In Memoriam: Al Trautwig

Al Trautwig, who died in February at 68 from complications due to cancer, was born in New York, and died in New York, and went to college at Adelphi on Long Island, and in his long career as a sportscaster, he spent much of it working for the MSG network covering the Knicks, Rangers, and Yankees. His deep voice was the kind you could imagine cutting through the harsh wilds of New York talk radio, one that left little room for equivocation, for better or worse. As a Midwesterner, however, I only knew Trautwig for his national sports coverage. He started with ABC both on Wide World of Sports and its Olympics telecasts before transitioning to NBC went the Games took up permanent residence on that network. That meant he was at ABC in the final years under industry visionary Roone Arledge. It was Arledge who recast the Olympics in the image of “Bugler’s Dream,” and it was Arledge who invented Monday Night Football. In other words, Arledge did as much as anyone to transform televised sports into spectacle and entertainment, a belief manifestly instilled in his protégé. 

Al Trautwig preparing to eat sugarcane on live TV at the 1987 Sugar Bowl.

During my beloved Nebraska Cornhuskers’ brutal seven-year bowl-less streak between 2017 and 2023, I would instead watch one of their older bowl games on YouTube each December as a semi-satisfactory replacement. One of those games was the 1987 Sugar Bowl in New Orleans against LSU. Trautwig was sideline reporter for that one though rather than reporting in-game news as the role typically requires, he did things like literally eat sugar, check in on the Superdome’s air conditioning system, and interview, in a manner of speaking, LSU’s live Bengal tiger mascot. It’s all corny, even stupid, but I confess, it also evoked a kind of ballyhoo that once went together with bowl games, meaningless exhibitions, after all, that also tended to have their own parades and king and queen courts. Trautwig understood the Sugar Bowl as show business as much as a gridiron showdown. A year later at the 1988 Calgary Winter Olympics, ABC aired a feature in which Trautwig sampled pastries in the Canadian host city, contemporarily criticized by both Sports Illustrate and the Los Angeles Times. Yet, if choosing pastries over live events might technically be wrong, I remember how much that sequence appealed to me as a kid, opening my eyes to how the Olympics were intended, underline, as a celebration of the host city itself as much as the feats of strength. 

Back then, the Olympics were in limited primetime telecasts and ABC and NBC still packaged many events in heavily edited segments, treating them as stories as much as real-time athletic events. In narrating these, as he did with cross-country skiing, or the cycling road race, Trautwig brought a sense of storytelling melodrama. That approach did not work when he was tasked with traditional play-by-play duties, and even in the settings where it was more suitable, it could rub people the wrong way. For ESPN the Magazine in 2000, Tim Keown lamented that Trautwig turned the inaugural women’s triathlon at the Sydney Summer Olympics “into the Peloponnesian War.” Keown wasn’t entirely wrong, but I remember that women’s triathlon. And though I never became an Olympics agnostic, during the strange period of my life between 1996 and 2000, I sort of lost sight of them, and I will never ever forget how that women’s triathlon and the way Trautwig presented it made the Games instantly click right back into place for me. What drew me to sports, and what continues drawing me still, is competition, yes, and feats of strength, sure, but also, a sense of theater. Trautwig saw sports as theater too. Not for nothing did he appear in the Jamaican bobsled team cult classic “Cool Runnings” (1993) as himself: “Go, Jams!” RIP.