Clinton, South Carolina, Thursday, January 30, 2020, 2:06 p.m.

Bill Hogan had the same approach to broadcasting that I applied to scoring baseball games. I always tried to play it straight and be fair to both teams, not just the home one. Because I saw that team every night, I figured I would be slightly partial to it but tried not to be.

On radio, Bill played it straight. He was a reporter over the air. His delivery was matter-of-fact, his humor deadpan, his attention to detail unfailing. When Bill described a ballgame, the listener never had to worry about the score being regularly reported or important details being omitted.

I grew up listening to Bill broadcast the football games of Presbyterian College and the basketball games of Furman University.

Bill was 95 when he died on Wednesday. The last time I saw him was on the night of April 26, 2019, when he was inducted into the Laurens County Sports Hall of Fame. I used to see him and his wife, Esther, who died in 2015, at Fatz Cafe, where they often dined.

Reared in Minnesota and educated in Maryland, Bill was a World War II veteran who decided he wanted to describe ballgames. When he bought WLBG AM-FM in Laurens, he introduced sports as a radio format in South Carolina. Bill ran the place and broadcast college football and basketball. Larry Gar was the radio voice of both the Greenwood Braves, a Class A baseball team, and the Ware Shoals Hornets. When I was in high school, I used to tag along with Jeff Singer to describe NAIA District 6 basketball games at Lander, Erskine, Newberry and wherever else a big game was being played. I sat next to Jeff at the press table and kept statistics.

Bill was the voice of the Paladins during the heyday of my alma mater’s basketball program. His analyst was John Block, who had played at Furman and was teaching me history while I was sending the stats up to the rafters of Greenville Memorial Auditorium, where Bill and John broadcast the games from what were otherwise booths for the spotlights. They described a victory over South Carolina in the NCAA East Regionals at the Palestra in Philadelphia and back-to-back wins over North Carolina and N.C. State in Charlotte’s North-South Doubleheader (1978). The Joe Williams-coached Paladins beat the Tar Heels again the following year.

Bill was low-key behind and away from the microphone. His description had a rhythm and a cadence. He let nothing speed him up. Today’s announcers let nothing slow them down.

The snap, the hold, the kick. It’s long enough. It’s high enough. It’s straight enough, and as time expires, the Bears of Lenoir-Rhyne have taken a Carolinas Conference football victory over the Blue Hose of Presbyterian by a score of 10 to 9.

Then there’s the most amazing sequence I ever heard on the radio. I was a senior at Clinton High School and had already decided I was going to college at Furman. The Paladins, enduring Williams’ only bad year as head coach, were playing at Richmond against the Spiders. With a couple seconds to go, Richmond had the ball and a 2-point lead. Dr. Block had already left the scorer’s table and was underneath the basket, waiting for the post-game interview with Coach Williams.

Richmond has possession under its own basket. Just getting the ball in play will probably wrap this game up, but wait. Whit (Steve Whittington) has stolen the in-bounds, and he lays it in to tie the score. Wait. He may have been fouled. John … can you hear me?

Yes, Bill.

Was he fouled?

He’s standing right here. Hey, Whit, were you fouled?

“Yeah, man, I was fouled!”

The only person who raised his voice was the ballplayer. Bill’s sentences didn’t have exclamation points. Just the facts. Like Joe Friday.

Whittington missed the free throw. The Paladins lost in triple overtime.

At Furman, in the press room, where I worked at home games, Bill and I had many pleasant conversations over Pepsi – Furman was and is “a Pepsi school” – and food catered by Darrell Floyd’s Sandwich Shop. He rarely raised his voice, but his eyes twinkled. He rarely laughed, but he chuckled a lot. He was one of my two contacts from back home. One of Bill’s daughters was a little older; his son was a few years younger. My other contact was Benny Walker, from Laurens, who was Furman’s financial-aid director, and I needed lots of it to go there.

I wrote a whole blog, but I only need one word to characterize Bill Hogan: pleasant.

 

 

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