By Cliff Nichols
The Better Times
Reprinted by permission, May 13, 1981

Part I

“For the play-by-play of this afternoon’s game, the ‘Voice of the Mountaineers,’ Jack Fleming …”

No matter where you look in this state, the name Jack Fleming, who began play-by-play duties for the West Virginia University Mountaineers in 1947, is a household word. The younger set of West Virginia sports fans have grown up listening to Fleming’s enthusiastic descriptions of WVU athletic events.

His professional duties have often called him away from West Virginia in more recent years (Fleming now resides in the Pittsburgh area), but he enjoys his frequent return trips to his native Morgantown and makes no secret of his genuine enthusiasm for WVU athletics.

He also doesn’t forget about the very start of his broadcasting career, “I started at the University during the war years, with a major in engineering. In about a year, a friend of mine, who was a professor, recommended that I get out of engineering; I wasn’t doing all that well,” Fleming recalls.

“I was doing well in English, speech class, phys ed, so I switched to journalism. I wanted to be a writer, before I even thought of broadcasting. I’d written sports in the Red and Blue Journal (Morgantown High School) at the same time as Mickey Furfari (executive sports editor of the Dominion Post).”

Fleming joined the Air Corps, and was injured in a parachute jump in France in 1944. He eventually wound up at a hospital in White Sulphur Springs – the Greenbrier Hotel was serving as an army hospital at the time. “We had a studio; we read the news and went around to the wards and had quiz shows and gave out soap and cigarettes and things like that.”

After his time at the Greenbrier, he went to Texas until he was discharged from the service in 1945 and returned to Morgantown. “On this particular noon I was walking my date home; she lived up in Woodburn, above the radio station which was on Spruce Street. I told her, ‘I would like to try it.’ She said, ‘Why don’t you go in and talk to them.’ So I walked her home and came back, went in and I got a job, only because they had nobody at the time.

“They had a minister who was 4-F because he was a minister, and a young guy who was 4-F because of his health, and three women. This was the 40s, and the only reason they had women was because there was a war on, and they wanted to get the women out as quickly as possible. At any rate, they were clearing out the staff and they hired me.

“I was pretty bad. I liked sports, and I did the color on the football and basketball for two years and then play-by-play … I stayed with that station (WAJR) 25 years.”

His first play-by-play broadcast was in the spring of 1947, when Morgantown High and Elkins played basketball at the old Elkins gym. “The other fellow was having some problems; he was about to leave. He’d been pretty well shot up in the war, so they sent me to Elkins and told me to take a try at it … I remember it very well,” Fleming said.

The enthusiasm he displays on broadcast come naturally, according to Jack. “Being a native, my enthusiasm for West Virginia University athletics is sort of built in … I patterned myself in the beginning after the man ahead of me; his name was Charlie Snowden. I had listened to him in the ’42 NIT (National Invitation Tournament – basketball), which West Virginia won, and he had paid his way up there to broadcast.”

Fleming believes his basketball broadcasting ability, early in his career, was ahead of his proficiency with football. “I don’t think I really developed my football to any extent until I got with the pros (Pittsburgh Steelers in ’58.

“People would always say, ‘You do OK in football but we really love your basketball.’ Then when I go into working in Pittsburgh in ’58, living in Morgantown and doing the Steelers, then I started hearing that my football was improving. You always have to improve.

“But the enthusiasm doesn’t die. There are nights – particularly in the wintertime, when you don’t have the voice, when you have a cold or are having a bad day, and everybody has them – when you walk out feeling like you haven’t worked to the full extent of your money, but you come back the next time.

“Actually, at my age, you have to control it a little more; you can’t go utterly berserk.”

Perhaps Fleming’s most discussed trait is his knack of getting on the officials when the calls are not going his team’s way. “I’ve tapered off on that considerably,” he grinned, although he recalls a few “incidents” that have occurred over his career.

“There was one official – he’s dead now – who called the last foul on Mark Workman (WVU basketball All-American) in a game at Pitt. (I said) ‘Workman fouls out of the ball game thanks to this call by this guy,’ and he was pretty upset. I probably shouldn’t have said that.”

His biggest run-ins, though, came when he was working in the National Basketball Association (NBA) with the Chicago Bulls in the early 70s. “One official and I actually left the game. It was an out-of-bounds play, and he was rather short and he didn’t see it,” Fleming explained. “It was tapped out by the opponent. The ball should have gone to Chicago, my team, and it went instead to the other team. As he came by – that was my technique, always ahs been, I talk loudly enough so they can hear me – I said it was a lousy call.

“He stopped. We got into a debate. In the meantime, the game’s going on. This went on for about 15 seconds. Another one came over and said, ‘You hoopie, take care of your job and I’ll take care of mine.’

