As fragile buds of crocuses began to peer through the rock-strewn soil of Massachusetts each spring, a fan could easily switch from Ned's evocative eloquence to the rat-a-tat-tat of Most's unyielding, theatrical narrative - an ongoing saga in which the good guys were forever attired in green and white. For nearly forty seasons, Johnny Most was able to describe in excruciating detail the heroic plight of a "warranted championship team" that even malevolent referees and hooligan thugs couldn't conquer. As one Boston sportswriter once commented, "John wasn't broadcasting a basketball game; he thought he was narrating the Passion Play."

Unlike the sedan-like quality of Ned Martin, Johnny Most's voice sounded like a car crash. He would sit, emperor-like, in his haughty perch just below the rickety third balcony at the old Boston Garden, inhaling non-filter after non-filter, creating a minefield of smoke that shrouded him in a perpetually dimming stupor. For more than two hours, Johnny would inexorably describe the proceedings taking place on the historic court below, whining over the inequalities of life even as his team won a gaudy sixteen championships in thirty years.

Amidst Buick-sized rats, plastic beer cups, and drunken louts, his grating voice and discriminating commentary became the adhesive to which legions of Celtic fans embraced in what might have been the most flourishing Off-Broadway production in history. There were very few critics; nearly every Bostonian seemed to warm to his antics like a tepid southerly breeze. An absolute original, Johnny Most made even the most irrelevant game in November seem important.

It is also certain that Johnny's exaggerated storylines knew no bounds if he was into it that night. His habit for glorious overstatement would invariably be replicated the very next day in countless schoolyards across the Boston area: "Big Red snags the rebound, and gets absolutely cuffed in the stomach by Kareem! Oh my goodness! But, of course, Jake O'Donnell isn't calling anything because there's no blood on the court! Do you believe that?"

Even the immortals wore black hats in Johnny's unambiguous world:

"Oscar gets the rebound...... and puts his left elbow right in the face of Satch Sanders! Right in the face! And Manny Sobel has the nerve to call a foul on 'The Lord!' The audacity! Well, ladies and gentlemen, those of us who have been blessed to see him in the flesh know that Oscar Robertson would never, ever commit a foul!"

One night, I actually heard him bawl: "Gene Shue just gave his Bullets' players an armful of tire irons so that they may attack anything out there in green and white....knowing that Mendy Rudolph will call it 'justifiable homicide!'"

Some of the more unique Mostian broadcasts occurred away from Boston, when opposing fans learned to unmercifully bait such a polarizing figure with aplomb. Inevitably, after being peppered by coffee cups and cigarette butts throughout much of the game, Johnny would growl, "I just got hit by a bagel! They're throwing things at me, ladies and gentlemen, because the fans here at the Civic Center are frustrated that their shabby, mediocre team always loses to the Celtics!"

It's not to say that John didn't have a sense of humor. His recurrent cackle sounded like an old Dodge Dart attempting to start on an arctic January morning. When Dave Bing was traded to the C's, Johnny couldn't wait to sing out, "The ball goes out to Dave Bing. He backs up to the right of the key as Dynamite Don clears the way. It's Bing from the corner -- Bing........bang!"

In the end, though, Johnny Most's calls were both original and extraordinary. His signature phrases became compulsory axioms for an entire region of basketball fans:

"This is Johnny Most high above courtside."

"Cousy fiddles and diddles -- now he daddles."

"Outside to Sudden Sam -- swish!"

"Russ gets the rebound - what a play by Bill Russell!"

"Jarring John tricky-dribbles with the ball..."

"The Celts are fast-breaking to victory as Tiny dishes it off to Larry!"

And, of course, his nightly signoff, "This is Johnny Most -- bye for now."

Indeed, Johnny Most was the Puck to Ned Martin's Hamlet.



We must remember, however, that the adored Mr. Most was not the only game in town after Ned Martin signed off for the last time each fall. Sharing the radio booth on Causeway Street each winter were the two most proficient play-by-play men to ever broadcast the Boston Bruins, Fred Cusick and Bob Wilson. Both announcers were meticulously prepared, inherently cogent, and naturally engaging. A contest described by either announcer was both compelling and unblemished. Ultimately, Bob Wilson and Fred Cusick served as admirable bridges to Ned Martin each and every year.

