Voice of the games
He calls himself a poor old dumb farmer. But sports fans across the Northwest know him better as the “Voice of the Vandals.” After 59 years with the University of Idaho, the voice behind hundreds of football and basketball games, Bob Curtis of Post Falls, will announce his last game this season. “It’s a wonderful situation, but it’s time for me to leave,” he said.
Curtis, who will be 80 in December, started broadcasting as a student at Washington State University.
He remembers being too slow and too small to qualify for competitive sports and said he began feeling sorry for himself when Pete Barr, station manager for the university’s public radio station, KWSC, asked Curtis to try out for sportscasting.
The next week, he was calling plays on the air.
As a senior at WSU, he was sportscasting for teams in Idaho, Montana and Washington. He graduated from WSU in three years and a summer semester with a B.A. degree in communications and a minor in English.
After he finished school, he’d travel to each home game from the family ranch, Curtis Cattle Co., near Elberton, Wash., between Garfield and Colfax. When the weekly game was over, he’d return home to work in the fields at night. Sometimes he wouldn’t get home until 4 a.m.
“It only got to be a problem in the fall” when harvest is most intense, he said. “All you got to do was change clothes and get on the tractor and go.”
As an announcer, he worked for radio sponsor Tidewater Associated Oil and earned about $150 a game, which was a hefty sum in 1946, he said. He still remembers their monogram and calls out with a hint of familiarity, “Play ball with Associated.”
A decade later, when the pops and clicks of television started stealing radio fans, the Pacific Coast Conference bought all their own radio rights, and took over sponsorship of the sportscasters. Washington radio station owners met at the Hayden Lake Country Club and offered new contracts for the announcers.
When the new owner of WSU’s station offered Curtis $25 a game, Curtis told him to “blow it out his nose.”
“I thought it was an injustice,” he said. “I told him absolutely not.”
Curtis walked out to the bar, and Ken Hunter, the sports information director for University of Idaho at the time, cut him a deal. Curtis got his $150 a game.
“I did it at the time with the thinking that I’d show whoever bought the rights that even Idaho could afford to pay what we had used to be paid for our services,” he said. “Idaho was so good to me that first year that I never left them.”
He’s seen hundreds of players pass through over the years, and he’s on his 16th head football coach.
A few games stand out as his favorites, including some when crowds would hang from the rafters in the early ‘60s to see Gus Johnson play basketball, and the tide-turning final seconds of the season finale in 1998, when UI beat Boise State in a risky two-point play. That win sent UI to the Humanitarian Bowl.
But his favorite memories were the coaches, directors and players who turned into friends along the way.
Tom Morris, assistant athletic director for sponsorship and marketing at UI, has announced beside Curtis for 17 years as “color” for the play-by-play program. Morris will begin announcing in Curtis’ place next year.
“It’s like replacing Vince Lombardi,” he said. “You’re replacing a legend. Bob will always be the Voice of the Vandals as far as I’m concerned.”
Morris remembers Curtis’ devotion to each game and the times when Curtis would have a cold. Curtis would sneeze and cough and suck on lemon halves during commercial breaks, but when the green light came on, he was as professional as ever, Morris said.
When they roomed together on the road, they talked about the ups and downs of life and plenty of Vandal history.
“You see a passion there that you don’t see a lot any more,” Morris said. “You cut him open, and it’s black and gold.”
Leonard Perry, head men’s basketball coach for UI, met Curtis when he started playing basketball for the university in 1989. Now in his third year as a coach, Perry doesn’t hesitate to call Curtis “the biggest Vandal there is.”
Curtis keeps up with old friends and about 20 coaches through an annual golf tournament at the Lewiston Golf and Country Club after spring practice.
“I’m not the wealthiest man in world or the poorest man in the world … but I’m the wealthiest man in world with friends,” he said. “That was my goal in life.”
Curtis sold the family ranch nine years ago and started a real estate company in Pullman with his wife, Lynn. They now sell real estate with Coldwell Banker Schneidmiller Realty in Coeur d’Alene.
Whether chasing a cow or calling ball games, he said he liked it all.
His first game this season will be the 529th consecutive game of his career with the Vandals. He’ll announce 12 games this year, with a retirement vacation planned after the last game in Hawaii.