Curt Gowdy, who died yesterday at 86, was a versatile sports announcer for NBC television, as well as the longtime voice of the Red Sox.

With a slightly nasal voice and a punchy, just-the-facts-ma’am delivery, Gowdy was among the most listened to announcers in the nation, starting in 1949, when he was hired as the second man in the booth to Yankees play-by-play caller Mel Allen.

“He’s certainly the greatest play-by-play person up to this point that NBC sports has ever had,” the NBC Universal Sports chairman, Dick Ebersol, said from the Turin Olympics in an interview with the Associated Press. “He literally carried the sports division at NBC for so many years on his back.”

Gowdy covered seven Olympic Games, eight Super Bowls, 12 Rose Bowls, 16 World Series, and anchored NBC’s “Game of the Week,” which focused on baseball, for more than a decade, starting in 1966. He also produced and often hosted “The American Sportsman,” a weekly half-hour show devoted to fishing in exotic locations around the globe.

Gowdy’s trace of a Western accent – which initially raised howls of protest when he went to work in Boston and mispronounced tricky New England town names – came from his childhood in Cheyenne, Wyo. His father was a chief dispatcher for the Union Pacific railway. Gowdy often credited his mother with laying the foundation for his broadcasting career, because she insisted on his taking elocution lessons as a child. At the time, he told the Washington Post in 1985, he thought she was “the cruelest woman in the world.” But later, as a radio station owner, he required all of his announcers to take them, too.

A high school and college standout in basketball who once held Wyoming scoring records, Gowdy injured his back badly enough playing college hoops that he was discharged from the Army Air Corps with a ruptured disk. He experienced disabling back problems for years.

Gowdy had announced imaginary games as a child, but it was not until he was out of college and the Air Corps, in 1943, that he was given his first on-air assignment: announcing a high school six-man football game for a Cheyenne high school. “There were two goalposts sticking up and two soapboxes sitting out there,” Gowdy told Esquire in 2003.”On one soapbox was a mike. I was supposed to sit on the other. … I said, ‘You got a roster?’ They said ‘No.’ Next thing I knew they blew a whistle and kicked off. Well, I made up the whole game. I put guys in the game that I’d met in the Air Force, guys I’d played basketball with.” His mother brought him hot soup.

An immediate success, Gowdy was hired as a high school sports announcer at KFBC in Cheyenne. During the summer months, he re-created major league baseball games on the radio from play-by-play telegrams delivered during the course of actual games in distant cities. In 1945, he was hired to cover college football and basketball by KOMA in Oklahoma City, and four years later came to New York and the Yankees. During one early visit to New York, Gowdy met his idol, Ted Husing, who pioneered play-by-play announcing, starting in 1924. Gowdy asked Husing for tips, then had the temerity to break in with a question while Husing spoke.

“Don’t you ever interrupt me again, you little bastard, when I’m talking to you,” Gowdy recalled Husing telling him. “It scared the hell out of me. But he went on and gave me a 30-minute lecture on how to broadcast track. It was brilliant.”

After two seasons with Mel Allen and the Yankees, Gowdy moved to Boston, where he became a much-loved figure among Red Sox fans. Ted Williams, also an avid fisherman, became a lifelong friend.

Among Gowdy’s apprentices in Boston was Bob Murphy, later the radio voice of the Mets. In addition to his baseball announcing duties, Gowdy had a six-days-a-week radio sports show, and in the off-season began broadcasting college football and professional basketball for NBC. In 1958, he broadcast his first World Series, teaming up again with Mr. Allen on the contest between the Yankees and the Milwaukee Braves.

Gowdy began calling American Football League games for NBC in 1961. He was the announcer for the fabled “Heidi” game of 1967, when NBC cut away from a close Jets-Raiders game in the final minute for a movie-of-the-week version of the inspirational Swiss orphan’s tale. The Raiders used the final minute to score two touchdowns and won the game; NBC’s switchboard was so deluged with calls, it was said, that it blew its fuse 26 times. Gowdy was unaware of the decision and called the game to its conclusion, then was asked by the network to re-create the last minute of action for later use.

Gowdy saw the incident through a slightly different lens than the average fan: “I said, ‘This’ll be the greatest promotion the AFL ever got,'” he told the Palm Beach Post in 2003. The story was page 1 news across the country, and when the Jets rebounded to win the Super Bowl that January, the league did ascend to parity with the senior circuit.

Gowdy stayed with NBC until 1979, when he left in a youth-oriented housecleaning of the sports department. He moved to CBS briefly, then mostly retired in 1981, relieved to stop traveling for half the year. He operated a sport-fishing tour business in Boston, and continued as owner/manager of six New England radio stations for many years.

He was inducted into the broadcast wing of the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1984 and into the American Sportscaster’s Hall of Fame in 1985. The Curt Gowdy State Park was established in Wyoming in 1971.

Gowdy’s favorite job seems to have been his years behind the microphone with the Red Sox, whose fans still cite his sterling radio performance as the model for others to emulate.

“I haven’t done radio play-by-play since I left the Red Sox, and I miss it,” he told Los Angeles Times in 1972. “It’s the most fulfilling job in sports. You’re like a wild bird. You can just take off and soar.”

Curt Gowdy

Born July 31, 1919, in Green River, Wyoming; died February 20 of leukemia at his home in Palm Beach, Fla.; survived by his wife, Jerre, children Cheryl Ann, Trevor, and Curt Jr., who is vice president of production and executive producer of SportsNet New York; and five grandchildren.