By TERRY NAU

Sports editor

John Rooke first fell in love with the radio business back in the late 1960s while growing up in Fort Worth, Texas.
“My earliest recollection of following sports as a kid center around listening to St. Louis Cardinals games on my grandfather’s old civil defense radio,” Rooke was saying on Sunday morning. “Jack Buck called their games for KMOX radio, a clear channel out of St. Louis. The Cardinals were the closest major league franchise to Texas we had in those days.”
Rooke played sports as a kid, eventually tearing up a knee as a member of his high school’s basketball team. This injury became a turning point in his life.
“I wanted to remain with the team in some capacity, to be with my friends after I was hurt,” Rooke said. “I started to help out as a trainer. Our student newspaper sent a reporter over to do a story on me. I saw him with his tape recorder and thought that was kind of neat. I joined the student paper and ended up earning a scholarship in journalism to the University of Texas. One door had closed for me and another opened up.”
At Texas, Rooke “fell backwards into broadcasting,” as he put it, describing the course he charted through college and into the professional world of sports communications.
His childhood exposure to play-by-play announcers stuck with Rooke, planting a seed in his mind that turned into a full-fledged career in radio and television, leading him from Texas to Rhode Island in 1988, where he got offered the play-by-play radio announcer’s job for Providence College basketball, a chore he continues to this day.
“It’s the job of a lifetime for me,” Rooke admitted. “I came to Rhode Island and worked as a sports anchor for Channel 12. I was also going to do some work for the new Big East television network. The position as voice of the Friars opened up and that turned into my career job. I could not ask for anything more.”
Rooke, who also works as an adjunct professor of journalism at Boston’s Emerson College, never lost his enthusiasm for radio, or for the intimate relationship a play-by-play radio announcer develops with listeners.
“I tell my students that play-by-play is the purest form of journalism,” Rooke admitted. “It is the broadcast equivalent of a newspaper beat writer. Our job is immediate, it is instantaneous. We are describing what happens on the court as it happens. I actually prefer radio (over television broadcasting) because I can be more creative, trying to craft word-pictures for the listener. I consider myself a radio guy at heart even though I have also worked in television for 30 years.”
Rooke had some early role models in his field, dating back to his younger days in Texas.
“Frank Glieber was one,” he admitted. “Frank was the second radio play-by-play announcer ever for the Dallas Cowboys. Eddie LeBaron was the first. I always loved Vern Lundquist, who was a television sports anchor in Dallas and followed Frank as the radio voice of the Cowboys. I’ve admired Vin Scully, who is still great (at age 80) for the Dodgers. Jim Nantz is wonderful covering golf and basketball for CBS. Dan Shulman out of Toronto is a terrific college hoops announcer for ESPN.”
As a college professor in the field of communications, Rooke must evaluate sports broadcasters, including himself, with a critical eye.
“We can all develop bad habits,” he pointed out. “I think that TV announcers can become redundant, re-describing what the viewer already is seeing on the screen. The television play-by-play announcer is more of a bus driver, trying to steer the bus and get out of the way of his analyst.
“In radio, the announcer is the focal point of the broadcast,” Rooke continued. “You can overdo your job on television and underdo it on the radio. Some radio guys don’t give the score or time remaining on a regular basis. You have to understand that radio listeners are a very transient audience. I try to give the score and time remaining every other trip down the floor.”
Although Rooke is a traditional caller of games, he respects the wide disparity of styles among his colleagues.
“Everyone has his own way of calling games,” he said. “Johnny Most was a ‘homer’ but his memory is revered among Celtics fans. Someone who is a homer, who roots for his team on the air, well that’s one form of play-by-play. You don’t have to be accepted by people outside of your home audience. It really depends on whether you can sell it as an announcer. Johnny Most could.”
Over the years, Rooke has put down deep roots in Rhode Island, raising his two sons in Rumford along with wife Hanna (a producer at Channel 10) while pursuing a variety of jobs within his field, including the teaching assignment at Emerson. He also works as a commercial voice artist and serves as a development officer for the Wish Come True charity.
It was this connection to working with children that led Rooke to help establish the Rhode Island Radio Hall of Fame.
“I received notification a couple of years ago that an old friend of mine had been voted into the Texas Radio Hall of Fame,” Rooke recalled. “I asked around and learned that we did not have a Radio Hall of Fame in Rhode Island. I talked to John Colletto (a radio veteran of WPRO and the former WSKO all-sports channel). John’s eyes got big and wide when he heard what I was proposing. He thought it would be a great idea, to start our own Hall of Fame in Rhode Island. We tied it into the Wish Come True charity foundation and launched our Hall of Fame last year.”
Rooke and Colletto now serve on the Board of Directors for the RIRHOF.
That first class led with WPRO legend Salty Brine and former PC hoops announcer Chris Clark. This year’s class featured Pawtucket’s George Patrick Duffy, voice of the now-defunct Rhode Island Reds hockey team along with a variety of news and music radio names, including Carolyn Fox, Jack Comley, Daniel “Giovanni” Centofanti, Jimmy Gray, Norm Jagolinzer, Jim Mendes and Don Pardo, long-time announcer for the Saturday Night Live show on NBC television.
For a more detailed look at the RIRHOF, visit its website: http://www.rhodeislandradiohalloffame.org/