If you watched the Triple Crown Races of the 1960s and 1970s on CBS or ABC, you looked forward to the witty incisive commentary of raconteur-broadcaster Heywood Hale “Woodie” Broun, who also during those years covered baseball and golf with the same elan.
Broun loved nothing more than being freed from the broadcast booth and being able to stroll about Churchill Downs, Pimlico and Belmont Park, interviewing jockeys, owners, trainers and the crowd gathered to watch this seismic annual sporting event.
“It’s a funny old track,” Broun once said. “You can’t name 10 tracks without naming Churchill Downs.”
An unmistakable figure before the camera, there he was illuminated in his colorful madras sports coats that looked like a slice of Neapolitan ice cream, animated droopy moustache and jaunty hats that ranged from jockey’s caps to tam-o-shanters, offering commentary that was equal to his colorful haberdashery.
“People are always describing me as dry, droll and detached,” he told the New York Times. “I think of myself as an intensely emotional and sentimental person. I have seen ‘Casablanca’ 10 times and I always cry at the ‘Marsellaise’ scene.”
Broun in both his professional and personal life was anything but dry, droll or detached.
“I have a flowery style of writing and speaking,” he explained in a 1975 interview. “I don’t make it up. I guess that’s the way of all thwarted English teachers, which is what I originally planned to be.”
Broun, who was the son of Heywood Broun, the noted New York World columnist, founder of the American Newspaper Guild and a member the Algonquin Round Table of wits, and Ruth Hale, a drama critic and feminist, was born and raised in New York City.
He was a 1940 graduate of Swarthmore College and began his newspaper career that year as a sportswriter for PM, the New York tabloid, and during World War II, served as a sergeant in the field artillery.
After the war, he went to work for The New York Star, successor to PM. After The Star folded, Broun changed careers and became an actor, working in TV soap operas, more than a dozen Broadway shows and several movies.
In 1965, CBS offered him an opportunity to become a sports commentator, where he remained for the next 19 years.
“He had a way with words, something modern Americans don’t know about,” Bud Lamoreaux, a close friend and former CBS producer, told the Associated Press in an interview at the time of Broun’s death in 2001.
“He was a master of the metaphor, and he read more books than most people know the titles of,” he said.
He also added Broun had a “suitcase full of words, oh what words.”
Broun who was known for avoiding reverence was content to tell of “those athletes who exist merely for the sun that shines on them,” adding, “sweat is the cologne of accomplishment.”
Reflecting on sports, he said, “I think we’ve taken the fun out of sport by insisting that everybody must be a champion or a failure. Sports do not build character. They reveal it.”
His first Kentucky Derby race was in 1966, and in the ensuing years he covered a dozen of them for CBS and ABC.
By his own admission, he said the greatest Derby he ever witnessed was in 1973 when Secretariat, with the horse’s “big feet tearing up the dirt,” finished 2 1/2 lengths ahead of Sham, and ran the last 1/4 mile in 23 seconds.
“He ran so fast like the horses of legend that you wondered if he might fly,” Broun said.
Secretariat’s Triple Crown Records that year have never been broken. In addition to the Derby, he ran the Preakness in 1:53 and the Belmont in 2:24.
When Broun came to Baltimore for the Preakness, he had an instant on-air chemistry with Charles “Chick” Lang, a legendary figure in racing, Pimlico’s longtime director of racing and later general manager, who began his career there in 1960.
Lang’s grandfather, John Mayberry, trained Judge Hime, the 1903 Kentucky Derby winner, and his father, who was also named Chick, was the jockey on the 1928 Derby winner Reigh Count.
The two men offered quite a contrast from Broun’s rainbow patchwork sports jackets of reds, greens, blues and yellow, to the more conservative Lang who wore a Marine Corps inspired butch haircut.
Lang so loved the Preakness that he earned the moniker of “Mr. Preakness” and when he died in 2010, his ashes were spread in the Preakness winner’s circle.
Broun was a reliable utility sports commentator who took as much joy in covering marquee athletic events as well as the annual nationals marble championship held in Wildwood, New Jersey, or the left handed golfers championship in Galesburg, Illinois.
He lamented at not being an athlete and defined his work to “that of a company clerk to the Musketeers or veterinarian to the Light Brigade.”
Of his various careers, he said, “I’m either a Little League Renaissance man or simply a person who can’t make up his mind.”
In 2001, while at Keeneland Race Course in Lexington, Kentucky, Broun fell and broke his right hip.
He later died that year of pneumonia. He was 83.
The longtime Woodstock, New York resident, was the author of three books, “A Studied Madness,” “Tumultuous Merriment” and “Whose Little Boy Are You?”
Fittingly, he’s buried in Artists Cemetery in Woodstock, Ulster County, New York.
