Pat Summerall, 'the voice of football'

Over four decades, NFL player-turned-broadcaster Pat Summerall, who died Tuesday in Dallas at age 82 of cardiac arrest, described some of the biggest sporting events in America in his deep, resonant voice.

He delivered the details on 16 Super Bowls, the Masters, and U.S. Open tennis with understated style.

Born George Allen Summerall on May 10, 1930, in Lake City, Fla., he was an all-state prep football and basketball player, and played baseball and tennis. He played football at Arkansas before going to the NFL, where he was a kicker for the Chicago Cardinals and New York Giants. He retired after the 1961 season and was hired by CBS Sports.

In the 1970s, Summerall and former Eagle Tom Brookshier were the No. 1 NFL broadcast team for CBS, working three Super Bowls together.

In a eulogy at Brookshier's funeral in 2010, Summerall recalled the first time they met - during a game at Franklin Field. "He just about split my face mask away from my helmet," Summerall said.

It turned out to be a serendipitous pairing, Summerall doing crisp, economical play-by-play and Brookshier doing a stream-of-consciousness color.

"I'd babble on and on," Brookshier said in a 2010 Inquirer story, "wandering around trying to remember what it was I'd started to say about four sentences back, and Pat would step in and tidy it all up before the next snap."

The duo remained together until CBS paired John Madden with Summerall in 1981. "Pat was my broadcasting partner for a long time, but more than that he was my friend for all of these years," Madden said in a statement on Tuesday. "Pat Summerall is the voice of football and always will be."

"He was a master of restraint in his commentary, an example for all of us," CBS Sports' Verne Lundquist said.

A recovering alcoholic, Summerall had a liver transplant in April 2004. The lifesaving surgery was necessary even after 12 years of sobriety.

After an intervention in a Camden hotel organized in 1992 by Brookshier with, among others, former NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle, former CBS Sports president Peter Lund, and former PGA Tour commissioner Deane Beaman, Summerall entered the Betty Ford Clinic.

"I had no intention of quitting, I was having too good a time," Summerall said in a 2000 AP story. "The prescribed stay at Betty Ford is 28 days. They kept me 33 - because I was so angry at the people who did the intervention, the first five days didn't do me any good."

But later, he acknowledged to Bill Lyon in the book When The Clock Runs Out: "Brookie saved my life. Literally."