R.I.P.: L-A Sportscaster Tom Kelly

Tom Kelly

Tom Kelly, a sports broadcaster who made USC football and basketball games “bigger than life” for more than four decades, died Monday in Encino of cancer.

He was 88, according to The LA Times.

Kelly, a former football player, started calling USC football and basketball games on the radio in 1961 and later made the move to television.

His “rich, deep” voice became “identifiable with USC athletics,” said Tim Tessalone, USC sports information director, and a colleague of Kelly’s.

“You knew it was Tom Kelly the second you heard the first syllable,” Tessalone said.

That “bigger-than-life” intonation was tempered by attention to basics, Tessalone said. Kelly never neglected to place his listeners in “down, distance and score,” he said.

Kelly was born in Minneapolis in 1927 to May Cosgrove and Lester Kelly, a railroad worker, said Kelly’s wife, Danusia. His mother was widowed when Kelly was 10, she said. He joined the Army at the close of World War II and was assigned to cook bacon on a Liberty ship.

Injured in the shoulder playing football at Northland College in Ashland, Wisc., he started broadcasting in college. He worked in radio markets in the Midwest, including Peoria, Ill., where he met and became friends with Chick Hearn and worked alongside him in 1954.

He would work with Hearn again when they both came to Los Angeles, where Kelly’s career took off, starting at KNX 1070 AM.

He called Trojan games on the radio through the early 1960s, then moved to KCBS-TV and returned to do Trojan radio broadcasts from 1973 to 1988.

In 1980, he moved again to television where he remained until he retired. He called games for five USC national championship football teams.