Broadcasting Career
Brookshier began sportscasting for WCAU-AM-FM-TV in Philadelphia in 1962, eventually becoming the station's sports director. He joined CBS in 1965 as a color commentator for Eagles telecasts, and continued to call regional action after the network moved away from dedicated team announcers in 1968.
In the early-1970s, Brookshier and Summerall co-hosted This Week in Pro Football, a weekly syndicated highlights show produced by NFL Films. After CBS dismissed its main pro football voice Ray Scott in 1974, the network went against its standard practice of using a professional announcer for play-by-play by promoting Summerall and partnering him with Brookshier. The two former NFL players became arguably American television's most popular sports broadcasting team for the remainder of the decade. Describing the pair's on-air rapport, Summerall said, "With Brookie, it was more of a conversation, like two guys in a saloon." Besides many regular-season and playoff contests, most of which involved the Dallas Cowboys who were the National Football Conference's most dominant franchise at the time, the duo called Super Bowls X, XII and XIV. Brookshier also worked pre- and post-game shows for four other Super Bowls. He and Summerall also appeared as themselves in the 1977 film Black Sunday, which was partially filmed at Super Bowl X.
In 1981, Brookshier switched to calling play-by-play for the network, with John Madden taking his place as color commentator alongside Summerall.
Read more about this topic: Tom Brookshier
Famous quotes containing the words broadcasting and/or career:
“We spend all day broadcasting on the radio and TV telling people back home what’s happening here. And we learn what’s happening here by spending all day monitoring the radio and TV broadcasts from back home.”
—P.J. (Patrick Jake)
“What exacerbates the strain in the working class is the absence of money to pay for services they need, economic insecurity, poor daycare, and lack of dignity and boredom in each partner’s job. What exacerbates it in upper-middle class is the instability of paid help and the enormous demands of the career system in which both partners become willing believers. But the tug between traditional and egalitarian models of marriage runs from top to bottom of the class ladder.”
—Arlie Hochschild (20th century)