However, this did not mean that the local hockey team was always in the capable hands of adroit announcers. When TV38 began to broadcast all seventy Bruins games each season at the pinnacle of the Bobby Orr era, the station named the inane Don Earle and his incoherent sidekick, Pat Egan, as the television voices of Boston's storied hockey franchise.

Earle, a native of Philadelphia, never knew a cliche he didn't like. Johnny Pie was "a gamer", Espo took scoring "to a different level", and Bobby was "a star among stars."

His recurrent use of bad puns and smaltzy humor caused my father to remark one night, "Ned Martin is crystallized ice; Don Earle is two-week-old slush." For three seasons, it seemed as if Ted Knight was serving as the Bruins chief TV announcer.

In one of his more memorable quips, Earle stated that "there were no holes in the B's 'Cheese'," moments after Bruins' goaltender Gerry Cheevers had shut out the Rangers. Earle also used the infuriating expression, "if you will", like MacDonald's uses salt on its fries. Once, when an irate fan tossed an egg at Derek Sanderson in Chicago, the Bruins' television announcer commented, "I'll have mine poached -- if you will."

In the end, however, sidekick Pat Egan made Don Earle sound like Henry V. A former Bruins defenseman who had toiled as a security guard at Northeastern for more than a decade, Egan was inexplicably tapped with the color job in 1968-69 where he would be regularly featured for one unforgettable season as the B's number two TV guy.

Ultimately, malapropism might have been Pat Egan's most flagrant broadcasting quality. After a particularly gory game against the Leafs one evening, Egan signed off, "The Garden gang will have a hard time removin' the blood from the ice before they put on the parakeet floorin'."

With ol' Pat ensconced in the catbird's seat that winter, thousands of New Englanders were exposed to such grievous errors in syntax that scores of well-intentioned parents banished the TV38 volume for a spell. From botched verb-tense agreement to dangling participles to droppin' the g's from both action verbs and gerunds, Pat's recurrent verbal gaffes caused English teachers around the Route 128 area to seriously consider seppuku.

Despite the fact that Egan hailed from Canada, his mispronunciation of French was singularly astonishing. For example, he once reviewed the action at the end of a frenetic second period in the Forum by signing off: "At the 19:45 minute mark -- with Donnie Awry off two minutes in the 'sin bin' for roughin' -- Montreal come back on goal by Lap-ee-air."

When TV38 announced that it would not rehire Pat Egan -- and that General Manager Bill Quinn would soon find an adequate replacement for him, my father commented, "On a certain level, a follow-up to Pat Egan is absolutely inconceivable." Fortunately, by the time the Bruins had skated their last shift on the Garden ice, Ned Martin was back behind the radio mike in his crowded cubicle at Fenway Park. "It's time for Ned to save us once again," my father grinned as he heard the first inning at Opening Game one April.





Early in each and every Red Sox broadcast, even the most casual of listeners could discern a hint of melancholy in Ned Martin's voice. While he obviously rooted for the Red Sox, he never, ever approached the over-the-top terrain inhabited by the great Johnny Most. There were even times when Ned would gently hint to his listeners about the possibilities of defeat just as it seemed as if the team was on the cusp of victory.

It turned out that this rational, insightful announcer had already witnessed the absolute worst that human beings could do to one another as a young man fighting in defense of his country on the remote island of Iwo Jima.

As Martin told Joe Fitzgerald of the Boston Herald before he retired: "I joined the 4th Marine Division and on D-Day, February 1945, we hit Iwo Jima. I don't think we were there thirty minutes when we came upon a shell-hole. I looked in and saw it was filled with dead Marines; I mean blown-up Marines, with entrails and . . . oh, God, I'd never seen anything like that before. Then I started looking around and pretty soon death got to be common. This wasn't anything like watching Desert Storm, a war that seemed so clean on TV. This was people being blown apart."

No wonder that In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning remained one of Ned's most cherished contemporary albums. There was surely an underlying pathos that filled him even as he described the sun-splashed game below. Regardless, we all seemed to love him for it.

