Coaches in the Booth
October 15, 2019
Speaking of coaches and voices, I'm noticing another trend where coaches who have faced some controversy end up as TV studio commentators to try to rehabilitate their images. You can see that now on Fox with Coach R Ban Meyer. He is following in the footsteps of former Texas coach John Mackovic Brown, who spent a few years on TV before returning to the sideline.
One of the most famous examples of this was Oklahoma legend Bud Wilkinson, who left OU and ran a disastrous US Senate campaign before heading over to ABC to do broadcasts for over a decade until the stench of his failure had subsided. He then returned to coach the NFL's Chicago Cardinals after enough time had passed.
Bud wasn't the first example of this coaching to broadcasting trend though. In the early days of television NBC hired former Illini coach Bob Zuppke to anchor its studio coverage with broadcasting legend Bill Stern.
Bill was well-known for his inspiring sports stories, many of which were completely made up. One of his most famous fables was his story where he claimed that Abe Lincoln, fading fast due to an assassin's bullet, told Abner Doubleday "don't let baseball die". If only that was a true story and if only Doubleday had strangled baseball in the crib, my life (and the lives of countless other sports fans) would have been so much better . . .
Bob Zuppke figured he had to keep up with story-telling, so he started making up his own tall tales. However, Coach Zuppke had both cognitive and gastrointestinal issues by this time and most of his stories involved recalling players who were having body function problems. One day he told a made-up tale about his most famous player, Red Grange, scoring a touchdown at Purdue then dropping his trousers and making an "extra point" in the end zone. At that point NBC cut the camera just as Bob dropped his trousers to re-enact the event on the soundstage. Coach Zuppke was hustled off to a nursing home and that debacle is why no coaches were seen on college football broadcast studio sets for another 20 years or so.
And now you know the rest of the story.