Bob
Wolff in 2013, before being honored in Washington at a baseball game between
the Nationals and the Cincinnati Reds. Mr. Wolff was a longtime broadcaster for
the Washington Senators, and also called Don Larsen’s perfect game in the 1956
World Series. CreditAlex Brandon/Associated Press
Bob Wolff, who called Don
Larsen’s perfect game for the Yankees in the 1956 World Series, the Giants’
overtime loss in the epic 1958 National Football League championship game and
the Knicks’ two title runs in a record-setting eight decades as a sports
broadcaster, died on Saturday in South Nyack, N.Y. He was 96.
His death was confirmed
by his son Rick.
“If you added all the
time up, I’ve spent about seven days of my life standing for the national
anthem,” Mr. Wolff once said.
Mr. Wolff was behind the
microphone from the radio age to the rise of cable television. He was cited by
Guinness World Records in 2012 as having the longest career of any sports
broadcaster.
He started out in 1939
while a student and former baseball player at Duke University, broadcasting
games on a local CBS radio station. He became the first sportscaster for
Washington’s WTTG-TV on the old DuMont networkin 1946. A year later,
he began doing television play-by-play for the often lowly Washington Senators
when most of the tiny black-and-white sets were in taverns and hotels.
More recently, Mr. Wolff
was a sports commentator for the cable TV station News 12 Long Island, which he
joined when it was founded in 1986. He delivered his final essay in February.
Mr. Wolff teamed with Joe
Garagiola on NBC-TV’s baseball Game of the Week in the early 1960s. He was a
broadcaster for Madison Square Garden for more than 50 years on staff and as a
freelancer, calling Knicks and Rangers games, college basketball and the
Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show. On radio, he called the last half of Larsen’s perfect game for
the Yankees against the Brooklyn Dodgers, and the sudden-death overtime N.F.L.
championship game between the Giants and the Baltimore Colts.
“The Colts are the world
champions — Ameche scores!” Mr. Wolff said, his voice rising, as Colts fullback
Alan Ameche won the game on a 1-yard touchdown plunge.
In April 2013, Mr. Wolff donated some 1,400 video and audio recordings,
representing about 1,000 hours of his broadcast work, to the Library of
Congress. They included interviews with Jim Thorpe, Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb and Joe
Louis.
“He was an archivist at
heart,” said Gene DeAnna, head of the recorded sound section of the Library of
Congress. “He was systematic, organized and had this sense of the future and
the sense of the importance of his legacy to keep it and to take care of it,
and we were very grateful that he did.”
Mr. Wolff was inducted
into the broadcasting wing of the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1995. (At his
induction ceremony, he played “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” on his ukulele.) He received the Curt Gowdy media
award from the Basketball Hall of Fame in 2008.
Mr. Wolff prided himself
on being a well-prepared journalist.
“In the old, old days it
was the voice that mattered,” he told The Philadelphia Inquirer in 2005. “But I
felt the one thing that gave me longevity was coming up with angles, creative
points, story lines. I approached every sport with the soul of a sportswriter.”
Curt Smith, a historian
of baseball broadcasting, said Mr. Wolff had a voice that was “erudite but not
unapproachable.”
As Mr. Smith told The
Washington Post in 1995: “He has a sense of humor — with the old Senators he
had to — and he was always honest. There was no phony baloney with Bob Wolff.”
But Mr. Wolff did enjoy
telling how he once broadcast a professional basketball game when he was not at
the arena. It happened on March 5, 1966, when bad weather prevented him from
flying to Cincinnati for a Knicks-Royals game that was to be telecast back to
New York on WOR-TV. Mr. Wolff broadcast the game off a TV monitor while sitting
in the station’s studio on the 83rd floor of the Empire State Building
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