Sometimes life can bring you to your knees and make you realize that another part of your childhood is gone.
For me, and an abundance of Bay Area sports fans old enough to remember, that moment came today when learning of Wayne Walker dying at age 80 due to complications from Parkinson’s disease.
In one respect, we should all be blessed to live such a long life but today was a sad one for Bay Area sports fans because there was a time when Walker was perhaps the most identifiable sportscaster in the region. He was the Bay Area sports guru, especially when it came to the San Francisco 49ers.
Walker spent 15 seasons as a linebacker for the Detroit Lions and worked two decades as a sports anchor for San Francisco CBS affiliate KPIX. Walker also served as a network color commentator for NFL games on CBS . He later became the San Francisco 49ers radio color commentator, paired with Lon Simmons and later Joe Starkey.
Walker also hosted 49ers Preview, which was taped during the week but aired on Sunday mornings before the day of 49er games. I remember getting up every Sunday morning when the show aired at 8:30 a.m. If I missed that show, my day was ruined.
The show featured highlights of the previous week’s game, a preview of the next opponent along with in-depth interviews with players and coaches.
Though Walker is remembered as a football broadcaster, he was versatile enough to do baseball broadcasts for the Oakland Athletics from 1976-1980 and 1985. Walker passed on an opportunity to play minor league baseball to attend college, where he played at the University of Idaho.
Did Walker’s experience as an NFL player give him a great advantage as a broadcaster? No question. However, former players becoming broadcasters are a dime a dozen. They may know the game but the delivery of their knowledge fails miserably.
I find that to be a very telling trait because sometimes you get a former player that becomes a broadcaster and they think they know it all but Walker took the opposite approach in that he constantly worked to improve his craft.
With Walker, behind that gap-toothed smile that could rival Michael Strahan, was a perfect blend of a straightforward and humorous delivery. With the latter, it was more of a dry sense of humor that was never in poor taste.
So much of today’s media culture is about how loud your voice can be like Screamin A Smith (err Stephen A Smith), Max Kellerman, Shannon Sharpe or Skip Bayless. In addition, so much of today’s culture is how many readers or listeners you can enrage. Don’t get me wrong, expressing opinions and good healthy discourse on controversial topics have their place but opinions should be substantiated with facts.
Listening to Walker provided a safe haven. Whether it was his highlight show on the 11 o’clock news, his color commentary, his interviews with players and coaches, it is easy to understand why he had such a trusted relationship with his sources. Having spent 18 years in the newspaper industry, I know the value of establishing and maintaining trust with sources.
Walker represented a different era of broadcasting in that the on-air talent were the reporters of the story, not the creators of it.
He had the perfect story-telling mentality for broadcasts. Even if you had no connection as a fan with the ones that were subject to his stories, his folksy demeanor lured you into the story. If you were looking for someone to rattle off stats, Walker was not your guy but his story-telling approach was second-to-none.
Walker also represented a different era of broadcasting in another way. If I couldn’t watch a sports event on TV, I would stay up and wait to watch Wayne Walker’s highlights on the 11 o’clock news, much to my parents’ chagrin. That was our only way of finding out who won.
Nowadays, highlight shows are de-emphasized because between ESPN.com, google, youtube, etc., you can have them at your fingertips in mili-seconds.
I don’t know how I got there but I was on youtube one day and came across footage of Walker’s aforementioned 49ers preview and a CBS broadcast where Walker was doing play-by-play for a Los Angeles Rams-Tampa Bay Buccaneers game.
Now I want to dust off a VCR and pop in a VHS tape to watch Wayne Walker, who is smiling at a broadcast booth in the sky.
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