Jim Reynolds didn’t grow up in the South. So he didn’t spend the autumn Saturday afternoons and nights of his youth listening to the radio legends of Southern college football – from Mississippi State’s Jack Cristil to Vanderbilt’s and Georgia’s Larry Munson to Cawood Ledford of Kentucky to North Carolina’s Woody Durham and Tennessee’s John Ward.
“I was from the Chicago area,” Reynolds said Tuesday as he recalled the most famous sports announcer in the Windy City. “So I was a big fan of Harry Caray.”
But when he moved to Chattanooga more than 38 years ago to become the revered radio voice of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga Mocs, he quickly became impressed with Ward’s distinctive calls of Big Orange football and basketball.
“That was really the golden age of radio,” said the man many of us know as J.R. “TV hadn’t taken over yet. Radio was king and Ward was as good as any of them, the way he’d paint those games through a Big Orange prism. He added so much fun to the broadcast experience for UT fans.”
Technically, that fun came to a close at the end of the 1998-99 school year. Having so masterfully painted UT’s national championship football season that fall – “the national champions are clad in Big Orange!” – Ward turned off his well-chosen words for good at the close of that year’s Volunteers men’s basketball campaign.