Central Michigan University Athletics
Oh My! -- A Conversation With Dick Enberg
July 12, 2001
Arguably one of the most well-known Chippewas, Dick Enberg is in his second year with CBS Sports after calling games for NBC for 25 years. His current assignments include men's college basketball, NFL, U.S. Open Tennis and the Masters and PGA Championships.
The sportscaster has called the Super Bowl eight times, Rose Bowl nine times, four Olympic Games and 20 Wimbledon championships. He is the only person to earn a national Emmy Award as a sportscaster (four times), writer (six times) and producer (once). He was the national "Sportscaster of the Year" nine times and has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
The Armada, Mich., native was graduated from CMU in 1957. He served as student body president and was an aspiring athlete who was cut from the varsity baseball team. Enberg was inducted into the CMU Athletics Hall of Fame in 1993.
CMUCHIPPEWAS.COM recently sat down with Enberg near his home in LaJolla, Calif., for this conversation.
CMUCHIPPEWAS.COM: You've endorsed CMU in the past saying if you had to do it again you would still choose CMU. Do you still make that endorsement and why?
ENBERG: Of course. Here I was, a kid from a small town in Armada, Mich., who had to borrow a sports coat for his senior picture, attended a one-room high school and graduated with only 33 people in my class. Central Michigan gave a farm boy a chance. CMU's president, Charles Anspach, spoke at our high school graduation which was hard to believe. Anspach was a big person in Michigan in that day and here he was speaking to a graduating class of 33. My mother had worked at Central Michigan College, so I approached him to see if he remembered her. He asked what my plans were and at that time, I really wasn't sure. So, he asked me if I were a good student and I didn't know how to answer it. So, I forwarded my grades to CMU and before I knew it, I had a $100 scholarship. I couldn't believe they were going to pay a farm boy like me $100 to go to school. CMU had, and still has, the tools to make any young woman or man into a successful person. Central gave me the opportunity to attain every dream I have ever had.
CMUCHIPPEWAS.COM: It is well known that you were cut from the varsity baseball team at CMU. How would your life have changed if you made the team?
ENBERG: I wanted to letter at Central in the worst way. It's the one thing that I wanted to do but it just didn't happen for me. However, I wasn't that great of an athlete. I've always been told that I talk a better game than I play. If I made the team, many things would not have happened. I could not have been the public address announcer at Central Michigan home games. I wouldn't have tried out for the debate team or I wouldn't have applied for a $1 per hour janitorial job at WCEN radio that launched my broadcast career. It just goes to show how one event can have an impact on your life and change the path you actually travel.
CMUCHIPPEWAS.COM: Do you still keep up with CMU sports teams and how?
ENBERG: Of course I still look-in on the Chippewas, although I live on the West Coast in La Jolla, Calif. I'm still a Chippewa at heart and I root for the them, especially when the football and basketball seasons come around. It's hard, though, living as far away as I do to get the scores but I open up the paper and try to get the line or box scores. I still get the alumni magazine and newsletters and those help me keep in touch with what's going in Mount Pleasant. College was one of the best times in my life. I have two teens and I tell them that quite often. College is where I made some of my best friends. It's the type of friends you have around you for the rest of your life.
CMUCHIPPEWAS.COM: What's your greatest CMU sports memory as a spectator or broadcaster?
ENBERG: When I attended school in Mount Pleasant, the football team was the best sport we had. We had one of the best backfields at that time with Walter Beech blocking and Jim Podoley running the ball out of the backfield. Those two ran the ball so well for Central Michigan during their time. However, the memory that most stands out in my mind occurred in Finch Fieldhouse. In those days, the basketball team would practice and then the track team would come in and use the fieldhouse as the basketball team wrapped up its workout. Well, Podoley finishes basketball practice, he walks over to the long-jump pit, still in his basketball shoes and warm-ups, and he set the fieldhouse record in the long jump. Of course, Podoley was just a phenomenal athlete. He went on to play for the Washington Redskins for two years. I think he would have been an exceptional pro athlete but he tore his knee and that cut his career short.
CMUCHIPPEWAS.COM: You are a great spokesperson for college athletics. What do you like most about college sports?
ENBERG: When you are on a college campus it is a happening. It is a part of that whole community. I love being in that environment. I'm excited by the young people and enjoy their thrust to know more and be enthusiastic about it. They give the electricity to an event that somebody who pays $40 a ticket to go to an NFL game with their family doesn't. Those fans may get really into it in the fourth quarter but on a college campus they are excited the night before a game. I love that environment. It's honest, it's fresh, sometimes it's naive. But, it's very special and there is no way a professional crowd, no matter how enthusiastic they are or how big the crowd is, can ever match the college or university campus on a college sports weekend.
CMUCHIPPEWAS.COM: You are an award-winning broadcaster and a lot of your work focuses on the emotional side of sports. How are you able to tell the stories you do as well as you do?
