“Leaving Footprints”: John Ferguson, Voice of the Tigers
Former LSU play-by-play announcer John Ferguson, 86, died Saturday in Zachary. The following story about the longtime “Voice of the Tigers” was written by Marty Mule’ for his book “Eye of the Tiger,” published in 1993 to coincide with the Centennial Celebration of LSU football. This story is presented on LSUsports.net with Mule’s permission.
There he goes. Dances through the middle of the line, BREAKS FREE, at the 30 … 40 … 45 … ROOOLLLLLLED out of bounds near midfield. First and 10, Tigers.
John Ferguson, many times.
John Ferguson, broadcasting a horrible 1950 football game, turned to his colorman.
The analyst — Gordon McClendon, founder of the Liberty Network — was fast asleep, head tossed back, mouth wide open and emitting a sound close to the rhythmic blasts of a train whistle. “I prefer to believe it was the game and not the broadcast,” Ferguson sniffed. The score was 33-7.
Forty years later, Ferguson turned off the mike. The rich baritone voice with the very proper personality that served LSU as a distinct signature — as much a part of the Tiger imprint as Billy Cannon, Bert Jones or Pete Maravich — signed off.
Ferguson stepped away from the radio broadcasts he had done continuously since 1961 — and intermittently since 1946 — in 1984. But he had retained his status and identification as Voice of the Tigers on TigerVision, the school’s cable outlet, though those telecasts were a stopgap, generally below the more attractive Tiger games which were often carried on network television.
But that too eventually was relinquished, and by the 1987 season, for the first time in 40 years, he had no broadcasting duties. “It’s not hard giving up this (TigerVision),” Ferguson said in 1987. “It was much harder giving up radio. That was my career.”
Ferguson chose to concentrate his energies on the Tiger Athletic Foundation, the fund-raising arm of the athletic department of which he was director. As much as Ferguson relished his role as Voice of the Tigers, he realized his less-publicized duties may well have been more important to LSU.
“Making footprints” is the way Ferguson described his fund-raising efforts, which in large measure fuels the program.
“I knew I’d be good at this,” Ferguson said with a chuckle. “Years ago (former ticket manager) Jack Gilmore asked me to help him get rid of six tickets in Section Eight, East Side. Sold them in 10 minutes.”
In 1942, Ferguson, then a recent graduate of Louisiana Tech with a degree in chemistry, sold an El Dorado, Arkansas, radio station owner named Fletcher Bowes on his budding talents.
“What makes you think you can do this?” Bowes roared at the suddenly shaking applicant. “Because,” Ferguson said, working up enough courage to retort thinly, “I’m better than anyone you have.”
He got the job, doing everything from sweeping floors to announcing Cotton States League baseball, 70 hours a week at $17.50.
It took awhile, but Ferguson worked his way to the Texas League, and then to what he described as “the Big Leagues then would be the Big Leagues now.”
One hundred forty-four missions as an Army Air Corps transport pilot over “the Hump,” the Himalayan Mountains between India and China, in hellish weather conditions at the earth’s ceiling, Ferguson said made him whatever he became.
“I was always the youngest man in my crews, just a kid of 22,” he recalled. “But I was always known as the ?Old Man.’ I wasn’t a fuddy-duddy, exactly and I wasn’t really a military man. But I was a military pilot, and I carried a lot of responsibility. I took it seriously.”
The material Ferguson piloted over the Hump supplied the B-29s that were bombing Japan, and occasionally the Chinese Communists who were fighting the Nationalists and the Japanese.
“We didn’t know who we were going to end up backing,” he said, “so I guess we were playing footsie with everybody. They weren’t any different from any of the other soldiers we came in contact with.”
There are moments that live in a man’s soul forever. Ferguson’s came when he took aboard 50 Chinese troops destined for training in India. It was 1945 and China was suffering.
The troops ranged in age from 11 years to over 70.
