New York Times articles on Marty Glickman
Anti-Semitism by Americans In Berlin Rejects a Sprinter
By Ira Berkow
Copyright New York Times Company Jan 7, 2001
On an August day in 1936, Marty Glickman, wearing his United States Olympic jacket, stepped off the train in the crowded Berlinbahnhof with his teammates. Glickman, then a dark-haired 18-year-old and a Syracuse freshman sprinter, felt a tap on the shoulder.
A young man introduced himself, saying he was an American and had recognized Glickman from newspaper photographs. He said that he was, like Glickman, a Jew, and that he was in Berlin and attending medical school.
”In Germany?” Glickman asked. ”Why?”
Glickman knew, of course, of the restrictions that the Nazi dictator, Adolf Hitler, had imposed on Jews.
”I couldn’t get into medical school in the States because of quotas against Jews,” the fellow said. ”But somehow I was accepted in a school here.”
Glickman told me this story a few years ago. ”Little did I know at that moment,” he said, with a tone that still suggested hurt, ”that I would soon be the victim of a kind of quota, too. But by Americans in Germany.”
Glickman was, along with Sam Stoller, scheduled to race in the 4×100-meter relay. Stoller was the only other Jew on the United States track and field team. Just before the race, Glickman and Stoller were told that they were being replaced by Jesse Owens and Ralph Metcalfe, both of whom had won medals in individual sprints.
”The two coaches, Lawson Robertson and Dean Cromwell, said that the Germans had been rumored to be hiding world-class runners,” Glickman recalled. ”I was steamed. I said to Cromwell, ‘How can anyone hide world-class runners?’ ”
The American team, with Owens and Metcalfe, won easily, while the Germans finished third.
Glickman learned that Avery Brundage, an American who spoke and wrote favorably about the Nazis and was head of the International Olympic Committee, ”believed that it was enough humiliation for Germany to have black Americans winning gold medals, but having Jews on the gold medal victory stand was too much.”
Over the past 55 years, Glickman became one of New York‘s best-known broadcasters. But it was his experience in Berlin in 1936 by which, he said, many people continued to know him.
”He and I had different but similar experiences and we talked about them,” said Margaret Bergman Lambert, a German-Jewish high jumper who was not given a chance by the Nazis to compete in the Olympics. ”What was scary about Marty’s situation was that it was American anti-Semitism that prevented him from running. And we shared the pain of the rejection. It never goes away.”
A People Person Who Loved To Talk About Anything
By Frank Litsky
Copyright New York Times Company Jan 7, 2001
With Marty Glickman, what you saw was what you got. And what you got was a man sweet and thoughtful and gentle. He was honest, but not if it would hurt an innocent party.
An old-timer once told him he remembered Marty’s radio broadcast of Red Grange’s New York pro debut. Since Marty was only 9 at the time, the man’s memory was playing tricks. Marty just smiled at him.
”I’m so grateful you remembered,” he said. ”Thank you.”
The man walked off, flattered that he had flattered this great voice. Marty smiled again.
”How old does he think I am?” he said. ”But it’s nice to know that people feel this relationship with me.”
Many people who knew Marty only by his voice felt that relationship. When he started, there was no television, just radio. And in the world of celebrity radio sportscasters, where reputations were big and egos bigger, he showed no ego.
He was of the people, as he demonstrated one night during the early years of HBO. He was doing play by play of a bad Knicks game, and he feared he would lose an already slim audience. So he told his viewers the truth.
”Look, folks,” he said, ”I know the game is bad, but it’s almost over and there’s a good movie coming right after it.”
He loved the microphone and the chance it offered to communicate, but he was generous with it, too. In the 1970’s and 1980’s, when he did the television play by play of Madison Square Garden track meets for HBO and later for the MSG Network, I was his analyst. Between races, while the camera panned the infield, we talked track, and the 20-second windows that analysts get now ran for long minutes then. He loved the sport and loved talking about it. He loved talking about anything.
He never really retired. When he stopped broadcasting, it was because the people who hired felt a neophyte might be better than an old master. So he did the next best thing, coaching the neophytes. Some had been football players who became network analysts. One, who started with him as a 16-year-old, $25-a-night helper at track meets, became an analyst for ESPN and the Prime network.
In recent years, Marty’s heart started betraying him. The closest he came to complaining was when he said, ”We’re all getting older, laddie.”
The day after he died, a call to his home was answered by a tape. It was the voice, great and glorious:
”I’m sorry we’re not in. Please call again.”
A Precise, Animated Diction That Captivated the Listener
By Richard Sandomir
Copyright New York Times Company Jan 7, 2001
Marty Glickman had one of the last big voices, one that alerted a listener to hang in, something extraordinary could happen. And if it didn’t, well, you wouldn’t be wasting your time listening to Glickman demonstrate his passion for sports, scrupulous sense of how to speak well and fidelity to the facts.
Glickman’s voice was not geographically pureed; in the best sense, this first star athlete-turned sportscaster sounded like a New Yorker, Bronx born, Brooklyn raised, who had seen the world.