And yet, after every tempest in Ned Martin's world, the sun would inevitably peak through the daunting overcast skies. As Ken Coleman once observed, "Ned was always a blatant optimist."

While talking about the horrors he experienced in the South Pacific, Martin admitted to Joe Fitzgerald, "They told us it was going to be a nine-day operation but I was there for twenty-six days, and I will never forget the day word spread that the flag was flying on Mount Suribachi -- our flag! What a feeling!''

Because he had climbed out of a manhole of hell as a Marine, Ned's passion for life was also palpable, especially during rain delays. He would take his listeners on a tour of his off-hour interests, from traveling to reading to appreciating "first-class music." A reserved man by nature, Martin was still able to share his sundry passions both on and off the air.

The day after he died, former Red Sox broadcaster, ESPN's Jon Miller, told the Globe's Bill Griffith about Ned's affection for one of those immense artists who seemed to exert a pull on Ned's heartstrings, the immortal Francis Albert Sinatra: "'Both Ken Coleman and Ned Martin loved Frank Sinatra's music,' said Miller. 'Ned had a Walkman with plugs for two headsets and sometimes they'd be listening to Sinatra on a flight home and break into song together. It was not broadcast quality." There is an old Latin dictum that was used as an addendum to conclude Sinatra's own funeral service -Ars longa, vita brevis. "Art is long, life is short." Ned would surely have liked that phrase.





After fourteen seasons broadcasting Red Sox baseball on WHDH Radio 850, Ned Martin gained a new broadcasting partner in 1974 with the arrival of Jim "The Possum" Woods. Pugnacious, impulsive, anecdotal, and brisk, Woods would serve as a brilliant converse to Martin throughout their five celebrated years as a baseball broadcasting team. In Woods' hail hearty, good fellow world, Ned became Nedly and every topic under the heavens was open for discussion.

Martin especially took great delight in bantering with "The Possum" over his days as the number-two announcer to the longtime Pirates broadcaster, the legendary Bob Prince. Because "The Possum" and the brash Prince were two of the most legendary beer connoisseurs in Major League history, Ned once asked, "Did Budweiser sponsor you, or did you two sponsor Bud?"

Animated, spontaneous, and gutsy, Woods seemed to always bring out the best in Martin. As sportswriter Art Martone remarked in his sterling remembrance of Martin in the Providence Journal:

"Announcers, and especially radio announcers, are one of a team's main link to its fan base. They're the prism through which information about the team is shot, and they often set the tone for the fans themselves. For five glorious seasons, Ned Martin was teamed with the sublime Jim Woods, giving the Sox a radio duo unmatched before or since, by anybody -- and it was Ned Martin, more than anyone, who helped define us as what we thought we were: Educated, intelligent students of the game, lovers of our team but also lovers of the sport . . . which, believe it or not, was how Red Sox fans were viewed (and actually were) in those days. Ned was one of the main links to our sense of superiority over Yankee fans, whose symbol was the shrill and hysterical Phil Rizzuto. It was, we thought, the perfect microcosm of the difference between Boston and New York baseball."

Listening to two such erudite yet disparate men night after night made the summer months seem even more fleeting and urgent. Even then, I recognized then that we were steadfastly ensconced in a provisional Golden Era, where names like Martin, Woods, the Gold Dust Twins, Yaz, El Tiante, Rooster, Pudge, and Dewey were firmly embedded in both the hearts and minds of Red Sox Nation.

Within seven years, however, it would be all gone as free-agency altered the ethos of baseball, and corporate America modified the landscape of sports broadcasting. As Art Martone recapitulated in his tribute published in the Journal, "Ned Martin's strengths became less and less important to the radio industry as it evolved from what it was in the 1960s to what it is today. Quiet and intelligent doesn't play over the airwaves these days; modern radio execs like shrillness and hysteria. His profession changed, and Ned Martin couldn't -- or wouldn't -- change with it."

