Lindsey Nelson at Shea StadiumBy Ben Byrd
Lindsey Nelson at Shea Stadium
When Lindsey Nelson passed away in an Atlanta hospital on the night of May 10, the University of Tennessee lost one of its most distinguished, and one of its most devoted, alumni.
Few people love their old school the way that Lindsey (Knoxville '41) loved UT. After his illustrious career as a network sportscaster had ended, he moved back to Knoxville to be near the place that had meant so much to him in those happy years before World War II. And from the windows of his condominium on Cherokee Bluff across the river, he could see the stately walls rising glorious to the sight.
It was, he knew, a conscious return to the scene of his youth. The UT of his day was a relatively small place, compared to the colossus that one finds there now. And it was an ideal place for someone like Lindsey who was so wrapped up in sports. In his last three years as an undergraduate, Tennessee football experienced a prosperity that it had never known before and has never known since. The 1938, '39, and '40 teams rolled up three consecutive unbeaten and untied regular season records, and the young man from Columbia, Tennessee, was very much a part of those teams.
An English major, he tutored many of the Vol athletes. He also served as an assistant sports publicity man, a spotter for network announcers such as Bill Stern, and as a jack-of-all-trades for legendary coach Robert R. Neyland. Years later, when someone asked him what he did to earn his athletic dorm room at old Humes Hall, Lindsey responded: "Anything that Neyland told me to do."
It was from Neyland that he learned one of the basic lessons that he carried into his career as a play-by-play sportscaster. He had just launched his radio career at Knoxville station WKGN, doing high school football broadcasts. General Neyland called him in one day to praise his work and added a few words of advice.
"If you go to Howard Johnson's," said Neyland, "you'll have a choice of 27 different flavors of ice cream. I always get plain vanilla. And that's the way I like my football broadcasts. Plain vanilla."
Lindsey never forgot. Throughout a 35-year span of covering major league baseball, college and NFL football, college and NBA basketball, and PGA golf, he always gave the listeners and viewers a straight vanilla account of the action. Although he was a brilliant and witty raconteur, he saved that for after-dinner speeches.
"The game is the important thing," he was fond of saying. "The announcer should never get in the way of the game."
That kind of professionalism won him five national Sportscaster of the Year awards, election to 12 Halls of Fame, including the big one at Cooperstown, and the undying admiration of his peers in the sports broadcasting industry. He was in truth the first of the great TV sportscasters.
Lindsey had a way of being where history was happening. As an army officer in the European theater he took part in the three major invasions of that part of World War II -- North Africa, Sicily, and Normandy. He fought in the Battle of the Bulge and was there at the Remagen Bridge when the American and Russian forces met. He saw Eisenhower, Bradley, and Patton at close range and shared quarters with legendary war correspondent Ernie Pyle.
The war left its mark on him. He felt that the war and the great depression that preceded it had shaped the lives of the men of his generation and that we could never escape their impact.
The public Lindsey Nelson walked in fame and celebrity, but the private Lindsey Nelson had to deal with many ordeals, the knowledge that his first daughter was retarded, the early death of his wife Mickie, the long siege of Parkinson's disease over his last 12 years. Through all of these and other bitter experiences, he maintained that courage and dignity and wit that saw him safely through the war. The last time I saw him, he was served lunch at the assisted living facility where he was residing. The main dish was roast beef.
Lindsey had very little strength left, and using his hands was difficult because of the Parkinson's. He attacked the meat as vigorously as he could with knife and fork, but it remained intact. After two or three minutes he leaned back in his chair and said:
"This looks like a tie game to me."
But Lindsey Nelson's life was not a tie. It was a majestic victory. And we can all be thankful that his triumphant life will always be memorialized at his beloved UT by the Lindsey Nelson Scholarship and the Lindsey Nelson Baseball Stadium.
Ben Byrd (Knoxville '46) is the retired sports editor of the Knoxville Journal.
A double winner: Lindsey Nelson with plaques proclaiming him the top television and radio sportscaster of 1959.
On his trademark flashy jackets: "We (the New York Mets) were going to be televising 120 games in color . . . . I walked into a New York clothing store and told the clerk, 'Let me see all the jackets you can't sell.' He brought out seven, and I bought all of them.
"People don't always recognize me but they know my outfit."
About broadcasting UT games: "WKGN hired me in 1947, and I did some high school games and recreated some of the great Tennessee football games of the past. I got the details from newspaper files. The '47 team was doing so badly I figured Tennessee fans wanted to hear about the glory days.
"The first Tennessee game I ever did was 1948, Mississippi State at Shields-Watkins Field. Mississippi State won [21-6]. We had 60 stations that day because the Mississippi State network took our feed.
"I proposed to General Neyland that we form the 'Volunteer Network.' He shortened it to 'Vol Network.' "
On the early New York Mets: "It was my job to set the broadcast policy. I told our broadcast team, 'This is a very inept group of players, and we're not going to try to hide their ineptness. We're also not going to make fun of them.' We simply described what they did, and what they did was hilarious."
How he began at NBC: "I was hired by Gallery [Tom, NBC sports director] as an administrator, not as an announcer. I stayed at NBC 10 years and never had a contract as an announcer. I never even had an agent; I didn't need one because I was hiring myself to announce the weekend events. When Gallery would say 'Who do you think we ought to use on this event?', I would say, 'Me.' "