2016 Ford C. Frick Award Winner Graham McNamee

Graham McNamee, one of broadcasting’s first and brightest stars as a beloved voice to millions of listeners in the first half of the 20th century, was named the 2016 Ford C. Frick Award recipient.

It would have been almost impossible to miss McNamee’s voice if you owned a radio from the mid-1920s to the early 1940s. Not only was he was quite possibly the first celebrity sportscaster, but he was also a pioneering broadcaster, renowned as the most recognized personality during radio’s formative years.

McNamee was a concert baritone when in 1923 he wandered into the WEAF radio studio in New York City looking for a job. Hired as an announcer at a station that would soon become home to the National Broadcasting Company, McNamee quickly became radio’s best all-around announcer. Soon, no football game, World Series, horse race, tennis match, inauguration, or other major event was complete without him.

His first sports assignment was the Harry Greb-Johnny Wilson middleweight championship at the Polo Grounds on Aug. 31, 1923. A few weeks later he broadcast the 1923 World Series between the Yankees and Giants. Over the next two decades he would call 12 World Series as well as 10 other sports. As a result of McNamee’s coverage of the 1925 World Series, WEAF received nearly 50,000 letters of appreciation.

Jim Murray, 1987 winner of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America’s J.G. Taylor Spink Award, penned in 1978 that McNamee “was a great announcer because he never let the action on the field get in the way of his imagination. He called the game as it should be. If he forgot the score, he described the sunset. Ring Lardner said sitting next to McNamee was like having a doubleheader – the game you were watching, and the game you were hearing.”

Among the three sports events that McNamee broadcast that he considered most memorable was the fabled long count of the Jack Dempsey-Gene Tunney heavyweight fight in 1927, the comeback of Philadelphia Athletics pitcher Howard Ehmke in the 1929 World Series and the Babe Ruth “called shot” home run in the 1932 World Series.

Heywood Broun, the winner of the 1970 Spink Award, once wrote: “A thing may be a marvelous invention and still as dull as ditchwater. It will be that unless it allows the play of personality. Graham McNamee has been able to take a new medium of expression and through it transmit himself – to give out vividly a sense of movement and of feeling. Of such is the kingdom of art.”

In his eulogy for McNamee, Dr. Franklin Dunham said, “Thousands of little children now grown up will remember his ability, as we of broadcasting do, to make the simple thing vivid and real.”

“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen of the radio audience,” was a familiar opening refrain from McNamee.

Although his devoted audience would not need the identification, the young baritone who would become a trailblazing sports broadcaster in radio’s infancy would sign off his broadcasts with, “This is Graham McNamee speaking, Goodnight, all.”