When two such unswerving iconoclasts were subsequently ordered to promote the sponsors' products more vociferously on the air, Ned and Possum ultimately balked, resulting in their dismissals at the end of the 1978 season. While Ned was quickly rehired as NESN's principal baseball announcer, Jim was not. Thus, the greatest broadcasting team in the history of professional sports in Boston was abruptly dispersed. While everyone remembers the infamous Bucky Dent game with a sense of revulsion, most casual fans have forgotten that it was also the last broadcast of the great Martin and Woods.





Ned Martin would serve as the Red Sox television announcer for another fourteen seasons before being summarily dismissed at the end of the 1992 season. While there were pockets of brilliance throughout his telecasts, his discreet eloquence often fell flat in the visual realm of television. He sometimes seemed confused as to whether he should fill the silence with prose. It was as if Faulkner were asked to write in haiku.

By his last year with the Sox, 1992, baseball and television had resolutely entered the age of Sportscenter, in-your-face journalism, and enduring union-owner-agent greed. At the time, Ned seemed slightly anachronistic, a gentleman in a society of "me-first." In Bill Griffith's accolade to Martin in the Globe, his last TV partner, Jerry Remy, talked about Martin's controversial dismissal: "'Ned was sad the last week of that season because he'd learned that NESN wasn't going to bring him back the next year,' said Remy. 'And I knew they were afraid he might say something on the air. There was no chance of that. He went out with dignity and class.'"

Ned Martin subsequently retired to Clarksville, Virginia where he spent time with his beloved wife, Barbara, his daughters Caroline and O'Hara, his son, Roley, nine grandchildren, a bevy of dogs, and his cat, Emily. While we in Red Sox Nation occasionally heard his tranquil, reassuring voice from his new outpost via the talk show circuit, he seemed at peace in his new surroundings, a fitting closing act for a truly serene man.

In 2001, he was both astonished and stirred when he was named to the Red Sox Hall of Fame. At the reception that year, he received the longest sustained ovation of any recipient. On July 22, 2002, Ned attended The Ted Williams Tribute at Fenway Park, where he interviewed old friend, Carl Yastrzemski, the other Sox legend who debuted with the team forty-one years previously. He died of a massive coronary at the Raleigh-Durham airport, a few miles from his beloved home.

Appropriately, his last public appearance had been on the infield at Fenway as a blinding sun sheltered the park from the unforgiving dimness of night. When I heard Ned had passed, I impulsively took out an old Paul Simon album that featured the baseball song, "Night Game." Ned's shadow seemed to envelop the lyrics as Simon's mournful voice echoed in my darkened living room:

There were two men down
And the score was tied
In the bottom of the eighth
When the pitcher died
And they laid his spikes
On the pitcher's mound
And his uniform was torn
And his number was left on the ground
Then the night turned cold
Colder than the moon
The stars were white as bones
The stadium was old
Older than the screams
Older than the teams
There were three men down
And the season lost
And the tarpaulin was rolled
Upon the winter frost.

As I turned off the light before retiring for bed that night, I swore I could hear Ned sigh off in the distance, "The game is over, the lights are dimming; it's time to go home. And so from Fenway Park this is Ned Martin. Farewell."



In the final analysis, the great Ned Martin incessantly stressed the enduring narrative of life through the potent medium of sports broadcasting. From his sage lens, the seasons ran together like an impressionist painting. Ultimately, they became chapters in a book that seemed to accentuate the same reoccurring theme over and over again even as hundreds of players entered and exited the tale like apparitions in a drawn-out war.

But he was more than just an invaluable bard -- he was also a master-teacher. Ultimately, Ned Martin served as an invaluable mentor to thousands of New Englanders who faithfully listened to his broadcasts year after year. Without knowing it, he not only vastly extended our vocabularies, but instilled in many of us an infatuation for language that stuck with us long after he broadcast his last game for the Boston nine. Mr. Martin provided countless baseball fans with a landscape of metaphor and simile that enabled us to apply the gift of comparative language to own lives as both speakers and writers.

In addition, Ned also served as a wellspring of insight for thousands of us who developed an emerging passion for literature due to his recurrent allusions to the great writers and their masterworks. Finally, he gave us all a sense of perspective about the game, time, and life itself. His daily broadcasts were his ultimate gift to us.

