MORE NEW YORK TIMES ARTICLES ABOUT MARTY GLICKMAN
‘Hitler’s Pawn’ on HBO: An Olympic Betrayal
Copyright New York Times Company Jul 7, 2004
by Richard Sandomir
At age 90, Margaret Bergmann Lambert seems to defy aging: she stands erect and moves gracefully, she talks with vigor and lives with brio. She jokes about the long legs and size 11 feet that made her one of the best high jumpers of her time.
And she remembers with restrained anger the isolation she felt as a Jewish athlete denied basic rights in Hitler’s Germany, and how, despite equaling a national record in the high jump a month before the 1936 Berlin Summer Games, she was excluded from the German Olympic team because she was a Jew.
Gretel Bergmann, as she was then known, had been used by the Nazis to dupe Avery Brundage, the American Olympic Committee chief, and the Amateur Athletic Union into believing that Jews would be on the German team.
”I can still hear that voice calling from within,” she says in ”Hitler’s Pawn,” a fascinating new HBO Sports documentary (July 14, 10 p.m.). ”Jump! Continue to jump. Show them what a Jew is capable of doing, of being. ”
In one of the most dramatic moments in the 60-minute documentary, Lambert sits in a chair in her home and reads aloud, in German, the letter from a Nazi sports official that informed her, ”Looking back on your recent performances, you could not possibly have expected to be chosen for the team.” While she would be provided with a free standing-room ticket, her hotel and transportation expenses to Berlin ”cannot be supplied.”
”Heil Hitler!” the official signed off. Lambert looks at the stained sheet of paper with the typewritten rejection. She examines the front, then the back, as if looking for something that makes sense.
”That’s it,” she says, emits a tiny chuckle, then reminds viewers that the day before that letter was addressed to her, the United States Olympic team boarded a ship and headed to Berlin, oblivious to the notion that the Germans would conduct an elaborate fraud and disinformation campaign to avoid an American Olympic boycott.
That was how they would get rid of her, she says. Not by breaking her legs, but by waiting until the last possible minute, when the Americans were on the Atlantic, to spurn her. But she was a Jew, and to the Nazis, she says, ”We were dirt.”
She was unspeakably angry, but anger made her leap higher. ”A hundred thousand spectators seeing a Jew win,” she says, ”would’ve been heaven.”
Heaven, or at least a better life, came after she emigrated to New York in 1937, married Bruno, now 93, a former track athlete who became a doctor, and reared two sons in a house in Queens. She is a compelling, wounded, humorous, plain-spoken, unsentimental woman who has had 68 years to distill Germany’s betrayal.
In response to a letter from the producers seeking her cooperation, she wrote back that despite her age ”my brain is functioning quite well,” but that if they wanted to know all the facts, ”don’t wait too long.”
George Roy, the co-producer, said: ”She’s easy to like, but for one who has lived her life, you’d think she’d be more emotional. We wondered if her character was going to translate on screen, if people would be smitten by her. But then we just let her talk, and the film pulsates whenever she’s on.”
And she evidently grasps what it means to join the HBO family.
”’The Sopranos,”’ she said last week after a screening of the documentary before an auditorium filled mostly with her large, extended family. ”’Six Feet Under.’ ‘Sex and the City.’ Margaret Lambert. A winning combination.”
Like other HBO Sports documentaries, ”Hitler’s Pawn” is enriched with excellent archival footage, including film of Lambert winning the high jump at the 1934 British Track and Field Championships, photographs and riveting interviews, many of them with other Jewish athletes with whom Lambert trained.
”Everybody who was there stood in awe of Gretel Bergmann,” Kurt Altschul, one of the athletes, said of meeting her in Ettlingen, Germany, where the Jewish athletes gathered to train. Yogi Mayer added, ”She reminded me of Nefertiti.”
The producers, Erik Kesten and Roy, also make widespread use of silent re-creations — actors portray Lambert as a young girl and athlete and play children in her home village, Laupheim, and other athletes. The actress playing Lambert is a ranked high jumper in Germany, Roy said.
Re-creations can be intrusive (more so if they have dialogue), but these are haunting — almost hypnotic — especially when deep focus shots tie the elderly Lambert in the foreground to the young Gretel high-jumping in the background.
