Jim Simpson obit

Jim Simpson, versatile sportscaster who helped launch ESPN, dies at 88

He was not on the list.

Jim Simpson, a versatile television sportscaster who began his career in Washington and covered the Olympics, the World Series and the first Super Bowl before becoming ESPN’s first play-by-play announcer when the sports cable network made its debut in 1979, died Jan. 13 in Scottsdale, Ariz. He was 88.

His death was announced by ESPN, which did not cite a specific cause.

For decades, Mr. Simpson was a handsome, smooth-voiced presence on sports broadcasts from around the globe. He covered his first Olympic Games in 1952, appeared on the 1961 premiere of ABC’s “Wide World of Sports” and remained an occasional presence on ESPN into the 21st century.

For most of his time in the network spotlight, he made Washington his home, often working during the week as the host of sports broadcasts on local TV stations from the 1940s to the 1980s.

After beginning his broadcast career at 15 with a hunting and fishing show on radio, Mr. Simpson entered television in 1949 as the first sportscaster at Washington’s Channel 9. After CBS bought the station and changed its call letters to WTOP, he shared a half-hour news program with another broadcaster just getting his start in TV — Walter Cronkite, the future “CBS Evening News” anchor.

“In the ’40s it was the excitement of being in the business,” Mr. Simpson told The Washington Post in 1986. “To me, it was the glamour of the business. I was walking around in a daze, so happy to be in it, that doing a station break correctly was a World Series.”

Soon enough, Mr. Simpson would be broadcasting the World Series during the 15 years he spent with NBC Sports. He covered virtually every sport under the sun at the highest levels: 16 baseball all-star games, 14 Olympic Games, all the Grand Slam events in tennis and golf, 14 college football Orange Bowls, six Super Bowls and six World Series.

In 1964, Mr. Simpson was the network host of the Winter Olympics from Innsbruck, Austria, and the Summer Olympics in Tokyo.

His broadcast partners included renowned announcers such as Red Barber, Jim McKay, Vin Scully and Mel Allen, and sports stars Red Grange, Arnold Palmer, Tony Kubek and Sandy Koufax. When Mr. Simpson joined ESPN, he was teamed on college basketball broadcasts with a little-known former coach whose palpable excitement for the sport came through in every New Jersey-accented syllable: Dick Vitale.

“One night, he and I were doing a game,” Vitale told the Dothan (Ala.) Eagle in 2010. “Somebody came up to me and asked, ‘What game do you guys have coming up?’ I turned to the guy and said, ‘Aw, it’s just another game, man, just another game.’ Jim grabbed me and said, ‘There is no such thing as just another game.’ He was right.”

Mr. Simpson’s professionalism and his ability to move effortlessly from ski jumping to golf to boxing helped secure ESPN’s emergence as a sports broadcasting dynamo.

“His arrival provided ESPN with a critical injection of credibility,” ESPN announcer Bob Ley said in a statement.