Alright, Get the New Picture in the Bulldog Broadcast Booth
Darrell Huckaby is a syndicated columnist and author of six books including two about Georgia football. Read Huck’s Wit and Wisdom every Wednesday and Sunday. Subscribe at https://dhuck.substack.com/.
4.27.26
Alright, Get the New Picture in the Bulldog Broadcast Booth
I had to make sure I wasn’t being pranked. You know how AI and social media are these days. Mark Twain once famously said, “Don’t believe anything you hear and only half of what you see.” Or maybe Benjamin Franklin said that. Or Edgar Allan Poe.
Maybe it was Barney Fife.
At any rate, I have been fooled more than once by fake news stated as truth on social media. Do you know how many times I’ve run crying through the house because I read online that Willie Nelson had died? He even wrote a song about it.
I woke up still not dead again today
The internet said I had passed away
If I died I wasn't dead to stay
And I woke up still not dead again today
So, I did my research. I went straight to the mule’s mouth. I called the man that Lewis Grizzard used to call the world’s greatest Bulldog fan—Dorsey Hill. Lewis said that Dorsey thought that “if you’re good, when you died you go to Vince Dooley’s house,” always adding, “Dorsey can’t wait.”
Dorsey didn’t know anything.
But then I managed to open the official University of Georgia website and there it was. Georgia football has a new play-by-play team for the coming season. It was right there in red and black. Jeff Dantzler and Jon Stinchcomb will be taking over the Larry Munson Broadcast Suite when Georgia tees it up between the hedges on September 5 against Tennessee State.
It is something that I had been dreaming of for a lot of years.
If you built a Mount Rushmore of Georgia personalities JD would be right there with the Mighty Munson, the inimitable Dan Magill and a figure to be named later. That’s how short the list is for the class that Jeff Dantzler is in.
For 42 years Larry Munson was the Voice of the Dawgs and there are plenty of people who weren’t born when Munson painted his last picture of a Georgia football game. But they still identify the great plays of that era with Munson’s calls.
*“I didn’t mean to beg Lindsay to run, but I had to!”
“Look at the sugar falling out of the sky.”
“We just stepped on their face with a hobnail boot and broke their nose.”*
In Munson’s day it seemed like half the crowd in Sanford Stadium had a radio pressed to their ear, or at least a headset on, during broadcasts. The other were asking the listeners after every big play, “What did Munson say? What did Munson say?”
I haven’t seen very many radios in the stadium lately, but I bet Amazon will be delivering a lot of them to addresses in the North Georgia Piedmont this summer. I already ordered mine, because listening to Jeff Dantzler call a sporting event is like watching Tiger Woods play golf or Michelangelo sculpt or Leonardo DaVinci paint. Nobody does it better.
This past Saturday I celebrated a rare Saturday at home by listening to Jeff and his baseball sidekick, David Johnston, call a doubleheader between Georgia and Ole Miss. A doubleheader. And the nightcap went 14 innings. That’s 23 innings of college baseball over more hours than I could keep up with. My lovely wife Lisa said I did it because I was just plain lazy, but she is wrong.
Listening to Jeff and David is like hanging out with your best buddies. Even when you don’t care what the conversation is, you enjoy the people you are having it with. It’s like spending the day fishing and not caring if your hook is even baited. It is the comradery that matters, not the catch.
Now mix in an encyclopedic knowledge of sports, and an amazing ability to paint a picture with words. Add the ability to allow the listener to see what is happening on the field with his ears, accompanied by an inane sense of when to use an appropriate cultural idiom. Top it all off with a love for all things Georgia, and you have the perfect combination for the person who should be the voice of Georgia football. You have Jeff Dantzler.
And don’t worry. Jeff won’t try to be another Larry Munson. He knows God broke the mold when he made Munson. But that’s OK, because being Jeff Dantzler is all he needs to be.
Glory, glory! I wish the season started tomorrow.
Darrell Huckaby