What, one wonders, would Marty Glickman have thought of this film? In a way, this is his story, too, told by a German Jew. Glickman, a broadcaster who died in 2001, was on the United States team in Berlin, but he was told by his coaches before the final trial heat of the 4×100-meter relay that he and Sam Stoller, both Jews, were being replaced by Jesse Owens and Ralph Metcalfe, who had not practiced for the event. Glickman always believed that the coaches, perhaps through Brundage, were appeasing Hitler.
Glickman and Lambert would find honor in what they were not allowed to do.
Glickman Provides Reminder Of How Good Sports Can Be
Copyright New York Times Company Feb 9, 2001
By Richard Sandomir
As the XFL’s sewage pollutes NBC Sports, it is valuable to find a bridge to quality in sports television.
You could not find an event that better symbolized quality than the tribute yesterday to Marty Glickman, who died last month. Glickman, the former radio voice of the Giants, the Knicks and the Jets, was also the sports director for HBO Sports in its early years.
Gerald M. Levin, the chief executive of AOL Time Warner, HBO’s parent company, said that Glickman’s dignity and perfectionism infused the work ethic at HBO Sports.
”He gave definition to our coverage,” Levin said. He recalled how HBO came to life on Nov. 8, 1972. The first voice and face subscribers saw was Levin’s. ”After a minute, we went to Madison Square Garden and there was Marty, who was calling the Rangers-Vancouver Canucks game,” Levin said. ”I watched from our studio on 23rd Street and the moment I heard that familiar hustle and concentrated energy in Marty’s voice, I was certain HBO would emerge as a truly miraculous thing.”
Much was made of Glickman’s penchant for offering tart but well-targeted criticisms to even the best of announcers — and his family.
”I’ve always thought this would be a cathartic experience,” Nancy Glickman, one of Glickman’s four children, said cheerfully. ”I’m gratified to learn that other people were told everything they did was wrong.”
After the Olympic Games in Sydney, Australia, in September, NBC’s Bob Costas called Glickman. After their greetings, Costas recalled, ”Marty said, ‘O.K., let’s talk about the Olympics,’ and he went down a list of observations, some of which I’d thought about and some of which I hadn’t. I’d draw a loose parallel between Marty and Steve Allen. Both were pioneers and set the structure for those who followed him.”
Here’s a guess: in 40 years, acolytes will tenderly recall during tributes how Jesse Ventura, NBC’s XFL analyst, and Jim Ross, its new top play-by-play voice, taught them how to shout the obvious, balk at preparation and shill like infomercial loons.
”I know Marty would be railing about the XFL,” Levin said. ”And he would call NBC to account for it.”
A Lasting Triumph; [Letter]
| Copyright New York Times Company Jan 14, 2001
To the Sports Editor: Marty Glickman and I were strangers when we sat next to each other at an N.F.L. exhibition game in Berlin in 1994. We were introduced in the unforgettable setting of the ehrenloge, Hitler’s own box, in the Olympic stadium. We shared a moment of triumph: we were there, the Olympic runner and a Holocaust survivor’s daughter — and Hitler was not. ANN KIRSCHNER |
A Sports Baritone For the Ages; [Letter]
Copyright New York Times Company Jan 14, 2001
To the Sports Editor:
While my research indicates that Marty Glickman spent only 19 years with the Giants and 12 with the Knicks, not 23 and 21 years as The Times reported (”Marty Glickman, Announcer and Blocked Olympian, 83,” Jan. 4), it wasn’t ”time in grade” that made this baritone the cynosure of New York radio sports.
Glickman broke into the Giants radio booth as a play caller in 1949. He was relegated to one season of color commentary in 1950 when WMGM brought in Ted Husing, who introduced a methodology to football play-by-play in the 1920’s. In 1956, when WMGM lost the Giants rights to WINS, Glickman gave way to Les Keiter.
In 1961, when he returned to the Giants for 12 years, Glickman earned immortality in the hearts of New Yorkfans. As he intoned from the booth in the early 1960’s, the Giants advanced to three straight National Football League championship games. Meanwhile, home games were blacked out on television. Radio was indispensable and Glickman’s rich voice filled homes, cars and bars, mesmerizing the Giants faithful.
