Chuck Thompson

Charles Lloyd Thompson (June 10, 1921 – March 6, 2005) was an American

Biography

Early life and career

Thompson was born in

He is particularly remembered for his flawed but endearing call of Bill Mazeroski's championship-clinching home run to end the 1960 World Series, for which he was the play-by-play announcer for NBC Radio.(Audio) This event was replayed in full on an MLB radio special some years ago, during one of the players' strikes. The pitcher was actually Ralph Terry; Art Ditmar was warming up in the bullpen, and besides that error, Thompson just got caught up in the moment:

Well, a little while ago, when we mentioned that this one, in typical fashion, was going right to the wire, little did we know…Art Ditmar throws—here's a swing and a high fly ball going deep to left, this may do it!…Back to the wall goes Berra, it is…over the fence, home run, the Pirates win!…(long pause for crowd noise)…Ladies and gentlemen, Mazeroski has hit a one-nothing pitch over the left field fence at Forbes Field to win the 1960 World Series for the Pittsburgh Pirates by a score of ten to nothing!…Once again, that final score…The Pittsburgh Pirates, the 1960 world champions, defeat the New York Yankees. The Pirates ten, and the Yankees NINE!... and Forbes Field... is an insane asylum!

In 1985, Thompson's Ditmar-Terry flub became a commercial hit, featured as an audio-over in a nostalgia-immersed

Thompson, who lived in Lutherville, Maryland, at the time, died at Greater Baltimore Medical Center on March 6, 2005, after suffering a stroke.

Catch phrase origins

"Go to war, Miss Agnes!" was picked up from a golfing friend who never swore and whose putting failed to improve even after reading a book about it. Thompson explained the details in Curt Smith's Voices of the Game:

He was a great guy, very proper, and like any golfer, he had some real frustrations. But instead of cussing, he'd come up with the phrase, 'Go to war, Miss Agnes!' I didn't know what it meant, but don't feel bad – he may not have known. What I did know was that it sounded so funny. I picked it up and used it to emphasize something big and exciting on the ball field, and it just caught on – with listeners, it snowballed.

Thompson phased out the expression when the Vietnam War was protracted, although it was later picked up by North Carolina Tar Heels football and basketball broadcaster Woody Durham.

"Ain't the beer cold!" became the title of Thompson's autobiography, in which he described the story behind the exclamation:

For years in my game broadcasts I had used the expression, 'Ain't the beer cold!' when things were going especially well for the home team. I got that phrase from Bob Robertson, a spotter who worked with me on Baltimore Colts football games (that were sponsored by the makers of National Beer). Eventually, I received lots of mail from people in

the Carolinas, the area sometimes referred to as the Bible Belt. The listeners felt they shouldn't have to put up with my ad libs about beer with all the beer advertisements they were already exposed to, and I thought they had a legitimate beef. So, I stopped using the line sometime in the 1970s.^[1]

External links

• Chuck Thompson Ford C. Frick Award biography at the National Baseball Hall of Fame
• Chuck Thompson, Voice of the Baltimore Orioles, Dies The Baltimore Sun, March 7, 2005
• Marylanders Celebrate Chuck Thompson's Life
• Isaacs, Stan. "The Orioles Play Stop The Music", Sports Illustrated, October 8, 1979

Bibliography

• Smith, Curt. Voices of The Game. 2nd edition. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992.
• Bready, James H. The Home Team. 4th edition. Baltimore: 1984.