RickKarle's Blog

     I hope your week has been going well. While the hype for this weekend's Alabama-Georgia game has reached a crescendo, I'm sorry to say the game will not feel right. Now don't get me wrong:  You can't get much better than the Tide and the Bulldogs between the hedges. But the sport of college football has found a void needed filling with the retirement announcement of Larry Munson.

     For 42 years, the gravelly-voiced Munson has been behind the radio microphone at Georgia Bulldog football games. The attraction of Dawg fans to Munson was not due to sheer broadcasting talent, but shear homerism.  Larry Munson was so over the top, so into his beloved Bulldogs that he often forgot to say such important facts as "Georgia scores!". How about this example of a Larry Munson radio call thanks to AOL.com's Pete Holiday?

Buck back. Third down on the 8. In trouble. Got a block behind him. Going to throw on the run. Complete to the 25, to the 30. Lindsay Scott 35, 40. Lindsay Scott 45, 50, 45, 40. Run Lindsay! Twenty-five, 20, 15, 10, 5. Lindsay Scott! Lindsay Scott! Lindsay Scott! Well, I don't believe it. 92 yards and Lindsay really got in a footrace, I broke my chair, I came right through a chair, a metal STEEL chair...Do you know what is gonna happen here tonight? And up at St. Simons, Jekyll Island, and all those places, where all those Dawg people have got those condominiums for four days...MAN, is there gonna be some property destroyed tonight!

      Now if my memory is correct, that call came in the Georgia-Florida game over 25 years ago, and it is but one example of a style exuded by a pure classic.  I've heard Munson utter such phrases as "We stepped on their faces" and "We absolutely nailed them!". Can you imagine another announcer talking like this?  The late Harry Caray comes to mind, but Caray did not have Munson's broadcasting mean streak- and that's exactly why Georgia football fans have loved this man so much for so long.  Long-time Boston announcer Johnny Most was much like Munson, as he called some of the great plays in Boston sports history  ("Johnny Havlicek stole the ball!", and  "Bird steals- over to DJ- it's in!").  Still, for generations of Bulldog football fans, there never has been and never will be another like Larry Munson.

       Munson is now 86 years old. He wanted to continue broadcasting only Georgia home games, but he has realized that now is the time to step aside (ironically, Munson read the writing on the wall last season when he decided not to travel to Tuscaloosa for the Alabama-Georgia game of 2007).

     In Athens, Georgia, some things can be replaced: UGA mascots, head coaches, shredded hedges,  and fraternity pledges. But there will be no replacing Larry Munson. And for that, the sports of college football has suffered.