The cargo area, where the troops were, wasn’t pressurized. Ferguson began to worry when the swirling weather over the Himalayas began buffeting the transport more than usual. To escape the storm, and for better visibility, Ferguson took the plane higher. And higher.
“It was sickening,” he said. “No one said anything. When we landed I didn’t move for a moment, then told the crew not to bother going to the cargo area. I didn’t want to see it, and I knew they didn’t. No one could have survived.
“We went to sign our flight papers, then walked slowly back out to the runway. The cargo door opened and one soldier struggled out. We couldn’t believe it.”
While the crew helped the one Chinese soldier, another staggered out. Within an hour every one of the 50-man contingent stood at attention in a raggedy line along side the transport.
“There wasn’t,” said Ferguson, “a dry eye on the base.”
A year later, Ferguson was at LSU working on a master’s degree in broadcasting. WJBO radio, which had just successfully bid on the Tiger football games, inquired about Ferguson’s availability. He almost knocked down the door trying to get into the radio booth.
Ferguson insisted that LSU team, the 1946 Tigers, was the very best he ever saw.
“There was a quarterback named Y.A. Tittle, a punter named Rip Collins who was the best in LSU history, Ray Coates, an excellent back. That team, filled with returning war veterans, was six deep everywhere.”
A halfback, Joe Glamp, from Mount Pleasant, Pennsylvania, who lettered in 1942 before going to war, is Ferguson’s favorite example of just how good that team was.
“Glamp was unhappy about his playing,” Ferguson said, “and went to see Coach Bernie Moore. Moore told him there just wasn’t that much opportunity for him at LSU.”
Glamp later started three seasons for the Pittsburgh Steelers.
Still, the 1946 Tigers lost one game — 26-7 to Georgia Tech — and were tied 0-0 by Arkansas in the infamous “Ice Bowl.”
Ferguson said the Tech loss was “just one of those games. But Tech score on the last play of the game, and seconds later the stadium lights went out. (Coach) Bobby Dodd took his team off the field and never kicked the extra point. He added insult to injury.”
In the Cotton Bowl, played in a blustery snowstorm, LSU ran up 15 first downs to Arkansas’ one, and gained 271 yards to the Razorbacks’ 54, but couldn’t score.
In the almost four decades in which Ferguson was the voice of the Tigers, he said some of LSU’s finest efforts ironically came in defeat. The scintillating 17-12 loss to a superior Southern Cal team in 1979, which hinged on two late controversial calls, was the best game Ferguson said he ever saw the Tigers play. A 3-0 defeat to Notre Dame in South Bend during the 1970 season got second billing.
LSU’s 28-8 thumping of the Irish in 1971, and Bert Jones’ 17-16 last second miracle against Ole Miss in 1972 are next on his all-time list.
The worst game Ferguson could recall was a 3-3 “clinker” with Tennessee in 1964.
Bert Jones’ heroics against Ole Miss, Ferguson said, was the finest individual performance he ever witnessed. “With 3:02 remaining, against a team that had clearly dominated, Jones completed passes for four first downs and eventually the winning touchdown,” Ferguson marveled. “Magnificent.”
Billy Cannon’s 89-yard punt return that beat Ole Miss 7-3 in 1959 is Ferguson’s runner-up performance, although, ironically, he didn’t broadcast that game. In 1958 and 1959 Ferguson was doing the Southwest Conference Game of the Week, causing him to miss LSU’s national championship season and Cannon’s run, the most storied play in Tiger history.
Through good games and bad, Ferguson’s trademark was terse reporting which gave every opponent its due and offered no excuses for the Tigers.
“I’ve always felt the listener should know what’s going on,” Ferguson said, “and I’ve never been a cheerleader.
“We always prepared, and we approached each broadcast as our business — professionally. We wanted to be second to none in that regard; we were sensitive to that.
“But we also wanted it clearly identified as a Tiger broadcast — and from Tiger Stadium. I think we pulled it off.”
