[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 128 (Wednesday, September 23, 1998)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1788-E1789]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




              IN HONOR OF THE KING OF SPORTS BROADCASTING

                                 ______
                                 

                           HON. GEORGE MILLER

                             of california

                    in the house of representatives

                     Wednesday, September 23, 1998

  Mr. MILLER of California. Mr. Speaker, as the baseball season comes 
to an end with all of its excitement of the homerun derby and the 
incredible performance of the New York Yankees, we in the San Francisco 
Bay Area have something else to celebrate and that is the remarkable 
career of sports announcer Bill King who has been the voice of the 
Oakland A's, The Oakland Raiders, and the Golden State Warriors.
  Bill King has been calling games for forty years and providing so 
many days of enjoyment for the fans. His calls are a major part of the 
legends of American sports broadcasting.
  Mr. Speaker, I have had the privilege the past few years to spend 
time with Bill King in social settings. It is a wonderful evening to 
experience and enjoy his stories, his understanding of sports in 
America, as his desire to talk sports, art, history and politics.
  Recently, the San Francisco Examiner ran an article celebrating Bill 
King's Career in the San Francisco Bay Area. I would like to share it 
with my colleagues. The article follows:

            [From the San Francisco Examiner, Aug. 23, 1998]

  Bill King Has Been the Distinctive Voice of Bay Area Sports for 40 
                                 Years

                          (By Michelle Smith)

       Bill King came to the Bay Area 40 years ago, without a 
     beard or a legacy. Both have long since been firmly 
     established.
       King, however, does not do legacy, the same way he doesn't 
     do shoes and socks, fancy cars or pants in the booth on a hot 
     summer day.
       He chooses to let his career speak for itself, and so it 
     does.
       In his years as the radio play-by-play voice of the A's, 
     Warriors and Raiders, King has been the consummate messenger.
       He has delivered some of the most memorable moments in 
     local sports history with a style and conviction that earned 
     him universal respect among his peers. And King's identity is 
     so strong that even though he has done most of his work in a 
     non-visual medium, he is instantly recognizable behind his 
     distinctive handlebar mustache and beard.
       King's voice is not the traditional baritone of those born-
     to-be-broadcasters. His staccato delivery and ability to 
     summon an evocative description for the big moments trigger 
     memory, emotion and goose bumps.
       Like in 1970 when he called a game-winning 51-yard field 
     goal by George Blanda against Cleveland and declared Blanda 
     had just been elected ``King of the World.'' Or in 1977 
     when King called ``The Ghost to the Post,'' Dave Casper's 
     touchdown catch that gave the Raiders a playoff win in 
     Baltimore. Or his 1978 call of the ``Holy Roller'' game-
     winning fumble recovery in San Diego, when he interpreted 
     an official ordering coach John Madden to ``get his big 
     butt out of here.''
       King's calls of the Warriors' 1975 NBA championship sweep 
     of the Washington Bullets and the A's 1989 World Series sweep 
     of the Giants remain etched in the minds of listeners. As 
     does his signature call ``Holy Toledo'' each time he sees 
     something that needs extra emphasis.
       ``It is always nice when people have good responses to 
     you--it's a lot better than the alternative,'' King said. 
     `You don't want them saying, ``Get that idiot off the air' ''
       Beyond that, King is reluctant to dig deeply into the 
     reasons for his success and longevity. He has been working 
     for a half-century, having called his first minor-league 
     baseball game in Peoria, Ill., in 1948 at age 19.
       ``I am not a terribly introspective person,'' King said. 
     ``I don't do a lot of examining about why this or why that or 
     why I feel this way or that way.''


                         Small-town simplicity

       King is a man of simple ideals--the only evidence of his 
     small-town Illinois upbringing--eclectic interests and a 
     limitless passion for painting a visual picture.
       ``I love being on the air, I really do,'' King said. ``I am 
     a verbal person. I get a tactile feeling on my tongue. To not 
     be able to verbalize is almost crippling to me. Some people 
     would probably say `I know, you never stop.' ''
       King shows no sign of stopping. He continues to work full-
     time at a time when popular Bay Area contemporaries like Lon 
     Simmons and Hank Greenwald have cut back or retired 
     altogether. King just signed a new three-year contract with 
     the A's that keeps him as the team's radio voice through the 
     2001 season.
       He keeps working simply because, he says, ``There's no 
     reason not to. I like what I'm doing. I get paid well for 
     doing it and I can't think of anything that would be more 
     desirable at this point.''
       He admits there no longer is time to do some of the things 
     he loves, like sailing and traveling to places that don't 
     have a baseball diamond within 50 miles. The commute to the 
     ballpark from Sausalito sometimes takes twice as long as it 
     used to, and the preparation--which has been a source of 
     equal parts pride and obsession for King--is not nearly as 
     straight-forward as it used to be, given the vast amounts of 
     information now available.
       King estimates he spends three hours a day preparing for a 
     broadcast. ``I can't imagine what it would be like to be on 
     the computer. I won't do it.''


                          Unique phone system

       For many years in the 1960's, when King was doing both 
     Warriors and Raiders games, he did not have a telephone in 
     his home. A select few knew how to reach him on a downstairs 
     neighbor's number.

