Keith Jackson Is Riding High After a Brief Retirement

On Saturday, Keith Jackson will drive from his hillside home in Sherman Oaks to the Rose Bowl, where he will do the play-by-play on that evening’s ABC telecast of the UCLA-Nebraska football game.

On Sept. 24, he’ll drive to the Coliseum to announce the USC-Oklahoma game.

To Jackson, those are plum assignments. “I’m one guy who loves to drive to work,” Jackson said.

Usually, Jackson flies to work. His broadcasting career, which began at a Seattle television station in 1954, has taken him all over the world.

“I’ve announced every kind of sporting event except hockey and demolition derby, and to be frank about it, I don’t really care to ever do those,” he said.

He also doesn’t care to do any more extensive traveling.

A couple of years ago, the travel, among other things, began to get to Jackson. So, very quietly, he retired. He let his contract, which ran through the Sugar Bowl of Jan. 1, 1986, expire.

For 10 years, beginning in 1976 when he had replaced Chris Schenkel, Jackson had been ABC’s No. 1 man on college football. But Roone Arledge, former president of ABC Sports, in an effort to keep Al Michaels from jumping to CBS, offered Michaels equal status on college football.

Jackson had experienced other disappointments. He spent one season, 1970, as the play-by-play announcer on “Monday Night Football,” then was replaced by Frank Gifford. Twice he had been taken off baseball, although he downplays that. “I never had a real fancy for baseball,” he says.

But the college football demotion, plus the years of traveling, convinced Jackson, then 57, to change careers.

“I was going to get out of broadcasting altogether,” he said. “I had plans to go into private business, and also teach, which I’d still like to do someday.

“I went three months without hearing from anyone at ABC. I didn’t even know anybody from Cap Cities, the new owners. I didn’t know anything about them.”

Then Dennis Swanson, who had replaced Arledge as ABC Sports president in late January 1986, flew to Los Angeles to meet with Jackson.

“During that first meeting, we talked for three hours,” Jackson said. “I had never met Dennis Swanson. We talked philosophies, we talked about a lot of things.”

Swanson coaxed Jackson out of retirement with offers of reinstatement as the network’s No. 1 play-by-play announcer on college football and a lifetime contract.

Swanson, in turn, compensated Michaels by giving him “Monday Night Football.”

So everybody was happy.

“The most appealing thing for me was the new contract called for a reduced schedule,” Jackson said. “At this point of my career, I don’t need more exposure.”

These days, things are coming up roses for Jackson, who will soon turn 60. Last year, ABC, flip-flopping with CBS, began televising Pacific 10 and Big Ten games instead of College Football Assn. games. That meant a lot of West Coast assignments for Jackson.

Then this summer, ABC acquired the Rose Bowl. So, on Jan. 2, Jackson gets to take another freeway ride to Pasadena.

Jackson, originally from Georgia, is sort of a laid-back good ol’ boy who seems somewhat out of place in sports broadcasting, a profession in which some people change jobs about as often as they change the oil in their car.

“I’ve had two jobs and one wife,” he says. And he has lived in the same house since 1964.

Jackson’s first job out of college, with Seattle’s KOMO-TV, was primarily in news. But he also announced University of Washington football and Seattle University basketball in the Elgin Baylor days.

A job with the western division of ABC radio as a news correspondent brought him to Los Angeles. He announced his first college football game for ABC Sports in 1966, a Clemson-Duke game that Clemson won, 9-6. “It was a hell of a game,” Jackson recalls.

Jackson joined ABC Sports full-time in 1967.

He and his wife, Turi, met on a golf course in 1951, when both were students at Washington State. They were married the following year.

They have three children. Melanie, 32, has two degrees from USC, but she is now a rock singer with REO, formerly REO Speedwagon. Lindsey, 30, also a USC graduate, works in the video department at KPIX, a San Francisco television station. And Christopher, 21, is an economics major at Stanford.

If being a favorite subject for impersonators is a sign of celebrity status, then Jackson has achieved it. He’s replaced Howard Cosell as the most impersonated sportscaster.

Roy Firestone started it all years ago.

Just the other night, a local sportscaster showed Keith Jackson, the Philadelphia Eagle tight end, and, attempting humor, said, “Fuuuummmmble.” It was a bad impersonation of Keith Jackson, the announcer.

Jackson, asked about all the attempts at impersonating him, said: “I don’t pay too much attention, but I’ll tell you one thing. There sure are a lot of people doing it, and they’re not doing it very well.”

About his job, Jackson said: “I try to do the best I can do, and sometimes after a game I go home satisfied and sometimes I go home and growl. It’s a 50-50 proposition. I’m satisfied about half the time.

“You can’t worry what people who don’t know anything about the business write and say about your work. If you do that, you’ll end up in a funny farm.

“I have a simple philosophy. If management can find somebody better to do my job, then they’re not doing their job if they don’t hire that person.”

Jackson must be doing something right.

TV-Radio Notes

At 12:30 p.m. Saturday, ABC will televise the USC-Stanford game, with Al Michaels and Lynn Swann reporting. . . . Joining Keith Jackson at the Rose Bowl for the 5 o’clock UCLA-Nebraska game will be commentator Bob Griese and sideline reporter Mike Adamle. Larry Kamm, who will direct the telecast, celebrates his 26th anniversary at ABC Saturday.

The NBC announcers working the Raiders’ game at Houston Sunday at 1 p.m. will be Ray Scott and Joe Namath. Scott, the old-time Packer announcer who now is the radio voice of Arizona State, is among the fill-in announcers NBC will be using the next four weeks while the regular guys are in Seoul. Others include Curt Gowdy, Al DeRogatis and Paul Hornung. . . . Another televised pro game Sunday will be the San Francisco 49ers vs. the New York Giants at 10 a.m. on Channel 2, with Verne Lundquist and John Madden reporting. . . . If the Ram-Raider game at the Coliseum Sept. 18 doesn’t sell out 72 hours in advance, Los Angeles will get either Atlanta at San Francisco or the Giants at Dallas.

Wednesday’s America’s Cup race was possibly the most boring sporting event ever on television. ESPN made a gallant effort to spruce things up, but to no avail. They do it all again today, beginning with pre-race coverage at 11:30 a.m. If you need something to put you to sleep, this is guaranteed to do it. Michael Fay, Dennis Conner and the other rich kids involved in this event have destroyed sailing as a spectator sport.

Channel 4 will be broadcasting its newscasts from Seoul, beginning Sept. 17. Next Thursday, to kick things off, the station offers a half-hour taped special, “Channel 4 Goes to the Olympics,” at 7:30 p.m. The special will look ahead to the Games and profile many Southern California athletes who will compete.

Kudos: During halftime of the New York Giant-Washington Redskin game last Monday, ABC showed a moving and well-done feature on Giant tackle Karl Nelson, who has apparently recovered from cancer. Swann narrated the piece, which was produced by Emile Deutsch. As for the game coverage, it too deserved high marks. . . . U.S. Open coverage by CBS begins today at 10 a.m. and concludes at 4 p.m. with a 30-minute local break sometime in between. Saturday’s eight hours of coverage begins at 8 a.m., and Sunday’s coverage of the men’s final begins at 1 p.m.

Basketball’s Reggie Theus, traded this summer from Sacramento to Atlanta, will appear on Showtime’s “The Boys” Saturday night at 10. Theus plays himself in his second television acting role. Last year, he appeared in a CBS sitcom, “Better Days.” . . . ESPN has hired New York sportscaster Charley Steiner as anchor for “SportsCenter.”