There are many lost arts but this is one: sports broadcasters reading ads. Do they even read ads anymore? They must, if not like they once did when broadcast TV was paramount. With so many college football games on ESPN, I suppose, the only relevant ads, really, are for, like, SportsCenter and SportsCenter doesn’t leave as much room for flourish, frankly, as “Murder, She Wrote.” Not that I can hear Chris Fowler, or even Joe Tessitore, emphasizing that comma with similar Summerall-ian flair; reading ads is just a job requirement.
It was not, however, just Summerall who read ads. I’ve been re-watching old Nebraska football games via YouTube in lieu of my beloved Cornhuskers playing new games so far this season. One game I watched was their 1987 wild-assed affair with Arizona State. Midway through, Keith Jackson, the signature voice of college football, was tasked with reading an ad. This ad:
Like Summerall, Jackson, when confronted with these obligatory ad reads, could not help but embellish. But where Summerall was succinct and monotone, so much so that you were not sure if he was even in on his own proper punctuation joke or if he was just reading it the way it was written, Jackson was folksy, alive to the absurdity.
The above he read began this way: “Tonight a blonde bombshell finds true love on ‘Once a Hero.’” [Beat.] “That’s what it says here.”
At that moment you can practically see the incredulous look on Jackson’s face, as if the spotter to his right and the statistician to his left were snickering and he’s communicating, hey, this ad isn’t my idea. He continues:
“Then Daryl Hannah, Tom Hanks, and John Candy are involved in the biggest fish story in history.”
If initially he poked fun at the proceedings, here he gives that “biggest fish story in history” all he’s got, treating Ron Howard’s 1984 romantic comedy with as much reverence as he might, say, Eddie Robinson, (at that time) the winningest college football coach in history. I kept wondering what Jackson might have sounded like reading other movie ads. “They shouldn’t have put him in the water,” you can hear Jackson saying of the ABC Saturday Night Movie Special “Striking Distance,” “if they didn’t want him to make waves.”
Summerall, on the other hand, would have been aces with “Signs.” “Then, after ‘60 Minutes’, M. Night Shyamalan’s ‘Signs.’” [Dramatic pause.] “It’s happening.”
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