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Don Griffith
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Don Griffith, Pensacola Announcer – from an Email by Scott Griffith
I spent a lot of time at Admiral Mason Park when I was a boy growing up in Pensacola. My father, the late Don Griffith, was a Pensacola broadcaster for fifty years. He was the voice of the Pensacola Dons, Angels, and Senators. Many times I watched my dad « recreate » baseball games the Don’s played on the road. He did road games from the WCOA studio which was located in the PNJ building in downtown Pensacola. A guy sitting at a teletype machine in the press box in Panama City, or Dothan, or Montgomery, etc., would type a pitch-by-pitch description of the game. My father, from the studio downtown would pull the wire copy and embellish the typed description with his own banter, adding sound effects such as the bat hitting the ball or the smack of a ball hitting the catcher’s mitt. He’d add crowd noise and turn it up for home runs and other big plays. Anyone listening to the game in Pensacola would swear it was originating from one of the Wiregrass Stadium, City Park, Bloch Park, or Paterson Field. Of course it wasn’t, but Griffith’s amazing ability for recreating the feel of a baseball game is an artform lost to today’s baseball fan. Don Griffith was a true radio talent and he was very well known in the Pensacola area not only for his recreations but for his excellent live baseball play by play and his descriptive announcing of high school football and Pensacola Navy Goshawk football games. During one year of Goshawk football a Heisman Trophy winner from the Naval Academy, Roger Staubach, was the team’s quarterback. If I’m not mistaken, it was the only season in which the Goshawks went undefeated. During the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, I’d go with him to almost every game at Admiral Mason Park. When I was about 12, I made extra money selling cokes and popcorn in the stands there. Needless to say, I have very fond memories of those days. Many fathers have great impacts on their sons, my dad is no exception. Don’s talent influenced and inspired me into my own career as a sportscaster: I’ve been a Mobile, Alabama broadcaster for almost thirty years now and everything I know about sports play by play I learned from him. Pensacola has a new team these days: the Pensacola Pelicans of the Southeastern League. I have been invited to announce a few innings of an upcoming Pelican’s game and I am truly looking forward to it. I hear Wayne Terwilliger will be there along with several others from that great era. It should be a lot of fun to attend the Pensacola game and to have a Griffith in the announcer’s booth again. |
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My father was Fred Davis. He died in 1997, and at the time, he he was doing
research for a book on the Alabama-Florida League. My Dad would be thrilled if he could see this website. Fred Davis was not only an |