Greg Gumbel, a familiar voice to football and basketball fans, dies at 78
Greg Gumbel, a sports broadcaster who called some of the biggest football and college basketball games on two networks during a career that spanned five decades, has died. He was 78.
His family confirmed his death Friday afternoon in a social media post from CBS Sports, where Gumbel had worked since 1989. He had been diagnosed with cancer.
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For decades, Gumbel served as a play-by-play announcer for CBS’ NFL coverage. In 2001, he became the first Black sportscaster in that role covering a Super Bowl. He also covered the NCAA men’s basketball tournament for the network and had spent four years reporting on the American Football Conference for NBC Sports.
He got his first chance as an announcer in the early 1970s, when a boss at the NBC affiliate in Chicago, Channel 5, told him that he wanted to broadcast a high school basketball game every Saturday, as Gumbel recalled in an interview with sportscaster Kenny McReynolds published in 2021.
“He said, ‘I have this idea, and I want you to take it and run with it,’” Gumbel said in the interview. “We introduced our audience to a lot of guys who went on to become famous.”
Gumbel’s career took off in the 1980s, when he began to cover the NBA. He called his first NFL game in 1988.
Gumbel was born May 3, 1946, in New Orleans. He said in a 2022 interview with Sports Illustrated that he had modeled his style on that of sportscaster Pat Summerall, noting that he liked how Summerall “didn’t overtalk.”
At the beginning of his career, Gumbel was nervous when he was on the mic, he said. The Channel 5 crew nicknamed him “Waterfall” because of how he would sweat while he called games, according to the Chicago Tribune. But over time, he became comfortable in his role, and millions of viewers came to appreciate his calm in covering games, letting the action play out without dominating the broadcast.
In an Emmy Award-winning career, Gumbel worked for NBC, ESPN and MSG Network, where he hosted the New York Knicks’ pregame shows. But it was at CBS where he spent most of his career, doing the play-by-play announcing for the 2001 Super Bowl and the 2004 Super Bowl.
While working his second Super Bowl, a television audience of nearly 90 million listened as the game built up to a dramatic final minute, with the New England Patriots marching down the field for a game-winning field goal.
“Looks good!” Gumbel shouted as the kick went up. Then he let the cheers from the crowd take over as the Patriots went up by three points with only four seconds to go.
Gumbel stuck mostly to sports, but politics slipped in when, in 1999, he declined an invitation to a NASCAR event because Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was planning to attend, saying he did not agree with Thomas’ political views.
Gumbel’s survivors include his wife, Marcy; a daughter, Michelle; and his brother, Bryant Gumbel, a broadcaster and former “Today” show host.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