“I’ve had my running debates wit them, but nothing that’s been too serious.”

Over 30 plus years of sports broadcasting, Fleming has had a number of memorable moments. One, in WVU football, came in his first year as the play-by-play man. “We beat Pitt for the first time in 19 years, 17-2, in a game that ended near the West Virginia goal line … in the fog … the crowd was getting raucous,” he recalls.

“I had an injured football player, a big guy, Vic Peelish from Beckley, working in the booth with me as a spotter, and one of the Pitt fans reached in and punched him, and he picked up a chair and threw it at the fan … all of this was happening.

“In the meantime, the goal posts were going down, there were people on the field; and the game ended 17-0. I got downtown, and they used to put out the football extra, and the final score was 17-2. There had been a safety scored down in the middle of all that.

“I remember that very well. It was a great victory after 19 years. It would compare with the way we’ll feel when we beat Penn State this year.”

Another memorable moment came just a few years back, in 1975, at old Mountaineer Field on the downtown WVU campus, when West Virginia beat Pitt 17-14 on Bill McKenzie’s field goal as time was running out. “I don’t think anything could top the West Virginia-Pitt game the last time we beat them …the crowd, the afternoon, the atmosphere, the scene, the game, everything. I said to a guy from Pittsburgh at halftime, ‘No matter who wins, it’s a great, great show. 

“Then we come down and win it on McKenzie’s kick. I think those were two that really stand out.”

Memory of WVU basketball is “probably the place where my mind is most crowded,” Fleming commented. He lists the names of those he followed early in his broadcasting career – Lee Patton, Whitey Gwynn, Fred Schaus, Leland Byrd, Clyde Green, Bobby Carroll and Mark Workman.

“The most exciting single game, he reflects, “was at Villanova during the Jerry West era. We were down 17 points, say, with three minutes and 30 seconds to go. We came back and won it on an out-of-bounds play at the end.

“I had these Philadelphia people – you work right in the crowd at the Palestra – and they had been on y back, on my back. We came back and we won it, and I screamed the final score and went to commercial, and then turned around and said, “Take it and shove it!’”

The past season was another high point for Fleming, as he talked about the years covering West Virginia University basketball. “I don’t think that anything can match the excitement that I felt this past year, seeing Gale (Catlett) and his kids bring it all back,” he commented.

“The victory at Minnesota (in the NIT), although it was not a thrilling finish, was as big a win as we’ve had had, dating back to the late 50s or early 60s.”

Fleming “doesn’t recall that much” about WVU’s loss by a single point to California in the NCAA finals in 1959. “I know this – had we had Chris Smith, a big guy from Charleston who went to Virginia Tech – I think we would have won the championship,” Jack pointed out.

“I actually don’t remember that (game) nearly as well as some of the other big games … I remember playing in the NCAA at Charlotte, playing St. Joseph’s. Jack Ramsey, in a tie ballgame near the end, called back-to-back time outs. They mapped their strategy, threw the ball in and Ronnie Retton stole it and West Virginia won the game.”

Fleming’s sports broadcasting career, in addition to his work with the Mountaineers, has included time with professional teams – the Steelers, the Pittsburgh entry in the old American Basketball League (ABL), and three years of radio and one of television with the Chicago Bulls of the National Basketball Association (NBA).

While covering the ABL in Pittsburgh for one season, Fleming got to see a youthful Connie Hawkins, considered one of the most talented one-on-one performers of all time --  a player who was banned from the NBA for several seasons because of alleged association with gamblers while in college. Hawkins’s struggle to get into the NBA (he was eventually successful), was chronicled in the fascinating book Foul and a series in Life magazine.

“I totally enjoyed that experience. Basketball is relative … the NBA was smaller … it could be right now that they’re utilizing the talent more,” Fleming related. “I still think you can go outside the NBAS and pick up ex-players, put them out on the floor and have a good game.

“That’s what we had. We had some NBA rejects, people like Hawkins who weren’t allowed to play in the NBA. It was enjoyable.

“Hawkins, at that point in his career, was incredible. He could bring the ball up the floor like a little man, so graceful and beautiful on the court. Off the floor, he was just like a child. He’s come from a very deprived situation in New York.

“Over the years he changed. Later I ran into him in the NBA. We had the NBA all-star game in Chicago. I emceed the banquet and did the national radio. We had a tiered dais. My job at the banquet was to interview, briefly, all of (the players).

“Bill Bradley (a former Rhodes scholar then playing for the New York Knicks) had great remarks. Bob Love was down near the end, from our team (Chicago). He stammered: I was very frightened about that. Love came through beautifully. I’m over the hump.

