When I was a youngster growing up in Tulsa, There was no cable & the only college football on tv was one game every Saturday. In those days, the link to any rabid fan's favorite team was the radio network broadcasting the games, many of which were huge & covered the nation. Another aspect of listening to these broadcasts was the fact that FM Radio was pretty much non-exsistent. Every radio network of any size usually had an anchor station that was a 50,000 watt behemoth that could be heard for great distances, particularly @ night. It's a little known fact that for one year, back in the 30's, Walter Cronkite, having recently graduated from "The Forty Acres", was "The Voice of the Sooner Football Network". Curt Gowdy also broadcast O.U. games for a period of time. I bring this up because some of my most vivid memories of listening to college football on the old Philco were of a great announcer who served as the voice of L.S.U. football & who I could listen to @ night over WWL. When you have never experienced first hand the panorama of a major college program & it's home field setting, the right announcer can literally put you in a seat. I can recall listening to numerous L.S.U. games with T A&M & Alabama over WWL, made totally real & life-like by this great play-by-play voice. I'm sure all of you know who I'm refering to. I don't remember his name but he was one of the very best. Nebraska had a similar "voice" in the 60's & 70's who was distinctive & made the action on the field come to life.
I would guess you are referring to John Ferguson. People usually either hated him or loved him. I just remember reading in the paper the next moring about the game and many plays did not happen the way he called it, different guys scored or the play was much longer or shorter than the way it was called, etc. My dad use to swear he was drunk by the second half sometimes.
owenfieldreams, that is how I listened to 95% of LSU FB games and I really liked JF. I don't like the guy we now have. My most memorable game on WWL was the 1972 (17-16) Bert Jones to Brad Davis Tiger win.
I'm 31 and I remember sitting in our house in Birmingham, AL listening to this old ass radio we had.....all of us huddled in front of it listening to the WWL broadcasts of LSU-Rice and the Tigers against Oregon.....North Carolina.....etc. I don't know why I remember LSU v. Rice games on the radio but I do. I thought JF was the luckiest guy in the world to get to watch LSU games every week.......what year did Jim H. become the full-time football play-by-play guy? These memories were from the late 70s early 80s. We moved back to Baton Rouge in 86 and I think JH was already doing the broadcasts fulltime then. C
One of my best friends, George Parry, was a split end on a Rice team in the early 60's that beat L.S.U. in Baton Rouge. George has a picture of himself catching the winning TD pass in that game. He always said it was the toughest place to play he'd ever experienced. Not too sure how many times Rice beat L.S.U. but it couldn't have been many; although, in those days, Rice was pretty good.
I always liked John, he had a that great, booming radio voice, but he always had some kind of weird math going on up there in the booth. For example, here's a typical John Ferguson call: "First and ten, Tigers on their own twenty...Woodley hands it off to Alexander who bulls ahead for seven...and it's now second and six, LSU at their own twenty-five."
