost him one of his legs. NBC decided to
give Stern a second chance, and for the
next 17 years he built an empire of mesmerized
fans with stylized and occasionally “tall” sports
reporting.
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