“Hawkins had been brought in to fill in, I think, for West. I looked at Connie very friendly and said something about the old card games we used to have on the airplane back in the old days in the ABL. (He said), ‘I don’t know nothing about that.’ All I know is that I get fined by Mr. Colangelo (Phoenix Suns --- Hawkins’s team – general manager) when I won’t go on the court and I get fined by Mr. Kennedy (then NBA commissioner) when I won’t get off the court.’

“He used me to air a complaint against his general manager and the commissioner. From that point on, he had gotten too big for me. He used me.”

Fleming covered NBA basketball with the Chicago Bulls from 1970-73 as the radio play-by-play man, and later returned to do about 20 road games on television for one campaign. The television work was “not that exciting” because it was difficult to re-establish ties being with the team on such a limited basis.

The three years with the radio, though, were a different story. “I like basketball from the standpoint of sociability, because there are more games and a smaller group of people, whether it’s pro basketball or college ball,” Fleming explained. “The more games you play the happier I am. The fact that they play 82 games – I love it.

“I wish West Virginia played 82. I’d do basketball the year around … throw in a little football … I really would. I love it that much.”

In 1958, Fleming began an association with the Rooney family and the Pittsburgh Steelers. He saw this team from the time when it struggled to win one game a year until it dominated the National Football League in the 70s.

“My first assignment with them was to do the color on the road games. I didn’t work on the home games. The play-by-play man was Joe Ticker. A fellow named Red Donneley from Steubenville (Ohio) did the color. When they went on the road, Tucker moved over to local TV; Donneley did play-by-play; and I did color.

“Unfortunately, Joe lost his mother. We went over to Philadelphia. Donneley went on the TV and I got to do the play-by-play, took my own crew with me. That was memorable.

“Coming up through the years, from Forbes Field through Pitt Stadium, I have nothing but good, warm memories. I’d never been that much upset with losing.

“I can remember the day that we were out in front of Dallas, at Pitt Stadium, coming down to the end of the game, and I said, ‘There’ll be dancing in the streets of Oakland tonight.’ Boom, boom. Dallas came back and won the game. I thought I’d never do that again.

“We get to Chicago – I lived in Chicago then. I’d made all these bets with my cohorts. We had like a two touchdown lead or something. At the end I couldn’t help but say, ‘Ill have fun collecting by $1 bets tomorrow.’ All the sudden one fumble and they go, another fumble and they go out past us. Those were memorable.

“Now if you want to come down to the most memorable single moment, it would be the Franco (Harris) catch (of a deflected pass that beat Oakland 13-7 in the 1972 playoffs). That’s been used all over the country and around the world, and they used our tape on it.

“The very fact that the team gradually attained success, to know these people and to see that they put it all together—I mean the players and the coaches – has been an overall great experience. I can’t point to any Super Bowl that’s been particularly exciting; they were all great experiences.”

Fleming did receive a brief try at major league baseball, working with Nellie King on the Pittsburgh Pirate broadcasts for about three weeks in 1971 while Bob Prince was ill. “It was a great learning experience,” he said. “My baseball had been confined to Little League, Pony League, American Legion and some West Virginia ball.”

Major League ball was “much easier to do” than other varieties of sport,” Fleming believes. “There’s no question in my mind I could do it,” he concluded. “There’s no chance in Pittsburgh. Joe Brown (former Pirate general manager) wrote me off saying I had too much of a football image.”

Part II

A television opportunity with WTAE-TV (channel four) in Pittsburgh brought Jack Fleming back to this area, after he spent three years covering the Chicago Bulls and serving as sports director at WIND radio. The return led to him rejoining the Mountaineer Sports Network, an opportunity for which he is “:grateful,” but, looking back, Fleming wonders if it wasn’t too late in his career to switch from radio to TV.

He was reluctant to leave Morgantown for Chicago in the first place, but was happy while he worked there. “They offered me the job, and I said no,” Fleming remembers. “Then they talked me into going up there. I got a look at the city – the area where I would work, where I would live – and I met some of the people. I liked it.

“I spent 25 years at one station. I talked to my family and I talked to the Rooneys (Pittsburgh Steelers). They said, ‘It won’t upset us a bit,’ So I made the move.”

He enjoyed the work, even when he wasn’t doing the play-by-play for the Steelers and the Bulls. “Radio is basically where I belong,” he said. “I didn’t have that much work to do. I did the Bulls; I did the Steelers; and at different times I did the sports show for them. For a while it was in the morning. Most of the time it was 6 or 6:05.

“I’d go out and get an interview at Wrigley Field (Chicago Cubs), go to sleep in the stands, watch the game, go down on a Wednesday afternoon to Cominskey Park (Chicago White Sox) … It was a good job, in the third largest market in the country. You’ve got pro basketball in the third market and pro football in what was the ninth market.”