Earlier, Glickman became the progenitor of basketball on radio when the college game gained popularity in the 1940’s. He developed the nomenclature, gave the court a geography and captured the game’s rhythm melodiously. So many of the terms basketball play-by-play people use today were first developed by Glickman. He served as first voice of the Knicks from 1946 through 1955.
Harry Gallatin was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame the same night Marty was honored as a broadcaster, May 13, 1991. In his speech to those assembled, Gallatin reminisced about returning from his first trip with the Knicks. He began to tell his wife about the game. She stopped him immediately: ”No need to, I listened to Marty and saw it on the radio.”
The list of announcers that Glickman inspired is endless. Johnny Most, his Knicks sidekick in the 1950’s, became an institution with the Celtics. Marv Albert was a 21-year-old Glickman assistant in 1963 when he was sent to fill in on a Knicks game. Albert, of course, became an icon. What did Most think of Glickman? ”Marv couldn’t shine Glickman’s shoes.”
DAVID J. HALBERSTAM
Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
The writer is the author of ”Sports on New York Radio: A Play-by-Play History” (NTC Publishing Group, 1999).
U.S. Dropped Baton; [Letter]
Copyright New York Times Company Jan 14, 2001
To the Sports Editor:
The reason Marty Glickman did not compete in the 1936 Olympics in Munich was that, when the Germans told the United States delegation that no Jews could participate, we acquiesced. Jesse Owens took Glickman’s place on a relay team that was destined to win. Later, Owens was to say, ”That gold was Marty’s.” This was one of Owens’s most gallant moments; sad to say, the same could not be said for our country.
The United States Olympic Committee bragged years later that when the American contingent passed by Adolf Hitler’s reviewing stand, we did not lower our flag; we give in to no one. Obviously we did.
NORMAN L. BENDER
Woodbridge, Conn.
Public Lives; [Metropolitan Desk]
by James Barron
Copyright New York Times Company Jan 9, 2001
Recalling An Athletic Voice
JOHN STERLING, the Yankees announcer who is a co-host of a talk show on WABC-AM, was to broadcast from the ESPN Zone in Times Square on Saturday. Minutes before air time, he was reminiscing about Marty Glickman, who died last week. He was the voice of the Giants, the Knicks, the Jets and the Yonkers Raceway and did postgame shows for the Dodgers and the Yankees for 22 years.
Mr. Glickman did not even have to broadcast a live game to be memorable, Mr. Sterling said. In the days before tape recorders provided the crack of the bat and the roar of the crowd, Mr. Glickman would summarize two baseball games in half an hour, complete with you-are-there sound effects.
”They would move along, say, about to the third inning,” Mr. Sterling recalled, and soon he was recreating Mr. Glickman recreating a game: ” ‘The Giants and the Braves are scoreless. Don Mueller is up for the Giants. Now here’s the pitch.’ ” Here Mr. Sterling clicked his tongue, making a bat-on-ball knocking sound. ” ‘Lined! Base hit, right field!’ ” he shouted.
Mr. Glickman had his catch phrases — ”Swish,” for example — and Mr. Sterling has his: ”Yankees win! Thuuuuuuuh Yankees win!” Mr. Sterling said he was regularly asked to deliver that line outside the broadcast booth at Yankee Stadium.
”The weirdest place I’m asked to say it is in men’s rooms,” he said.
He then excused himself to prepare for his broadcast as he walked toward the bathroom, clearing his throat, ready for requests.
Sports of The Times; Glickman Can’t Stick To a Career; [Biography]
By George Vecsey
Copyright New York Times Company Dec 23, 1992
A MASSIVE scam is being perpetrated upon the football fans of this town by a man named Glickman. He says he is retiring from broadcasting because he is 75 and getting too old to call the plays. But I checked him out last Sunday, and I don’t buy it.
This Marty Glickman has made Charlie Conerly and Emlen Tunnell and Freeman McNeil and Al Toon come to life on Sunday afternoons for the last four decades.
The very best way to enjoy this sport has never been in the stadium or in front of the tube or reading the newspaper, but rather raking leaves or taking a walk or going for a long drive in the country, with the radio on.
