NORMAN — You cannot help but like Bob Barry. You may not like his calls, but you cannot help but like him. You may count his mistakes, but upon meeting him, you’ll forgive them all. The truth is, you may not like what he does, but you have to admit he does it pretty well.
Saturday begins his final season as the voice of Oklahoma football. In November, he begins his final year as the voice of Sooner basketball.
This year makes 50 he has been the voice of OU or OSU sports. Thirty-two of them, including his last 20, will have been with OU.
He’s almost done.
“I’ve been so fortunate and so lucky to have the job I’ve had,” Barry said. “I tell young people all the time that when you find the thing you love to do, then do it to the best of your ability, it’s really not work at all.”
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His story is one for the ages.
It began the day he maybe should have died.
Seven years old, Barry had already bought one strawberry pop from his 4-year-old brother, a budding capitalist, who was selling them on a hot summer day.
He wanted another but was short the nickel his brother insisted he pay. He called his father, who told him one pop was enough, and not to ask for a nickel from the next-door neighbor.
Barry asked the neighbor anyway, got the nickel, and had himself another pop only for his father to be told of it by the neighbor. Ashamed, he lied to his father and was sent to his room without supper.
In his room, crying and sad, he watched his mother paint a swing through his open window.
“I’m crying and I look out the window, touch my hair against the screen and it opens up and … two stories, head first, on a concrete porch,” Barry remembered. “Made the front page of The Oklahoman.”
Lucky to be alive, his skull was fractured. Told to stay in bed and not lift his head from the pillow for eight weeks, he turned to the only outlet available.
The radio.
That’s where it began.
Listening to games.
A passion was born.
From that point forward, he was a bit of an oddity. He created his own baseball games, rolling dice, and announcing the action.
“Then I put out a little newspaper about how my game went,” Barry said.
He knew what he wanted to do even if he didn’t know how to go about doing it.
A nod to his humility, he told on himself, even as university president David Boren walked by Tuesday at the stadium. Because once upon a time he was a student at the university for which he became the voice, only to flunk out.
“They called me in and said, ‘Son, you’re wasting your money and our time,’” he said.
His dad told him he better enlist and Barry chose the Air Force.
Once enlisted, he was pleased as punch to explain, they made him a teacher, even after flunking out of college. Apparently, the thing that kept more aircraft grounded than anything else in those days was a lack of supplies and Barry taught folks how to go about finding them.
Upon leaving the service, he went to work at KNOR radio, in Norman, which has since become KREF.
“I could always sell,” Barry said, and that’s how he paid the bills. But when KNOR acquired Norman High football and basketball, he told his bosses he was their man and they agreed.
A career was born.
It was 1956.
Five years later, Bud Wilkinson wanted somebody else calling Sooner games and was familiar with Barry, having heard him call sons Jay and Pat Wilkinson’s games at NHS.
Fourteen aspiring broadcasters called one quarter each on tape at the 1961 spring game, which then was the varsity-alumni game. Barry won the job.
Another nod to his humility, Barry understands Wilkinson’s previous familiarity with him may have given him a leg up on the competition.
“I’ve always thought that probably helped me get the job,” he said.
A 19-6 loss at Notre Dame was Barry’s first game as voice of the Sooners.
An icon was born.
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Barry knows he has detractors, but he makes two great points. One, there’s no editing in live radio, never has been and never will be. Two, you can’t please everybody and only one person calls the game.
Here’s a third.
Not only did Barry call OSU football and basketball for 18 seasons between Sooner runs — a result of broadcasting rights changing hands, not his changing Bedlam loyalties — Barry called no great Sooner teams until Bob Stoops came along.
John Brooks called Barry Switzer’s glory years and people loved him. Some of them weren’t prepared to love the next guy and didn’t.
If only they’d met the man.
I used to be one of Barry’s detractors.
He blew too much sunshine, even as Gary Gibbs struggled mightily to follow Switzer, even as Howard Schnellenberger put on his W.C. Fields act, even as John Blake took head coaching back to the stone ages.
As a fan raised on Little Joe, Steve Davis and George Cumby, I wanted the truth to be told, in the starkest terms. I didn’t want apologies.
What I didn’t understand was plenty.
Barry wasn’t in the booth to pass judgment. He was there to pass along the excitement, the excitement he felt when he couldn’t raise his head from his pillow, but could listen to games from across the country; the excitement he felt when he created his own games, called them and wrote them when, only a boy, he was already a one-man media band.
It’s always been about the excitement for Barry.
“That’s why I like to count down a touchdown, “ he said. “Thirty-five, 25 …”
I never counted his mistakes, but I’m sure I heard a few. Big deal. Because when you listen to Barry call a game, he really does deliver that excitement, taking you back to this place and time when sports were full of wonder and awe, always bigger than life.
Can’t you just hear Barry calling the great events of a nostalgic past? Prize fights and horse races, baseball before every game was on TV?
It’s not hard.
Then, as now, he would have called a fine game.
Clay Horning 366-3526 cfhorning@normantranscript.com
