DyeStat.com – News – Bob Hersh: The Anchorman

Track And Field Flourished In The Light Of Bob Hersh’s Brilliant Mind

By Marc Bloom for DyeStat

Bob Hersh was a commanding presence in track-and-field whose authority lent weight to his every word. It wasn’t only that Bob knew the rule book and record book inside and out — which he did, question him at your peril — but that with his lawyer’s training and Ivy League education, Bob burst forth on every point with eloquence, erudition and a manner of speech far from the streets of his native Brooklyn.

Whether delivering monologues on the finer points of a relay zone, hammer cage or false start — with the locution of a Greek orator in the Penn Relays press box, Olympic stadium announcers’ tribunal, or at USATF national conventions or champagne-feted World Athletics council gatherings in far-off European capitals — Bob captivated his audience with style and substance, and a never-relinquished fan-of-all-fan’s devotion to fact. 

Bob died last Thursday, Jan. 19, after a long illness. He was 82, and would have turned 83 on Feb. 12 — one day after this year’s Millrose Games, whose signature event, the Wanamaker Mile, was perfumed annually by Bob’s call, starting with his own anticipated vocals, a tease of the thundering battle to come:

“Ladies and gentlemen… The Wanamaker Mile!”

Simple words, but Bob’s timing and timbre, leavened with a personal but restrained excitement the audience could taste, stirred thousands out of their seats for the countdown of starters alone. Bob knew his crowd. 

With his recitation of athlete credentials, giving only enough, not too much, and then in the race play, concise with wording paced as lyrical as poetry, Bob exercised an impresario’s instincts as though wielding a conductor’s baton in front of an orchestra. 

But he would never make himself the story. Bob’s rhetorical flourishes were underpinned by a journalist’s boundary. After a big race, a Wanamaker, when the uproarious fans settled back into their seats sated with track’s wonder, they could breathe re-assurance that the tableau they’d come for was just right, the nuances covered, with a completeness fashioned of grace by the man with the mic.

Bob lived on Long Island, in the town of Roslyn Heights. At the funeral the day after his passing, family, friends and colleagues spoke of Bob’s immersion in the sport for some 65 years since he was a high school team manager, and his trajectory to the highest levels of track and field…