By Bob Hertzel
The Dominion Post
Reprinted by permission, Jan. 4, 2001

At noon on Thursday, Jack Fleming phoned his commentary in to WAJR radio as he has done from his Pittsburgh home on a regular basis since being relieved of his play-by-play duties with the West Virginia Mountaineers four years ago.

His voice was full, his delivery crisp, his demeanor happy.

No one knows if it was 10 minutes after he hung up the phone, an hour or five hours, but sometime later that day “The Voice of the Mountaineers” sat down in his chair and died.

It was almost the way he would have asked to go.

“His whole vision of the way he wanted to go was to do a Mountaineer game, sit down, take a nap and never get up,” said Dale Miller, the general manager at WAJR.

Gale Catlett, who became a fast friend of Fleming’s after he returned to his alma mater to coach basketball in 1978, echoed that thought.

“He wanted to work until he was dead,” Catlett said. 

WVU, from where he graduated, was Jack Fleming’s love.  Radio broadcasting was his passion. 

“Sometimes we’d have a show to do that night and I’d talk to him during the day.  It’d be snowing and I’d tell him not to bother coming in,” Catlett said. “But he’d drive through that snow to get there.  He wanted to be on the air.  He wanted to talk to the people.” 

And long before E.F. Hutton talked, people listened.

One of those people who listened was John Raese, chief operating officer of Greer Industries.

“I remember back in 1959 when West Virginia and Jerry West went to the NCAA finals, the family was out in California,” Raese said.  “Dad took all of us up on top of a mountain in Palm Springs so we could pick up the broadcast of them playing Louisville in the semifinals.”

You have to picture this.  Here was Dyke Raese, the only coach to bring WVU a national basketball championship, when he won the 1942 NIT, with his family up atop a mountain in California, rooting on the Mountaineers through Fleming’s call on WAJR that was picked up and carried by clear-channel, 50,000-watt station KMOX, of St. Louis.

That, to Jack Fleming, was what life was all about: WVU playing for a national championship, him laughing at the microphone and people hanging on his every word.

The 7-10 split

Dale Miller simply shakes his head when he thinks about it.

“Jack Fleming started broadcasting on this station in 1945, and he was on the air yesterday,” he said as he sat in the vestibule leading into the WAJR studio.  “Think about that.  He broadcast for 55 years of the 65 years this station was on the air.”

Fleming began his career after being discharged from the U.S. Army Air Corps, which he served as a navigator during World War II.  He was shot down over France, parachuted into a tree and was rescued by a group of women who worked for the Underground.

In the early days, Fleming would do anything.  He’d engineer the board or broadcast ... bowling?

“Jack did bowling out of Suburban Lanes,” Miller said.

If that wasn’t hard enough to do, John Raese recalled another chapter of the life of the early Jack Fleming.

“I was a Little League star,” Raese said, laughing.  “I played for Sanitary Milk.  He’d be out there broadcasting the Sanitary Milk-Horton Ford game, then the next day drive to Pittsburgh and do the Steelers game.  Any sports assignment, he would do.”

What might have been

Jack Fleming had the voice, he had the passion.  What he didn’t have was the desire to become a nationally known broadcaster.

He was at the top of his game at the same time as the likes of Chris Schenkel, Keith Jackson and Ray Scott were on top of theirs.

If he’d been in New York ... if he’d been in Los Angeles ...

“If he had the major type of representation that those guys had, I think he would have been one of the chief announcers on the NFL on CBS or NBC,” Miller said.  “He could have made millions and millions.”

No one doubts that.

It was just that wasn’t Fleming’s style.

Jack did some television but loved radio.  He loved WVU.  He loved his life.

He had a couple of times when he thought of moving out.  Once he went to Chicago to do Bulls in the pre-Michael Jordan days.

“Grew his hair long, hung out with Bob Love,” Miller said.

But that wasn’t really his gig, and he came back home.

Then there was the chance he had to go to work for KMOX, in St. Louis.  Bob Hyland, the general manager of the station, offered Fleming a chance to broadcast the St. Louis Spirit in the ABA.

