By T. D. Thornton
Dick Enberg, a National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association Hall of Fame member who earned 13 Emmy Awards while calling every sport imaginable during a 60-year television and radio career–including horse racing–died suddenly Dec. 21 at his home in San Diego. He was 82.
Enberg's daughter, Nicole Enberg Vaz, confirmed to The Associated Press that family members became concerned when her father didn't arrive as planned on a flight to Boston to meet his wife and children for a holiday gathering, and that a subsequent wellness check found Enberg dead in his home in the La Jolla neighborhood near his packed luggage. She said a heart attack is suspected as the cause of death, but that the family is awaiting official word from examiners.
Enberg honed an understated, precisely punctuated, gentlemanly style that allowed sporting events to essentially tell their own stories. But when he let fly with one of his trademark, enthusiastic “Oh, my!” ad libs, viewers and listeners were sure to know that it signified a big shift or a stunning development in whatever game, race, or match Enberg happened to be calling.
Enberg's personal highlight reel included being the on-air personality for national broadcasts of Super Bowls, the Olympics, Wimbledon tennis championships, and college basketball's Final Four tournaments. He also had a decades-long southern California presence as the play-by-play baseball and football voice of the California Angels, San Diego Padres, and Los Angeles Rams.
Although it was not a sport he covered regularly, Enberg had a lead role in one of Thoroughbred racing's benchmark broadcasts: On Nov. 10, 1984, he co-hosted the very first Breeders' Cup on NBC.
At the time, the concept was an unprecedented and somewhat daunting challenge for both the on-air and production teams, because no entity had ever attempted to fit seven horse races that run roughly two minutes each into a four-hour telecast.
As Enberg recalled in an interview with the San Diego Union-Tribune just three months prior to his passing, the NBC team compensated by over-preparing, but a number of those planned segments went unused when the drama and spirit of racing's first championships ended up carrying the broadcast.
“The races took care of themselves,” Enberg told the Union-Tribune, downplaying how he had personally prepared for his first go at covering Thoroughbred racing by immersing himself in an 18-month crash course in the sport. “We got millions of viewers to tune in for something they weren't super-passionate fans about. We were all thrilled.”
Dave Johnson, who shared co-hosting duties with Enberg for the first three Breeders' Cups (Enberg would later partner with Tom Hammond for the 1987-90 broadcasts), recalled not only the “flying by the seat of our pants” nature of those first few Breeders' Cup telecasts, but how hard Enberg worked behind the scenes to ensure a seamless flow and pace.
“I'm going to use the word 'generous,'” Johnson said via phone on Friday when asked what Enberg's style was like behind the microphone. “Because his whole broadcasting mantra was make the other people look good. He was well-prepared and thoroughly professional. He never threw you a curve ball, and he did it to make everybody on the broadcast look good.”
Despite being known for elevating meticulous preparation to an art form, a Washington Post remembrance of his work noted one frenzied exception: In 1989, on the eve of the Breeders' Cup, Enberg returned to his hotel room only to find that his entire dossier of notes for the broadcast had gone missing.
“That was the most anxious I'd ever seen him in his life. He was hyperventilating,” his wife, Barbara, said in 2016. Believing the maid had mistakenly thrown away the paperwork, the Enbergs spent a good chunk of the evening digging through the hotel's massive trash receptacle before finding that the housekeeper had instead tucked his notes on an unseen shelf behind window blinds in the room. “I was ready-to-cry kind of panicked,” Enberg later recalled with characteristic good humor.
When Enberg retired from his last main gig, the Padres telecasts, in 2016, he said in a Union-Tribune retrospective that horse racing had also provided his toughest assignment as a broadcaster: the fateful GI Breeders' Cup Distaff in 1990, when the scintillating stretch duel between Go For Wand and Bayakoa turned tragic on national TV after Go For Wand suffered a catastrophic injury and had to be euthanized.
“It's like someone dropped a curtain on 50,000 people–just silence,” Enberg said in the retrospective. “It was an awful silence. I'm trying to explain it on the air [and] instead of going on a 'talk-back' or 'cough' button, I said on air, 'Please don't play that again.'”
Enberg ended up maintaining his enthusiasm for racing even after he stopped hosting the Breeders' Cup. When assignments took him to the Bluegrass region, he would arrange for tours of stallion farms, and he would often attend events like the Dr. Tony Ryan Book Award ceremony at Castleton Lyons. In the week that Del Mar Thoroughbred Club hosted the Breeders' Cup this past November, those two entities teamed up to honor Enberg with the Sports and Racing Excellence Award.
Within the fraternity of sports broadcasters, Enberg was particularly known for his willingness to help newcomers just breaking in behind the microphone.
Enberg's humility and helpfulness extended back to his own formative days as a sports broadcaster in his native Michigan, where he leaped at the chance to rise from being a one-dollar-an-hour radio station custodian to calling play-by-play for local high school football games.
Funeral arrangements are pending for Enberg, who is survived by his wife and six children. His attorney, Dennis Coleman, said in a statement that the family ”is grateful for the kind thoughts and prayers of all of Dick's countless fans and dear friends. At this time we are all still processing the significant loss, and we ask for prayers and respectful privacy in the immediate aftermath of such untimely news” -@thorntontd
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