And from the late 1940’s until 1992, he defined how New Yorkers listened to the Knicks, then the Giants and finally, the Jets. Just how many viewers of Giants games turned down the volume on their TV sets to listen to Glickman on WNEW radio?
Classic play-by-play voices — who made your ears perk up and the dial stop turning — are increasingly rare. Gone, like Glickman, are Red Barber, Mel Allen, Harry Caray, Lindsey Nelson, Jack Brickhouse, Don Dunphy, Ray Scott, Foster Hewitt and Johnny Most.
Vin Scully still offers grand Dodger melodies but no longer works the national stage. Keith Jackson still defines college football, but he is content to work only West Coast games. Ernie Harwell, in his 80’s, is still calling Detroit Tiger games.
There are still other big play-by-play voices — Al Michaels, Dick Enberg, Joe Buck, Jon Miller and Marv Albert, the staccato soundtrack of pro basketball who learned how to call the sport and use its geography by listening to Glickman.
In his autobiography, Glickman wrote that he so influenced Albert ”that he would talk like me around his house, when he answered the phone. His parents thought he was nuts.” He advised Albert to define himself, not be a Glickman clone.
Albert recently reclaimed his role as NBC’s lead voice for National Basketball Association games after it was ceded by Bob Costas, who years ago sought Glickman’s counsel on how to sound more mature.
”Bob, have you ever heard an old man talk rapidly?” Glickman asked. No, Costas said, they speak slowly. ”Then speak slowly,” Glickman said.
He never attained national renown like Costas. He might have, had NBC hired him to call N.B.A. games in the mid-1950’s (a decision caused by anti-Semitism, he wrote) or had ABC not passed him over on the N.B.A. for Chris Schenkel in the 1960’s.
So he elevated our enjoyment of New York sports, mostly on radio, which played to his strengths, with a brio and a voice that excitedly described double reverses, told you precisely where on the old Madison Square Garden floor Carl Braun was shooting from or called out, ”Good! Like Nedicks!”
Marty Glickman, Announcer And Blocked Olympian, 83; [Obituary (Obit)]
By William N. Wallace
Copyright New York Times Company Jan 4, 2001
Marty Glickman, who always believed he was denied a chance to compete in the 1936 Berlin Olympics because of anti-Semitism but later became the pre-eminent radio voice in New York sports, died yesterday at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan. He was 83.
He died from complications after undergoing heart surgery in mid-December, his daughter Elizabeth Alderman said.
Glickman’s voice had the clarity of a bell and the authority of a bank. But his broadcasting career began modestly and because he was a good college football player. After Glickman had scored two touchdowns for Syracuse in an upset of Cornell, a haberdasher in the upstate New York city hired him to do a sports broadcast on radio for $15, ”to capitalize on your fame,” Glickman was told. That was in 1937.
For the next 55 years, he would set a style for generations of New York sports fans and would-be announcers with his staccato, concise, clear descriptions of all kinds of games.
His trademark call of ”Swish!” for a basketball shot that went in without touching the rim or backboard was as familiar to New York listeners as ”Good! Like Nedicks!” The call referred to the name of the Knicks’ sponsor, a chain of hot-dog stands.
After his retirement in the early 90’s, Glickman was remembered for what he did not do: run in the 400-meter relay in the 1936 Games. The day before the 400-meter relay, the assistant coach, Dean Cromwell from the University of Southern California, dropped Glickman and Sam Stoller, the only Jewish athletes on the track-and-field team. The track officials kept Foy Draper and Frank Wycoff on the relay and added Ralph Metcalfe and Jesse Owens.
Owens, despite not wanting to replace Glickman and Stoller, would win his fourth gold medal at the Berlin Games.
Glickman, then 18, said publicly that Cromwell had favored Draper and Wycoff, his own athletes from U.S.C. Years later, Glickman was relentless in in his claim that Avery Brundage, the head of the United States Olympic Committee, and Cromwell were members of the America First Committee and ”sympathetic to the Nazis.”
While not finding written proof that the U.S.O.C. kept Glickman and Stoller out of the relay because of anti-Semitism, William J. Hybl, then president of the Olympic group, said in 1998: ”I was a prosecutor. I’m used to looking at evidence. The evidence was there.” That year, the U.S.O.C. presented Glickman a plaque in lieu of the gold medal he most likely would have won even if Owens and Metcalfe had not raced. Stoller died in 1983.
”If it hadn’t been for that decision by our coaches, no one would remember me as an Olympian,” he told an interviewer in 1996. ”I mean, name another 400-meter relay runner. But I’d much prefer to have run and won a medal.”
His outrage was sustained and severe.
In 1986, he returned to Berlin for a celebration of Owens’s achievement. He wrote in 1994 about returning to the Olympic Stadium: ”Suddenly a wave of rage overwhelmed me. I thought I was going to pass out. I began to scream every dirty curse word, every obscenity I knew. . . . being there, visualizing and reliving those moments, caused the eruption which had been gnawing at me for so long and which I thought I had expunged years ago.”