He offered him $20,000 a year with the proviso that if he made it to three years, the salary would jump to $100,000.

“I can’t afford to come to St. Louis for $20,000,” Fleming told Hyland, turning down the job.

There is an irony in this.  Hyland hired someone else, a local guy by the name of Bob Costas.  Hyland wound up promoting him nationally, just as he had done with Jack Buck and Joe Buck and Dan Kelly.

But in the end, the most famous call in all of NFL history is Fleming’s radio call of Franco Harris’ “Immaculate Reception” that won a playoff game for the Steelers.

That call was an example of how good Fleming could be.

“It was,” said his radio partner Myron Cope, “a perfect call.”

It also made one wonder what Fleming might have become had he been in the ideal broadcast situations.  That, however, didn’t happen.

Fleming spent much of his career without a true color analyst, an X’s and O’s guy who knew the game.  He had folksy Woody O’Hara at WVU, the flamboyant Cope with the Steelers.

But he didn’t have a John Madden to explain what was going on.

“I don’t really know what’s going on out there,” he often told Miller.

So, he would stick with what he saw.  You may not get an in-depth analysis of how the off-side guard kicked out the blitzing linebacker, allowing the tailback to cutback into a wide hole.

“What Jack did do was have a quirky vision,” Miller said.  “He may not be able to take apart the X’s and O’s, but he’d see a guy peeking strangely over from the Georgetown bench.  He always caught that odd angle.

“At Penn State, he’d note that these people are Mercedes drivers or cheese eaters or wine sippers,” Miller continued.  “He’d let you know that way that they weren’t the common people who rooted for West Virginia.”

Legendary Temper

Like so many people blessed with a unique talent, Jack Fleming was difficult to read at times.

“His temper was legendary,” Miller said.  “He’d go off lightning quick.  He could cast a look at you that would scare you to death.  I remember him doing that often, then two minutes later looking at me and winking.”

People were awed by him.

Jay Jacobs, the former WVU player from Morgantown who is the color commentator on the radio broadcasts, remembers Fleming doing broadcasts from the old studio on Spruce Street.

“I’d sneak up there and watch him broadcast. I’d bring a note pad and take notes.  No one could do basketball on radio like he did.  He’d make the game just build and build,” he said.

Five years ago, they asked Jacobs if he wanted to join Jack on the radio.

“The first thing I could think of, is this cleared with Jack?  He liked to work alone and I didn’t want to move in on that,” said Jacobs.  “It was Jack’s show.  I knew that.  I’d just try to get in four, five or six-second comments.  I really felt for a while I had to win his respect.”

So, too did his long-time partner on Steelers broadcasts - Cope.

Talk about your odd couple: the smooth Fleming and the King of Yoiks in the broadcast booth.  Cope, a freelance journalist who stands about 5-4 and has an irritating voice and a unique delivery, had joined WTAE, in Pittsburgh, and they wanted to promote him by putting him on with Fleming.

“We thought, this will never work,” said Steelers President Dan Rooney, whose father Art, was running the team at the time.  “And it was a struggle.  Jack exercised some tremendous patience.  It took three years before they could work together.”

Cope was forever jumping on Fleming’s play-by play.  He recalls one game where Frenchy Fuqua was off on a long touchdown run, Fleming describing it to perfection as Cope was screaming, “Frenchman, what are ya doin’ looking’ back?!”

The two learned to co-exist.  Cope, of course, started the Terrible Towel craze.

“He hated it,” said Cope, who would have one at his elbow at each game and wave it at the proper moment.  “Of course, I think he was only kidding about hating it."

The final countdown

As all good things must come to an end, so too, did Fleming’s play-by-play career.

Sports announcing was changing.  As Miller noted, “Pat Summerall gets $600,000 a year to do play-by-play, and John Madden gets $8 million to do color.  That wouldn’t sit well with Jack, who believed play-by-play was the thing.”

The Steelers eventually decided that they wanted to change their broadcasts, replacing Fleming with Bill Hillgrove, who was willing to sit back and let Cope and former player Tunch Ilkin act like raving maniacs in the booth.