He left this behind, though, to try television with WTAE for three years, beginning in 1973. During his time with the station, he was involved in a highly publicized incident at the WVU Coliseum when he openly cheered for the Mountaineers in a basketball game against Pitt.

“The interesting thing was that the people down here were cursing channel four, saying that they gave me the business. Te Golden Panthers (at Pitt) are telling everybody they got me fired, and none of this is true,” Fleming emphasized.

He explained that he never signed a contract with the station, and worked out the three years on a verbal agreement. John Conomikes, the station’s general manager, had a heart attack early in the fall of 1973, soon after, Fleming came to Pittsburgh and didn’t return to work until the next January.

Conomikes and Fleming met, and it was noted that “things just aren’t going right,” Fleming recalls. “We never signed a contract,” Jack added. “We had a verbal  agreement, which, you’ve got to have a feeling, a lot of other stations might have broken. They are good friends .. good, honorable people … I worked out my three years with them,” he said.

“Looking back, I’m a little disappointed that I made the move … it was a little too late for a radio man to make it (transition to television), unless you’re really in some specialized field. On the set, I wasn’t cutting it from the standpoint of image.

“I thought, and they agreed, that I gave them piles of work. I worked without any help. In other words, I did six days a week, and a lot of those days started at eight in the morning and went to midnight, with time off to grab a bite and a shower.”

Ed Conway, the station’s former sports director, was rarely permitted to work, Fleming pointed out.

“I came in there and I gave it a shot,” he continued. “I think I did a good job for them, and they admit it. I worked as hard as anybody they had. I was the first guy to ever come down here (WVU) and cover anything. I was the person that told them there was something down here. I’ve been to Fairmont State (basketball). I went out and covered insignificant things at Pitt and Carnegie Mellon – did all these things, but that wasn’t good enough. The image wasn’t getting across. They wanted something else, Conomikes told me that that day.”

When Jack tenant, who had been serving as “Voice of the Mountaineers” since Fleming went to Chicago, decided to go to Louisville, Leland Byrd, former WVU athletic director, called Fleming to offer him the job. “I go to John (Conomikes) and John said, ‘No, you can’t do it because you’ve got to be on the news,’” Fleming said.

“(I said) ‘Hey, we’ve already agreed that my time is limited, and I need to establish a new base,’ He said, ‘You’re right.’ That’s when I came back.”

Fleming enjoys the opportunity to again cover West Virginia University sports. “They have been very good to me,” he commented. “I lost the rights once (early 1960s) – we lost two years – and went to Chicago and Pittsburgh --  we lost four years. Dr. Byrd was the man who brought me back, and I’ll always be grateful.”

He enjoys looking ahead to the next Mountaineer football and basketball and Steeler football campaigns. “I am totally enthusiastic about the things that are happening (at WVU),” he said.

West Virginia football is now moving in a positive direction under Don Nehlen, Fleming point out. “I thought the man did a terrific job. I love Frank Cignetti., loved his work,” he commented. “I thought that he didn’t get the full chance that he deserved.

“We made the transition, and in comes the new man. I think we have to get behind his administration. I think he did an incredible job. You like the things that you saw in the program 

“Then Gale (Catlett) –that’s just another story. We’re old friends from back when he was in high school. I would see him when I was in the pro league and he was at Kentucky and Kansas and those places, so we’ve had this running friendship. We have great chemistry.

‘We’re both sort of hams. We do a radio show. We like to needle each other. He’ll get me about age and I’ll get him about how ugly he is, or something like this. Great communication.

“I think that the important thing about Catlett is that he has revitalized West Virginia basketball. Eighteen years it’s been, and we’ve had some good coaches here and some good players, and we’ve never really had things going, statewide support.

“It declined while Bucky (Waters) was here. We had 19-9 seasons, but nobody was really that stirred up because we weren’t running with the ball … Catlett has put an exciting dimension to the game at West Virginia University.”

Fleming also considers the Steelers to be a solid entry in the National Football League, in spite of a disappointing 1980 campaign. He feels the entire season was ruined for the club in its two upset losses to Cincinnati. “I’m not the least bit pessimistic,” he concluded.

Fleming now resides in Pittsburgh for professional reasons. In addition to his play-by-play duties, he does freelance work on radio and television, including some commercial activity. He also keeps hi Morgantown ties, as he has throughout his career. “At this point in my career, I would like to live here (Morgantown), but there are no job opportunities. Pittsburgh is where the work is,” he explained.

“If I had my druthers, I would like to have a job here, maybe running the network, that would also allow me to broadcast West Virginia and broadcast the Steelers, but we’re happy up there.”

Although he has been involved in the broadcasting business since the 40s, the enthusiasm doesn’t die. “I look forward to the next 25, 30 or 40 years,” Jack grinned.