For me personally, Ned Martin gave me a focal point, a purpose, a sense of the possibilities, a future. For the past quarter of a century, I have entered my classroom each and every day as his undisclosed yet grateful apprentice, efficiently equipped to provoke and kindle my students with the same elixir of perspicuity and insight that he first used on me four decades ago. I became an educator because of Ned Martin.

Early on in my professional career, my first headmaster asked me, "Shaun, who most influenced you to become a teacher of English."

I gazed out my classroom window as the trees began to sway in rhythm. I looked back at him and whispered, "Ned Martin".

Sadly, however, I never had the chance to personally say, "thank you" to him. "Regrets are as personal as fingerprints," sighed Hemingway after the death of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Because Mr. Martin seemed eternally vigorous, I always thought that there would be time to drop him a note that would convey to Ned how much he meant to me -- to us.

Unfortunately, this little tract will have to suffice. Huxley once wrote, "We live in a world which is full of misery and ignorance, and the plain duty of each and all of us is to try to make the little corner he can influence somewhat less miserable and somewhat less ignorant than it was before he entered it." Using Huxley's words as a measuring stick, Ned Martin lived a most meaningful life.

In a lovely piece entitled, "A Day of Light and Shadow," first published twenty-five years ago in Sports Illustrated, acclaimed Red Sox fan and musicologist, Jonathan Schwartz, wrote, "Ned Martin is as articulate and creative a sportscaster as there is in the country. He is often poetic and moving. 'The Yankee score is up,' Ned observed late last in September from Toronto, where scores remained only momentarily on the electric board. 'Soon it too will be gone,' he continued in his usual quiet tone. 'It will flash away like a lightening bug into the chilly Canadian night.'"

In my mind, the sadness - the vulnerability - that sometimes crept into his broadcasts, made Ned even more endearing in the end. Despite the fact that he had lived through the anguish and terror of war, he bravely emerged as a humble and generous human being. Three days after Martin died, former ESPN broadcaster Keith Olbermann wrote, ''He was a subtle, controlled, educated man, from Duke via Iwo Jima. His favorite on-air expression of surprise or delight was 'Mercy,' and in a summer in which we have lost Jack Buck, Darryl Kile, Irv Kaze, Ted Williams, and Jim Warfield, that quote from Hamlet which Ned Martin always invoked in times of crisis seems all too tearfully appropriate: `When sorrows come, they come not as single spies, but in battalions.'''

An unfussy romantic, Ned Martin often used musical allusions to describe the choreography of baseball. The game had a certain rhythm and Ned was most cognizant of its nature, the season, and the fixed beat that seemed to slowly dissipate as fall began to envelop the region. During an extended rain delay in Cleveland in the mid-seventies, Martin and his buddy, Jim Woods, impulsively began to discuss their own favorite musical numbers over the years. Suddenly, as if on a dare, Ned began to croon out the old Kurt Weil classic, "The September Song," a standard that his beloved Sinatra had once sung so well. As Martin began to sing, I instantly recognized that I was getting a rare glimpse into the soul of an introvert.

For it's a long, long time
From May to December
And the days grow short
When you reach September
And the autumn weather
Turns the leaves to flame
One hasn't got time
For the waiting game
As the days dwindle down
To a precious few
September, November
And these few precious days
I'll spend with you
These golden days
I'll spend with you.

From 1961 to 1992, we were fortunate to have spent a plethora of golden days with Ned Martin as we listened to him artfully describe the daily episodes of a team that truly mattered to us all in the end. Despite the dark clouds that sometimes rolled inside of him, Martin was able to emit a potent luminosity, a tangible light that was able to cut through the very shadows of our own lives. The best Boston sportscaster of them all showed us the way even as he guided us through the haze of the seasons. Without realizing it, thousands of loyal Red Sox supporters were able to learn from an exquisite artist.

There is an old proverb that states, "Power lasts ten years; influence not more than a hundred." Like a weathered chestnut tree, Ned Martin planted enough seeds to eventually create a prodigious forest. In the end, we his pupils became his enduring legacy.

Mercy.

« Previous Next »