ENBERG: That all is trust. I've been around long enough that they know who I am and that I'm not trying to be sensational or find out something wrong with an individual or team. A terrible thing happened with the Watergate investigation journalistically. From that point on, no longer did we find that writing a positive story or looking always for the good in an event or person was primary. But we've taught a whole legion of media people to look for something investigative or interrogative or what can you find out underneath the carpet that no one else has found before. I'm not saying that is wrong, in fact it's very right. It's important. I defend my position as someone who can be just as journalistic by finding the positive story. I work no less hard at trying to extract information and find an angle, develop it, layer it and tell a good story that is emotionally appealing and makes people at home feel good. "Yes, I'd like to have that kid as my next door neighbor," or "I hope my son has those kind of values one day." Why does that make me any less journalistic than the other person that goes out looking for a story that involves some imprudent action that maybe no one heard of but they found on some police blotter. They got their job done but I'd rather do mine. I'm pleased that I've been able to take that route. Some think I'm too saccharin, too sappy, too emotional and I've been criticized by some of the media people for that but that's who I am and what I love. I don't think we should ignore what's good about our society.
CMUCHIPPEWAS.COM: You recently moved from NBC to CBS. What brought about the change and how has it been?
ENBERG: I was at NBC for 25 years and some marriages don't last that long. I had a tremendous amount of friends and people I cared deeply about and I loved the events that I did. But when I arrived at NBC in 1975, I was hired to do their college basketball game of the week. There weren't 20 games a night or even in a week back then. There was only one big game and it was just the start of the popularity of the college basketball. To do college basketball and the NFL was why they hired me. As time went on, to nobody's fault, NBC lost the college basketball and the NFL. I took a long look at my own life and said you know it's time for me to be a little bit selfish. I wanted to finish my career doing the events that I enjoy most of all. Not that I didn't enjoy what I was doing, I mean I loved doing Wimbledon and the Olympics but there are some things you have to give up and here was CBS with the NFL and college basketball and now I'm back full circle doing the events that were my strength going back 25 years ago. That was the basis for making my decision. I'd be happy anywhere. It's not that I'd be happier working any place else. I'm paid well, I work great events and I have a wonderful partner for football in Dan Dierdorf and basketball with several including Bill Walton, a guy who I called his games back at UCLA. A lot of circles are going around. I get to do the U.S. Open Tennis, so I get my tennis fix out of it still and it's not bad having to write an essay at the Masters. Nobody should have to feel sorry for Dick Enberg.
CMUCHIPPEWAS.COM: "Oh My!", is your trademark call. How did it start and what constitutes an "Oh My!" play?
ENBERG: An "Oh My!" is basically defined as a time where if you wandered away from the television set or the radio and you hear "Oh My!" you ought to come running back in because it is something different. It is either a spectacular play, unbelievable play that's either good or bad, a play that I've never seen before or a happening when you say how could someone do that at that crucial moment. I don't say "Oh My!" much socially, I mean it doesn't come out automatically. It's been a wonderful friend since my days at Central Michigan where I first used it. Then, when I went to Indiana University as a graduate student and won the audition as its new IU Sports Network play-by-play man, I figured I really have to come up with a punctuation mark. "Holy Cow!" had been taken and "Well How About That!" had been taken, too. "Oh Doctor!" had been taken by Red Barber and so I said I'd conscientiously try "Oh My!". Within a week, kids would come up and say there's Enberg -- "Oh My!" so I thought maybe it would work. It came from my mother who usually expressed her dismay in me by saying "Oh My Richard -- how could you do that!" It is a handy little friend that has allowed me, in the moments when I can't think of anything else to say, to just say "Oh My!" and let the crowd see it themselves.
CMUCHIPPEWAS.COM: You were a leader as student body president at CMU and now you are a leader in the broadcasting world. What motivates or pushes you?
ENBERG: That comes from my parents. That's no different than any young person on any college campus today. We are what our genes dictate and how we were raised and the people who influenced us. If we were lucky we had a mother and father that did that. My dad was very demanding and never quick to praise. He always reminded me that "If you think you are good and you are so good that you can't improve, then you can only go one way. So you better get your head screwed on straight because that's what you have to do if you want to get better. Be good first, then be great." It hurt me when I was young because in high school I wanted him to be more loving and full of praise. But to this day I am driven by that. I don't ever want to embarrass myself, my name, my sport, my profession or my employer. I pridefully would say that there are not a lot of young people who will outwork me. I will outwork them so that I come up with a nugget of information that they can't find. I want that and enjoy that. It's a game that I play with myself. I want to think that on a Sunday telecast that I've got something in my bucket that nobody else has. So that the people can say, "I like listening to Enberg because he says the score right and he pronounces the names correctly and now and then he tells me something I've never heard before." The preparation for what I do is the excitement that continues in my job and challenges me.