DEVON, PA — Award-winning sportscaster Jack Whitaker died early Sunday morning, according to CBS. He was 95. He reportedly passed away in his sleep at home in Devon due to natural causes.
Whitaker, who grew up in Philadelphia, graduated from Northeast Catholic High School.
He was a World War II veteran who was injured in France three days into the D-Day invasion in 1994, according to CBS.
Upon returning home, Whitaker graduated from St. Joseph’s in 1947, the university reported. After the war, he said he started working at a radio station in Pottstown, where he learned the business.
Then he got a radio gig calling plays for the Philadelphia Eagles in the 1950s, according to NBC Sports. In the early years of his career, he was at WCAU-TV in Philadelphia. While it was owned by CBS at the time, it is now NBC 10.
From 1961 to 1982, he worked as a broadcaster with CBS. One of his career highlights was calling the first Super Bowl in 1967. He also announced the 1973 race when Secretariat won the Triple Crown.
Whitaker went on to work for ABC in the 1980s and 1990s.
“There will never be another Jack Whitaker in sports broadcasting,” CBS Sports Chairman Sean McManus said in a statement through CBS News. His “amazing writing ability, on-air presence and humanity,” McManus said, are “unmatched.”
In 2012, Whitaker won a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Emmys for his contributions to broadcasting. Among his numerous accolades, he won a 1997 Emmy Award for sports personality of the year; was named the Broadcast Pioneers Person of the Year in 1981; and was inducted into the American Sportscasters Association Hall of Fame in 1997.
According to a news release about his lifetime achievement award, Whitaker said the greatest event he covered was the 1973 Belmont Stakes because it was “the most dominating performance I have ever seen by any athlete, even more than Tiger Woods [in 1997]… Because he won by 31. I mean it just blew me away. It blew everybody away. People were crying. It was just perfection. So I think I’ll stick with that, although Tiger is pretty close.”
Another well-known episode was when he called the group of onlookers a “mob” at the 1966 Masters in Augusta, Georgia, which Golf Digest said caused a flap that resulted in CBS taking him off that assignment thereafter.
Described as a “thoughtful white-haired figure who covered just about every niche of the sports world,” The New York Times reported Whitaker was just as well-known for his broadcasts as for his essays. He penned “Preferred Lies and Other Tales: Skimming The Cream of a Life in Sports,” which was published by Simon & Schuster in 1998.
“His mind was still brilliantly sharp right to the end,” according to CBS sportscaster Jim Nantz, who said in a statement Sunday that he had spoken with Whitaker earlier in the week once hospice had visited his home.
Reflecting upon the time they first met, at the 1986 Masters in Pebble Beach, California, Nantz told CBS: “I felt like I had just been introduced to Ernest Hemingway.”
Whitaker is survived by his wife, two children, two sons, 11 grandchildren and 15 great-grandchildren, The New York Times reported.
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