On these Sunday afternoons, New Yorkers could envision runners blasting along the right side, cornerbacks pushing the receivers out of bounds, weak punts fluttering in the breeze, behemoths in helmets crashing into each other. It happened best when Marty Glickman was calling the games.
Now, just when the man is getting the hang of it, he is retiring because he wants more time for sailing and more time for his wife and more time for the grandchildren. He is also a founding co-chairman of the Jewish Sports Congress, which hopes to create a memorial to the 11 Israeli athletes and officials slain at Munich in 1972.
Glickman, of course, is much more than a football broadcaster. He was a star running back and sprinter at Syracuse University and a member of the 1936 United States Olympic team. But the sportsmen who ran the American team found ways not to send a Jewish runner out to compete in front of their host, Adolf Hitler.
In later years, when crusty network executives would explain why Marty Glickman had never become a major national broadcaster, there was always the suggestion that he was “very New York.” I think this was a euphemism. His voice is a Brooklyn Bridge of grace and strength, a blend of concrete and steel, best summed up in a single word not found in the dictionary: “Nedick’s.”
When he was broadcasting the Knicks in the 50’s — when thousands of boys all named Albert were studying his inflections — Glickman used to greet a field goal by Carl Braun or Harry Gallatin with the expression, “GOO-OOD — like Nedick’s.” Every true New Yorker knew that Nedick’s (pronounced “NEE-dix”) was a local hot-dog chain, with a branch next to the marquee of the old Madison Square Garden. Don’t bother looking for it today.
With his Nedick’s persona, Glickman has been in the greatest tradition of the local announcer, the voice who sounds like home: Cawood Ledford broadcasting the Kentucky Wildcats. Harry Caray sputtering “Cubs win!” The Fordham Angeleno, Vin Scully, wafting from transistors all over Dodger Stadium. Bill White trying to elicit something rational out of the Scooter. Radio does this best. It is personal, and it requires a bit of imagination.
Not even bothering to turn on the tube, I tuned in WCBS radio last Sunday night. Glickman and his partner, Dave Jennings, painted the picture of a beautiful night in Miami, and Glickman noted this was the “penultimate” game of the Jets’ season and also of Glickman’s career.
When Jennings discussed football fans, Glickman made a point with a question: “You mean the fans in New York are fickle?” His voice lavished every syllable with dripping New York irony, like a man spreading mustard on a knish.
Glickman insists he no longer is as sharp as he used to be, but his urban cadences sounded as good as ever:
“He moves forward, Aguilar does, high in the air, way up there, coming down right at the 1-yard-line, right at the goal line, taken there by Parmalee. Runs up the right sideline and down he goes at the 22-yard line of the Miami Dolphins. And this game is under way.”
Even copious commercials went by easily as Glickman and Jennings described the game, an inartistic thriller. In the final two minutes, the Jets needed one first down to clinch an upset and I had no doubt they would make it until I heard Glickman blurt, “I have a terrible feeling about a foulup on this play.” Of course, the Jets were stopped, and Dan Marino led the Dolphins to a last-second field goal, and I felt I was there.
A day later, I asked Glickman what prompted his comment. He said, “Nothing specific. Maybe I was tempered by what I had seen all season. Sometimes I just have feelings like that, so I say them.”
This is a man who is past it? On Saturday at 12:30 P.M., the Jets play New Orleans on WCBS, 88 on the AM dial, which can be heard far along the East Coast. Marty Glickman says this is his ultimate game, but I prefer to think he is sending out his tapes for some interesting new job.
SPORTS OF THE TIMES; GLICKMAN IS BACK WHERE HE BELONGS
By George Vescey
Copyright New York Times Company Dec 18, 1988
LEAD: Old joke: Who’s the only person to play for both the Dodgers and the Knicks in New York? Answer: Gladys Goodding.
Old joke: Who’s the only person to play for both the Dodgers and the Knicks in New York? Answer: Gladys Goodding.
Marty Glickman never played for the Jets or the Giants, but he has certainly broadcast for both of them. The best thing is that he is back broadcasting Jet games at the age of 71.
When the Jets try to ruin the Giants’ season today, the master will be on WCBS radio with that crisp sidewalk-flavored cadence that always put you alongside the 50-yard line. For some of us, the game of football was never as perfect in person as when Glickman was describing it for our ears.
