Jim Simpson (sportscaster)

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
For other people named Jim Simpson, see Jim Simpson (disambiguation).
Jim Simpson
NSSA Hall of Fame
(2000)

James Shores Simpson

Hall of Fame
.

Career

Jim Simpson was born in Washington, D.C., and grew up in nearby Chevy Chase, Maryland. He began his broadcasting career with a short-lived radio show, Hunting and Fishing with Jimmy Simpson, when he was 15.[1] He attended George Washington University and served in the Coast Guard and Navy Reserve. After several jobs in radio, he began working in television in Washington in 1949.

In the early 1950s, he shared a half-hour news program at Washington's

owned-and-operated Washington station, WRC-TV, in 1955. Simpson broadcast Atlantic Coast Conference basketball
games in the early 1960s and worked as a sports reporter at WRC-TV.

NBC Sports

Eventually Simpson would broadcast many sports at

golf. For much of the 1960s and 1970s he was generally considered the network's number two play-by-play announcer, behind only Curt Gowdy. He was in New Haven, Connecticut on November 22, 1963, preparing to call the annual Harvard-Yale football game with Lindsey Nelson and Terry Brennan, when word came of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Simpson was quoted as saying to Nelson as they walked through the tunnel of the Yale Bowl, "We will remember this walk and this moment for a long, long, time." His work on American Football League (and later American Football Conference
) telecasts for NBC is perhaps what he is best remembered for.

In 1966, Simpson and Bill Cullen (who at the time, along with Simpson hosted a sports anthology series called NBC Sports in Action), were the between-periods co-hosts for NBC's Stanley Cup Finals broadcasts. It marked the first time that the Stanley Cup Finals were broadcast on American network television. It was also the first time that hockey games were broadcast on network television in color.[2] The CBC would follow suit the following year.

On January 15, 1967, Simpson (along with former quarterback

Olympic Games
for NBC television.

ESPN

In

TNT
.

After his sportscasting days Simpson retired to

St. Croix, Virgin Islands. Among other firsts he was the initial U.S. sportscaster to appear live via satellite from Asia, and he was involved in the first American sportscast using instant replay technology. In 2005, ESPN brought Simpson back from retirement to do play-by-play for a series of college basketball games in a "turn back the clock" format on the ESPN Classic network. He died on January 13, 2016, in Scottsdale, Arizona at the age of 88.[4]

References

  1. ^ a b c "Jim Simpson, versatile sportscaster who helped launch ESPN, dies at 88 - The Washington Post". The Washington Post.
  2. ^ Ted Damata (April 10, 1966). "Black Hawks in Colorful Color". Chicago Tribune. Tribune Publishing. p. C1.
  3. ^ Hagger, Jeff (January 11, 2017). "Rundown of Dick Vitale's college basketball TV partners". Classic TV Sports.
  4. ^ "Hall of Fame Sportscaster Jim Simpson of ESPN Early Days Dies". ESPN.com. January 13, 2016. Retrieved January 13, 2016.

External links
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