Background and career
Brent Woody Musburger (born May 26, 1939) is an American sportscaster, currently the lead broadcaster and managing editor at Vegas Stats and Information Network (VSiN). With CBS Sports from 1973 until 1990, he was a longtime host of their program The NFL Today and is credited with coining the phrase "March Madness" to describe the NCAA Division I men's basketball tournament while covering the Final Four. While at CBS, Musburger also covered the Super Bowl, NBA Finals, the World Series, U.S. Open tennis, The Masters and college football, including Hail Flutie and Catholics vs. Convicts. Joining ESPN and ABC Sports in 1990, Musburger continued to cover the NBA Finals, as well as hosting Monday Night Football and providing play-by-play for Saturday Night Football and the SEC Network. He covered the Indianapolis 500 motor race, U.S. Open and British Open golf, the FIFA World Cup in soccer, the Belmont Stakes in horse racing, the Rose Bowl and the College Football national championship among other big events. In January 2017, he left the ESPN and ABC television networks after 27 years, briefly retiring from play-by-play of live sports before returning as the play-by-play voice of the Las Vegas Raiders from 2018 until 2022. Raised in Billings, Montana, he is a member of the Montana Broadcaster's Association Hall of Fame.
Musburger was born in Portland, Oregon, and raised in Billings, Montana, the son of Beryl Ruth (Woody) and Cec Musburger. His brother, Todd Musburger, is a prominent sports agent. His love of sports began as a boy, where he played Little League Baseball and was a boyhood friend of former Major League pitcher Dave McNally. He also sold programs at Billings Mustangs games in the late 1940s and early 50s. Musburger's youth included some brushes with trouble: when he was 12, he and his brother stole a car belonging to their mother's cleaning lady and took it for a joy ride. His parents sent him to the Shattuck-St. Mary's School in Faribault, Minnesota. Educated at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, he was kicked out for a year for owning and operating a car without a license. Around this time, Musburger was a minor league baseball umpire in the Class-D Midwest League for the 1959 season. While it had been previously reported that Musburger was the home plate umpire when Tim McCarver, future MLB All-Star and Ford C. Frick Award winner, made his professional baseball debut that summer for the Keokuk Cardinals, the story is apocryphal. However, Musburger did umpire games of McCarver's later that season. Musburger began his career as a sportswriter for the now-defunct Chicago American newspaper, where his editor was sportswriter Warren Brown. In 1968, Musburger penned a column regarding Tommie Smith and John Carlos's protest of racial injustice in the United States with a Black Power salute on the medal stand during the 1968 Summer Olympics. In it he stated "Smith and Carlos looked like a couple of black-skinned storm troopers" who were "ignoble," "juvenile," and "unimaginative." In a 1999 article in The New York Times, Musburger stated that comparing the two to the Nazis was "harsh," but he stood by his criticism of the pair's action:
Did [Smith and Carlos' action] improve anything? ... Smith and Carlos aside, I object to using the Olympic awards stand to make a political statement. According to Carlos, Musburger never apologized:
We are talking about someone who compared us to Nazis. Think about that. Here we are standing up to apartheid and to a man in Avery Brundage who delivered the Olympics to Hitler's Germany. And here's Musburger calling us Nazis. That got around. It followed us. It hurt us. It hurt my wife, my kids. I've never been able to confront him about why he did this. Every time I've been at a function or an event with Brent Musburger and I walk towards him, he heads the other way. Carlos later told Jemele Hill during a 2019 discussion that "Brent Musburger doesn't even exist in my mind. He didn't mean anything to me 51 years ago. He doesn't mean anything to me today. Because he's been proven to be wrong." In 1968, Musburger began a 22-year association with CBS, first as a sports anchor for WBBM radio and later for WBBM-TV. In the mid-1970s, Musburger moved to Los Angeles and anchored news and sports for KNXT (now KCBS-TV); there he worked alongside Connie Chung as a co-anchor on KNXT's evening newscasts from 1978 until 1980, when he joined CBS Sports full-time. In 2020, Musburger told the Sports Illustrated Media Podcast that he has always won while betting the length of the Super Bowl national anthem by having his friends attend the rehearsal the day before the game and time it: "Some people have lip-synched it and that was an easy win because that recording is automatic."
Beginning in late 1973, Musburger was doing play-by-play for CBS Sports. He started out doing regular season National Football League games (future The NFL Today co-host Irv Cross was also doing NFL games at that time as well). Musburger was paired with Tommy Mason or Bart Starr, who provided the color commentary. A year later, Wayne Walker would be paired with Musburger in the booth. By 1975 at CBS, Musburger went from doing NFL play-by-play (and other items, mostly on CBS' Sports Saturday/Sunday programs) to rising to prominence as the host of the network's National Football League studio show, The NFL Today. Suddenly, Musburger began to cover many assignments for CBS Sports. Among the other events he covered, either as studio host or play-by-play announcer, were college football and basketball, the National Basketball Association, horse racing, the U.S. Open (tennis) tournament, and The Masters golf tournament. Musburger also called Major League Baseball games for CBS Radio. He would even lend his talents to weekend afternoon CBS Sports Spectacular fare such as The World's Strongest Man contests, the World Series of Poker, and the like.
But it was Musburger's association with The NFL Today that made him famous. During his tenure, CBS' NFL pregame show was consistently the #1 rated pregame show. One of the signatures of the program was Musburger's show-opening teases to the various games CBS would cover, along with live images from the various stadiums. Musburger's accompanying intro to each visual, "You are looking live at ..." became one of his catch phrases. In promoting the network, his voice often tailed off on the last letter of "CBS" ("C.B. eeezz"), creating another catch phrase.