LSU’s Saturday night spectaculars were easy to broadcast, Ferguson said. From the late 1950s to the late 1980s LSU generally produced very representative teams. The Saturday night power of two clear channel stations, one in New Orleans, one in Shreveport — at a time when few schools played at night — gave the Tigers a “wonderful public relations window.”
“I was in the right place at the right time,” Ferguson said. “I started doing LSU football in the heyday of football broadcasting, the ?50s and ?60s. Before then, the game wasn’t as popular. And in the last 10 years or so, with cable, with more and more teams playing at night, the market has become fragmented. There was never a better time for broadcasting (than during Ferguson’s professional prime).”
And he did it in good times and bad, doing a game in 1968 two days after his father died, and another in 1979, a day after his grandson was born.
The networks, of course, were not unaware of Ferguson. He did U.S. Open golf, the Liberty Bowl for seven years, the Sugar Bowl for NBC radio, American Football League for ABC, New Orleans Saints games, and Southeastern Conference basketball.
“I decided this is where I wanted to live,” he said, “but I accepted just enough network work to satisfy myself that I was at least in the same league with some of my colleagues.”
The very first AFL game telecast out of Denver (versus the Oakland Raiders) was broadcast by Ferguson, who was aided by the Broncos’ public relations man, Paul Manasseh, who later became LSU’s sports information director.
But Ferguson remembered that 1960 game mainly because of a horse show at midfield during halftime.
“A horse embarrassed himself in front of the cameras,” Ferguson said with a hearty laugh. “And when the cleaning man went out with his scooper, the camera stayed on him all the way out … and all the way back. It seemed like forever.”
Nothing, of course, is forever. Ferguson always promised he would get out of the broadcast booth by the time he reached 50. That was in 1972. “Fifty just got here a lot faster than I expected it to,” he said.
It could have been coincidence, but when controversial athletic director Bob Brodhead surrendered WWL-radio, which reached 43 states on those Saturday night football games, as the Tigers’ flagship station, the impetus to nudge Ferguson out of the broadcast booth may have been provided.
Brodhead put the broadcast rights up for bid, and they went to WJBO, the Baton Rouge station where Ferguson began his career, for $1 million.
“I begged him not to do it,” Ferguson said. “I told him if the deal (with WJBO) wasn’t too far gone, to buy his way out if he had to. WWL was that important.”
When WJBO became the anchor of the LSU network, Ferguson was asked to do one half of play-by-play and new announcer Jim Hawthorne would do one half. Ferguson felt the suggestion was demeaning, and declined. “I told them I would do one more season, the last one on the WWL contract, then step aside.”
Joe Dean, Brodhead’s successor, eventually got the Tigers back on WWL-radio, and Hawthorne has been a solid replacement for Ferguson.
In personal demanding times as those surely were, Ferguson harkened back to his days flying “the Hump.”
A steep drop into a northwest Indian valley after an exhausting flight, onto a cobblestone runway just as the stormy skies sapped the last rays of visibility, ran through Ferguson’s memory bank.
“That’s what I mean about that experience making me what I am. After flying ?the Hump,’ things that seem overpowering to some people seem a bit trivial to me. I think I have a sense of what’s important.”
Ferguson hasn’t been “the Voice of the Tigers” since the fall of 1986, but he continued spending his Saturday nights where he spent them for most of the previous four decades — in Tiger Stadium, usually from the press deck. He admitted football isn’t nearly as enjoyable, though as when he was on the mike. “The game,” Ferguson said, “just isn’t as focused to me.”
What was focused was a sense of mission — leaving footprints — that Ferguson exuded with an energy and enthusiasm that belied his almost seven decades.
“Sixty-six is startling?” Ferguson asked rhetorically in 1987, and with a hearty laugh.
“Figure out how many minutes there are in 66 years. There isn’t a minute in my life that I haven’t loved.”