Throughout his long broadcasting career, Glickman’s medium remained radio despite his occasional forays into television, which included a stint as the National Basketball Association’s first announcer for TV. He was the voice of the football Giants, for 23 years, of the Knicks for 21, Yonkers Raceway for 12, the Jets for 11. Glickman did pre- and postgame shows for the Dodgers and Yankees for 22 years; he broadcast track meets, wrestling matches, roller derbies and rodeos, even a marbles tournament.
”I never got tired of working,” he once told an interviewer. ”If you love something, you can do anything.”
Martin Irving Glickman was born in the Bronx on Aug. 14, 1917. The son of a textile salesman and a homemaker, he grew up in Brooklyn. At James Madison High School, he competed in various sports and also met his future wife, Marjorie.
He never forgot the role the P.S.A.L., the sports arm of New York public schools, played in shaping his life, so much so that his family asked donations be sent to the P.S.A.L. in lieu of flowers.
In addition to his wife and daughter Elizabeth Alderman, of Armonk, N.Y., he is survived by two sons, John Glickman of St. Petersburg, Fla., and David Glickman of Goffstown, N.H.; another daughter, Nancy Glickman of Winchester, Va., 10 grandchildren and 6 great-grandchildren.
Glickman had been in Syracuse one year when he made the 1936 Olympic team. After he graduated in 1939, he joined the radio station WHN and by 1943 was its sports director.
When the New York Knickerbockers were formed in 1946, Glickman was their radio announcer. He was right there as the Giants’ broadcaster with the increase of pro football’s popularity in the 1950’s and 1960’s.
Later in his career, NBC employed him as a critic and teacher of its sports announcers, and Glickman was severe with sloppy former athletes who had been hired to talk.
In 1988 WCBS hired him for his second tour as the Jets’ play-by-play announcer on radio. It was from that position that Glickman quietly said goodbye to his last audience in December 1992, at age 74. His autobiography, ”The Fastest Kid on the Block” (Syracuse University Press), was written with Stan Isaacs, in 1996.
Glickman also had a long association with Home Box Office, mostly as an adviser.
Glickman was in the second generation of sports broadcasters who followed originals such as Graham MacNamee, Ted Husing and Bill Stern. They were shouters who sometimes laced their descriptions with hyperbole. Glickman played it straight, seldom offering opinions, and he was inspirational to many others who followed in the craft.
”My idol,” said one of his former assistants, Marv Albert, another broadcaster who attended Syracuse, and who has become a famous New York, and national, broadcaster in his own right.
Glickman, Shut Out of 1936 Games, Is Honored at Last; [Biography]
By Gerald Eskenazi
Copyright New York Times Company Mar 30, 1998
The United States Olympic Committee presented the broadcaster and former sprinter Marty Glickman with a plaque today in lieu of the gold medal it prevented him from competing for 62 years ago.
This marked the first time the U.S.O.C. has conceded that because he was Jewish, Glickman was kept off the 4×100-meter relay team that captured the event at the 1936 Games in Berlin.
In emotional ceremonies at the New York Jewish Sports Hall of Fame’s annual presentations, the U.S.O.C. president, William J. Hybl, gave Glickman the Olympic committee’s first Douglas MacArthur Award. General MacArthur was the U.S.O.C. president in 1927-28.
Although Hybl said he had never seen written proof that the U.S.O.C., which was headed in 1936 by Avery Brundage, had kept Glickman off to appease Adolf Hitler, Hybl said: ”I was a prosecutor. I’m used to looking at evidence. The evidence was there.”
Glickman recounted how, on the morning of the final trial heat, he and Sam Stoller, who was also Jewish, were told by their coaches that they would be replaced by Jesse Owens and Ralph Metcalfe, even though neither had practiced on the relay team.
”Jesse said, ‘Let Marty run,’ ” Glickman recalled after accepting the award from Hybl. ”But the coaches said, ‘You’ll do as you’re told.’ ”
The coaches, Lawson Robertson and Dean Cromwell, told the team members that the Germans had been hiding their fastest sprinters for the relays and the Americans had to counter with theirs. But the German relay team was composed of the same men who always competed.
Owens and Metcalfe teamed with Foy Draper and Frank Wycoff to win the heat by an astonishing 15 feet. The next day they repeated the victory to take the gold medal, also by a comfortable margin and in world-record time. Thus, the presumably slower Glickman and Stoller still would have been successful.
Hybl explained that the MacArthur award would be given in the future only by the U.S.O.C. president and that it is not necessarily an annual presentation.
”It will be done for circumstances which require recognition by the U.S.O.C..” he said. ”The U.S.O.C. isn’t going to be afraid to tackle things, to have wrongs corrected.”
The 80-year-old Glickman, who went on to a career as a radio and television broadcaster, becoming the voice of the Knicks, Giants and Jets, said of Hybl, ”It was really remarkable, what he said.”
Glickman, born in Brooklyn, is the last survivor of that group of sprinters. He said he tried to avoid being bitter. At the time, since he was only 18 years old, he said, ”I had a whole world ahead of me.”
Hybl said, ”I’m really proud of what the U.S.O.C. has done is this regard.”
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