[[Page E1789]]

       ``I had this boat hook and I'd lower it down, he'd put the 
     phone on the hook and I'd pull it upstairs,'' King said. ``To 
     let us know if there was a call, he'd bang on the ceiling.''
       King still refuses to put an answering machine in his 
     office and would never consider carrying a cellular phone. 
     His scaled-down mentality applies to transportation as well. 
     King owns two cars, a 1983 Firebird and a 1980 Mercury four-
     door, both of which perform the minimal function of getting 
     him to and from the ballpark with no regard to style.
       If King prefers to keep things simple, one would never know 
     from his varied pursuits. He is a devout patron of the arts, 
     a frequent attendee at the opera, ballet and symphony. He is 
     a talented painter and a lover of all things nautical. He 
     still owns a sailboat and has sailed around the world, taking 
     open-sea trips to Hawaii, Canada and up and down the West 
     Coast. In the 1960s King lived on the boat with his companion 
     of the last 39 years, Nancy Stephens.
       ``Bill has a wonderful mind, and he is interested in so 
     many things,'' Stephens said. ``When he gets interested in 
     something he pursues it and he learns it thoroughly. When we 
     first met, he wasn't well-versed in classical music, and I 
     was. Before I knew it, he knew way more than I did.


                            Self-taught man

       King traveled to the Soviet Union in the late 1970s after 
     teaching himself to read, write and speak Russian, mostly on 
     long flights during trips with the Warriors and Raiders. This 
     thirst for self-taught knowledge is either ironic or 
     appropriate for a man who did not go to college, choosing 
     instead to begin his broadcasting career.
       King's culinary tastes are legendary. He will concede only 
     that he likes ``things that people might consider unusual.''
       King has been known to dip entire pats of butter into a tub 
     of popcorn during a game, and eat raw onions in the booth 
     during the stifling days of summer. His morning favorite is 
     peanut butter and chopped onions on warm tortillas.
       ``His latest concoction is this thing they make up for him 
     at the ballpark and it has onions, tomatoes, salsa and nacho 
     cheese sauce over popcorn,'' said A's broadcast partner Ken 
     Korach. ``It's like he eats whatever pops into his head.''
       ``Bill is unique,'' said Franklin Mieuli, the former 
     Warriors owner.
       Mieuli was so enamored with his play-by-play man that he 
     went to bat for King when KTVU-TV refused to put him on 
     camera because of his beard, paid fines to the league for 
     King when he criticized officials on the air, and answered 
     the telephone calls when King uttered a profanity during a 
     1968 game that is recalled by those in the know as ``NBA 
     Mother's Day.''
       King came to the Bay Area in 1958, hired by KSFO radio to 
     be a fill-in baseball broadcaster for Lon Simmons and Russ 
     Hodges when the Giants and 49ers seasons began to overlap.


                       Caught with his pants down

       ``Chub Feeney owned the Giants at that point,'' said 
     Simmons, who was King's partner for 15 years with the A's. 
     ``He was from New York, very much a suit-and-tie person. The 
     first time Bill walked into the broadcast booth and took off 
     his pants to do a broadcast, I think Chub almost had a heart 
     attack.''
       To clarify, King only takes off his pants on hot days, and 
     only after he's removed his shoes and socks first.
       ``In any weather, I don't like shoes and socks,'' King said 
     ``But in hot and humid weather, I don't like sitting at a 
     ballgame and then getting up after three hours and feeling 
     like I've just taken a shower in my pants. So from the time 
     I've been doing minor-league baseball, when I would work 
     solo, I operated in my skivvies. Now in Texas or Baltimore, I 
     always have a pair of trunks with me.''
       King's voice defined the golden eras of both the Warriors 
     and Raiders. King called Warriors games from 1962-83 and 
     Raiders games from 1966-92.
       ``It gives me chills when I hear some of those old calls,'' 
     said former Raiders coach and current Fox-TV analyst John 
     Madden. ``Those are things that stay with you all your life, 
     the Clarence Davis catch against Miami, the San Diego call 
     Anyone who has ever been a Raider fan will always associate 
     Bill as the voice of the Raiders.''
       Given that many NFL and NBA games were not televised in the 
     1960s and 1970s, King was more than the voice of the game, he 
     was its mind and body as well.
       ``Nobody has even been able to rise to an exciting moment 
     and bring the excitement into the sound of their voice like 
     Bill,'' said Giants announcer Jon Miller, an East Bay native. 
     ``It's not just shouting, it's the theatrical flair that he 
     brings to it. Sometimes in an exciting moment, I find myself 
     trying to do Bill.''


                          Long-lasting impact

       To this day, every Warriors broadcaster finds himself 
     compared to King, who hasn't done an NBA game in 15 years.
       Greg Papa called Warriors games on the radio for nearly a 
     decade. ``I would be at a gas station or something and I 
     would tell people what I did and they'd say, `Oh, Bill King 
     does that,' '' Papa said. ``His power over this market is 
     immense.''
       Raiders fans clamored for King's return when the team moved 
     from Los Angeles back to Oakland three years ago. King passed 
     because he enjoyed the free time his baseball-only schedule 
     allowed. He quit as the Raiders voice in 1992 after a falling 
     out with the Southern California company that held the team's 
     radio rights.
       ``It was very flattering,'' King said. ``But in my mind, 
     once I did baseball alone, I wouldn't think of doing another 
     sport, and that was the operative reason there.''
       King is so happy with his schedule he has set no retirement 
     date.
       Said King, ``It depends on whether I like what I'm doing, 
     and whether I think--and I'm a fairly harsh personal critic--
     I'm still good at it, and whether people think I'm still good 
     at it, because that's the most important thing.''

                          ____________________