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Dick Enberg: The halo goes dim on the legendary broadcaster

By Benjamin Chase

SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA - SEPTEMBER 29: San Diego Padres announcer Dick Enberg waves to the crowd during a ceremony held before a baseball game between the San Diego Padres and the Los Angeles Dodgers at PETCO Park on September 29, 2016 in San Diego, California. The Padres held the pre-game ceremony to honor Enberg's last home game as the team's primary play-by-play man for television broadcasts. (Photo by Denis Poroy/Getty Images)
SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA - SEPTEMBER 29: San Diego Padres announcer Dick Enberg waves to the crowd during a ceremony held before a baseball game between the San Diego Padres and the Los Angeles Dodgers at PETCO Park on September 29, 2016 in San Diego, California. The Padres held the pre-game ceremony to honor Enberg's last home game as the team's primary play-by-play man for television broadcasts. (Photo by Denis Poroy/Getty Images) /
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Former Angels and Padres team broadcaster Enberg passed away Thursday night from a suspected heart attack. He was 82.

One of the great voices of sports history passed away Thursday night as former Los Angeles Angels and San Diego Padres television broadcaster and MLB Game of the Week play-by-play guy Dick Enberg passed away at 82 years old.

Enberg’s baseball background

A Detroit Tigers fan from his youth in the Detroit area, Dick Enberg had a long-time interest in baseball.

Enberg excelled at baseball as a youth and earned a baseball scholarship to Central Michigan University. He got his graduate degree from Indiana University, where he began his broadcasting career began doing Indiana football and basketball games.

Enberg spent five years and four baseball seasons as an assistant professor and baseball coach at Cal State Northridge in the early 1960s before his broadcasting career truly became his full-time pursuit.

Angels broadcasting

Already broadcasting the UCLA Bruins men’s basketball team and the Los Angeles Rams, Dick Enberg picked up another gig in 1969, taking over as the play-by-play man with the then-California Angels. He would spend more time with the Angels than in any other professional gig outside of the U.S. Open play-by-play.

He was known for his catch phrase when the Angels won, “And the halo shines tonight.” This referred to the scoreboard at the stadium with an A on the scoreboard adorned with a halo that would be lit up after a win. and was visible for quite some distance from the park.

While Enberg was calling Angels games, however, the halo was dim more often than not as the team had just two winning seasons in his 10 seasons with the club from 1969-1978. Ironically, the team won the American League West the first season after Enberg moved to a different job.

He did return in 1985 to broadcast a number of Angels games in a much more pleasant time, as the Angels won 90 games in 1985, though they missed the playoffs.

MLB Game of the Week

Dick Enberg had a long-term relationship with NBC from the 1970s all the way through the 1990s. Part of that included working with NBC’s coverage of national baseball games from 1977-1982.

He was promised the prestigious role of the lead play-by-play guy for the station’s game of the week starting with the postseason of 1982, but as the regular season wound down in 1982, NBC executives informed Enberg that they would be bringing on legendary Vin Scully for the role going forward.

Though he was significantly disappointed, he did stay on as a studio host through 1989 doing baseball with the network.

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Dick Enberg broadcasts Padres

After a decade with CBS and ESPN from 2000-2010 covering basketball, tennis, and football primarily, Enberg returned to his first love, baseball, in 2010 as the play-by-play man for the Padres for roughly 2/3 of their games.

He received some flack from fans for being too level-headed as a broadcaster, which made it appear that he was praising the opposition too highly as most sports fans are used to hearing their home team’s broadcaster have a sense of homerism about the home squad.

To counter these complaints, Enberg used his catch phrase “Touch ’em all” only for Padre home runs, which seemed to calm the criticism.

Enberg served through the 2016 season doing play-by-play with Padres, even doing a game for Fox Sports Detroit calling his boyhood team, the Tigers, in 2016 as they played the Rays.

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Enberg is survived by six children, three sons and three daughters. He was the chairman of the American Sportscasters Association for 35 years, from 1983 until 2017, and his influence on the announcing of countless sports will be felt for decades to come. Rest in peace, Dick.

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