Good sport always
PULLMAN – The words are so familiar that Bill Doba mouthed them to himself Tuesday night as the man sitting next to him ended yet another broadcast. “Always be a good sport, be a good sport all ways,” Bob Robertson said, closing out the Washington State coach’s radio show.
Robertson, of course, has been around Cougars football for much more than the occasional coaches show. On Saturday he will take the microphone for the first home game of his 40th season doing Cougars football.
His trademark phrase – and he did in fact acquire a trademark on it about a decade ago – has been a signature dating back to a time before his first game on the Palouse.
“A play on words, always and all ways,” said Robertson, who detailed a long search for the right signoff. “I did it, and it felt OK. Nobody else was using it, so I just went ahead and kept on using it.”
That phrase and all the words coming before it have taken the 77-year-old a long way in the broadcasting world. Robertson is a member of multiple regional and national halls of fame, and has been named the state’s Sportscaster of the Year on 15 different occasions.
His is a career that spans decades, going back to 1949, when, in a wise move, he passed on a season of minor league baseball in Oregon to start calling games in Wenatchee.
“Until I was about 30, every year I would kind of think maybe I should go back and play baseball,” he said. “But by then I was married, and the playing career days were way long past. So I stayed with this.”
Before arriving in Pullman, Robertson took the mike in a number of minor league baseball towns, gave a voice to Notre Dame football when Paul Hornung was in the backfield, and helped found a TV station in Tacoma.
In fact, most Cougars fans are probably too young to remember that Robertson once did play-by-play for the Pac-10 program on the other side of the state as well.
After broadcasting WSU games from 1964-68, a network switch sent Robertson to Montlake, where for three years he covered Washington games. Another shake-up in the radio rights world sent him back to WSU on football Saturdays, although he nearly ended up reversing course and going back to the Huskies just a year after that.
“I rationalized it. I thought to myself, now, if I do this there’s only two years left on that contract,” Robertson said. “If I go back to the Cougars then leave them a second time, I’m never going back there again. So I ended up not accepting the deal at Washington and I stayed with the Cougars.”
He’s been there since, although his yearly schedule isn’t limited to a dozen or so days on the air.
In addition to Cougars football, he does play-by-play work for the Spokane Indians as well as Division III Pacific Lutheran basketball – men’s and women’s. Every now and then, he’ll travel to games just like the rest of the gang – on the team bus.
“I’m driving through Arizona listening to the radio, going through the dial,” recalled Jeff Aaron, who worked with Robertson as a sideline reporter at Cougars games for seven of eight seasons from 1993 to 2001. “And all the sudden I hear the high school state championship football game, and it’s Bob Robertson doing the game.
“The energy is always the same, and I marvel at that. And any time that I whine in my career that I’m too busy or I’m working too hard, I think of his schedule. … If Bob Robertson isn’t tired, I can’t be tired.”
Robertson thought about scaling things back a year ago when his wife, Joanne, became ill. But she pushed him right back out the door, and Robertson sees no reason to stop calling games now.
“What are you going to do, play golf on Tuesday by myself?” he asked. “I was a baseball player, and I grew up learning that any ball that far out of the strike zone you shouldn’t swing at.”
The veteran of countless games in almost every sport under the sun does see one scenario where he might leave the business he’s loved since childhood.
“Maybe someday somebody in a network will use it and I can sue him for 100 million dollars. And then I’ll retire. Buy a yacht or something.”