Bob Robertson: Washington State’s Bob Barry
A broadcasting legend will begin another college football season Saturday night in Oklahoma. In related news, Bob Barry also will call a game.
While Barry begins his 50th and final college football season, calling the Oklahoma-Utah State game, in Stillwater, Washington State’s Bob Robertson begins his 44th season with the Cougars. And like Barry in Oklahoma, Robertson has gone back and forth in Washington.
Robertson called WSU games from 1964-68, jumped to Washington for three years, then returned to Washington State, where he’s been since 1972.
Robertson, 81, begins his 47th season overall calling either WSU or UW games. Robertson also is the voice of the Spokane Indians, the Class A Northwest League baseball team, but he’s been around so long, Robertson once spent a season re-creating games, inventing play-by-play off teletype events, like Ronald Reagan once did in the 1930s on Cub games for a radio station in Davenport, Iowa.
Robertson quit doing WSU basketball in 1994. A long-held story said that then-Washington State coach Kelvin Sampson wanted someone who lived closer to Pullman, Wash. — Robertson still lives in Tacoma, on the other side of the state from Pullman — but the Seattle Times reported that Sampson later phone Robertson to tell him that wasn’t true.
Over the years, Robertson turned down two NBA and two NFL jobs, but he always wanted to do baseball. He called three Mariner games in 1992, and the Times reports Robertson will lampoon into a takeoff of the fictional Crash Davis from “Bull Durham”: “Yeah, I was in the Show. I was in the Show for 21 days once. The greatest 21 days of my life.”
My long-time friend, OG&E spokesman Tim Hartley, is a WSU grad who alerted me to Bob Robertson. “On behalf of all of us out here who cherish radio play-by-play, thanks for the column on Bob Barry … Of course, thinking about radio men takes my mind quickly to Bob Robertson, age 81, who begins his 44th season as Voice of the Cougars on Saturday night in Stillwater. If you have a chance to meet Mr. Robertson while he’s here (and to get re-acquainted with his sidekick Jim Walden), you’ll be reminded of what it means to be a ‘class act.’ He ends every broadcast thusly: ‘Always be a good sport; be a good sport all ways.’ Accordingly, we don’t boo our visitors.”
-------------Berry Tramel can be heard Monday through Friday from 4:40-5:20 p.m. on The Sports Animal radio network, including AM-640 and FM-98.1. You can e-mail him here and follow him on Twitter @BerryTramel. Visit Berry's website here.
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Thanks for the piece on Mr. Robertson. I’d say that he pre-dates statehood in WA, but he probably wouldn’t like that. He also did televised baseball for the PCL Seattle Rainiers and Tacoma Giants, long, long ago. He and Walden are quite a pair. Bob is a class act, and a real treasure of the northwest, not just to Cougar fans, but most of us who’ve been around a while.