Before I was hired as executive sports editor of the Rocky Mountain News in April 1982, editor Ralph Looney and managing editor Ben Blackburn required me to send them my ideas for making the section competitive with, if not better than, the Denver Post’s.
That’s what led me to meeting Chris Fowler—long before he became the lead voice of college football on ESPN and ABC. Every time I hear him on TV, think of this.
(He’ll call Friday night’s Alabama-Oklahoma playoff game, the featured pairing in each succeeding round, and the championship game on January 19.)
Among my proposals to Looney and Blackburn were several ways to increase and improve Broncos content (of course, in Denver), hiring a full-time sports cartoonist (who turned out to be Drew Litton), and expanding coverage of high school sports.
The latter involved publishing the linescores for all metro Denver football and basketball games (along with more game and feature stories), which meant building a small group of clerks to take phone calls as results were phoned into the News.
I asked Dave Plati, who semi-retired a couple years ago after 40 years in sports information at the University of Colorado, if he knew of any CU students who would be interested in becoming high school sports clerks for me.
Dave delivered a small contingent of hand-picked guys who loved sports. Chris Fowler was among them.
I remember Chris as quiet, unassuming. He’d come in, find a desk with a phone, and get right to work. There were nights when I didn’t even know he was there until I looked around the room.
Still today, Chris includes his time as a Rocky prep clerk in his Wikipedia profile online and makes it part of his talks to students and other groups.
“Paying my dues,” he calls it.
“I tell them about all the Friday nights when I would have liked to have been in Boulder, having fun, but instead was downtown at the Rocky Mountain News, taking high school agate (box scores),” Chris told me for a magazine feature years ago. “It was a definite part of starting my career, and I haven’t forgotten it.”
A graduate of Palmer High in Colorado Springs, Chris began his career editing videotape for weekend sportscasts for the late Les Shapiro at KCNC in Denver—almost immediately after getting his Bachelor of Science in Sports Broadcasting from CU in 1985.
“Chris was really good, and really bright, always,” Shapiro said. And when opportunity knocked, Chris jumped to answer.
“We needed a part-timer to gather sound bites for the weekend sportscasts. One day Chris dropped a videotape off on my desk and said, ‘Do me a favor. Take a look at this, would you?’ So, I popped it into the tape machine, and it was an incredible 10 minutes.
“It was Chris sitting in front of a fireplace, I believe in his apartment, and ad-libbing a sportscast—for 10 minutes, without a teleprompter—and it was incredible. My jaw hit the floor—he was so good and so fluid and sounded so knowledgeable.
“That tape blew me away. I knew he needed to be on the air; he was that good.”
It was Chris Fowler’s big break, but also the beginning of the end for him at Channel 4. Quickly, he landed the job with ESPN., where he has stayed for four decades.
From 1986 to now his assignments progressed from host of a national, 30-minute high school sports show called “Scholastic Sports America,” to college football sideline reporter, to host of “College Gameday” (as a studio show before taking it to college campuses), to his current starring role as the voice of the College Football Playoff for ABC/ESPN.
“To have one of the biggest games every week, and then call the biggest games at the end of the year, that’s a dream thing for me,” he once told me.
“Since I was 10 years old, I wanted to do this job. And what attracted me to it then, and still does now, is documenting the excitement of a live event. To me, nothing else ever seemed better than that.
“Well, maybe rock star. But I have no musical talent. If I can’t be Bono or The Edge or somebody . . . I fell into something I always wanted to do.”
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Denny Dressman writes a weekly sports column for The Villager. You can write to Denny at dennydressman@comcast.net.