Man, now this is a column I hadn’t anticipated writing for some time, but as reality would have it…when you retire at age 85, the inevitability of a column like this coming sooner rather than later really does rear it’s ugly head.

Growing up a Yankees fan, a lot of my time following the team as a kid was spent watching the team’s games on WWOR-TV, channel 9 on weekday nights. In those days, I remember the announcers to be Bill White, Frank Messer & Phil Rizzuto…of which, Rizzuto, a former Yankees shortstop was the most memorable of the three. Each time a play of significance would occur, Rizzuto would exclaim his signature, “Holy Cow!” Though, for a large portion of the game, Rizzuto would talk about just about anything besides the game going on in front of him. But from a fan’s perspective, he was always entertaining.

Fast-forward to my adulthood and listening to games on the radio while in the car has become quite commonplace for me. Now not all sports come across well on the radio. Hockey specifically, can be tough to follow on the radio, as can basketball, but in my estimation, two sports were made for radio broadcasts, those being football and baseball. And as a Yankees fan, the one constant to all those New York Yankees broadcasts for the last 35 years has been the welcoming voice of John Sterling. John took over the play-by-play duties from Hank Greenwald to start the 1989 season at the age of 50. He wouldn’t miss a single broadcast for the next 30 years, compiling an incredible streak of 5,060 straight Yankees game broadcasts, which includes 4,851 regular season games and 209 playoff games, including 8 World Series appearances. Just as I mentioned about Phil Rizzuto above, John Sterling certainly found his own way to make all these broadcasts entertaining.