He was back at it a week ago, working the Jets’ victory over the Colts. At one point, with a minimum of words, he caught the drama on the frozen turf:
”Reverse! – DOUBLE reverse! – Fumble! – LOOSE Ball! – BIG Loss!” he chanted as it happened, not indulging in hysterics but keeping up with the rising crescendo of the crowd.
Another time he noted, ”Even the great Dickerson turns his head before catching the ball.” And when a play was whistled dead, he instantly noted it was not a penalty but the quarterback being in the grasp of a tackler.
That Glickman is back calling New York football games is a recognition by the powers at WCBS that some people can stay at the top of their game well into their 70’s. It is also a tribute to such a thing as a New Yorksound and tradition.
In our awe of the lacquered talking heads of the screen, we often neglect to pay homage to the treasured voices who keep us informed and sane and entertained while we are stuck in traffic or working at home:
Irene Cornell, with her nuances from the courtroom, and Stan Brooks, the old newshound, and Barry Gray, still asking questions, and Gary Thorne, the man the Mets are going to miss, and religion-based commentary by Roy Lloyd, and Peter Fornatale with his folkies, and Jonathan Schwartz with his monologues, and Bill Mazer, who not only saw Cap Anson play in high school but was also a close personal friend of his.
Marty Glickman is a legend in New York: Madison High School. All-East tailback at Syracuse University. Sprinter on the 1936 United States Olympic team, held out of the relays in Berlin for dubious motives by the assistant coach, Dean Cromwell. Broadcast the Knicks, track meets, Giants for 23 years, Jets for 6 years.
His was the voice that generations of New Yorkers like Marv Albert, Al Albert, Steve Albert, and any other Alberts out there, idolized, dreaming that their turn would come.
For thousands of hard-core sports lunatics who tried to stay awake for the Knick game from Minneapolis or Fort Wayne, the last words they heard before falling asleep were, ”GOO-OOD – like Nedicks.”
Glickman was caught in a switch of stations in 1978 and was dropped from the Jets’ broadcasts. He kept more than busy with other work and sailing in exotic places, and in recent years he did games for Connecticut and Seton Hall universities and has been a paid mentor for NBC football broadcasters.
Last spring WCBS acquired the rights to the Jets games and began searching for a play-by-play man. David Halberstam, the man who broadcasts St. John’s basketball games, not the writer of the same name, suggested that Glickman would be perfect.
”We told Marty we didn’t need to hear his tapes,” said Ed Kiernan, the station manager and a New Yorker. ”The thought of having Marty’s voice on WCBS. . . . He came in to see us and we thought, ‘This is going to be easy.’ ”
Glickman was paired with Dave Jennings, the punter who did indeed play for the Giants and the Jets. Kiernan admits there were some rocky moments, but the tailback and the punter knew how to turn up the intensity for the season.
The toughest critic is Glickman, who said: ”I may be a wiser old man but my lips are not nearly as facile. I know I’m not as quick as I used to be. I have to rely on fewer words.
”Also, it takes me longer to memorize the names of the backs and the receivers. I have to make sure I’m physically ready. In the old days, I might have arrived at the stadium 10 minutes before a game, not because I wanted to but because I was coming from somewhere else. This year I make sure I’m rested the day of a game.”
He may not know the out-of-town players as easily as he did when there were fewer teams, but Glickman has worked hard at knowing the Jets, spending a week with them in camp, visiting their bunker on Long Island at least once a week, and traveling with them.
”Of course, I know Joe Walton, who was the tight end on those championship Giant teams,” Glickman said. ”I love being around the players. You could say it’s work, but to me it’s playing the game. When Y. A. was throwing those passes, I was throwing those passes. I have a ball. This is a labor of love. It keeps me going.”
Kiernan wants to sign Glickman and Jennings for another season, to which a large chorus of Marty Glickman fans respond: ”Goo-ood – like Nedicks.”
Wait a minute. Nedicks was an orange-juice and hot-dog stand right outside the old Garden. Minneapolis and Fort Wayne were in the National Basketball Association. Gladys Goodding was an organist. Any other questions?
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