Play by play
In Cleveland, Jim Donovan's voice is the tie that binds.
There’s an agility to the voice, and a precision, and a sense of purpose. It delivers information in staccato, each word discrete and intent, and yet there’s a flow to it. As William Green looks for a hole late in the fourth quarter in Week 17 of 2002, the Cleveland Browns holding a one-point lead over the Atlanta Falcons and seeking their first playoff berth since the team was ripped away from the banks of the Cuyahoga, the voice mimics the rookie running back.
“Second down, they give it to Green…”
The last four words are quick, choppy—giv-idda-Green—just like No. 31’s feet are in the backfield. Both voice and ballcarrier are ready to take any avenue that comes available, but this close to the line of scrimmage, neither has much room to work with. Too big a move in so confined of quarters could mean being waylaid by overcommitment. Both must stay tight, quick, sharp.
It’s 2nd-and-3, and the Falcons have countered the Browns heavy personnel with a 10-man box. Kelly Holcomb (appearing in relief of the injured Tim Couch) has pivoted and made the handoff. The Browns’ line does its job, Falcons’ defenders get stuck in the muck, and suddenly: daylight. After a stumble, William Green breaks into a sprint down the far sideline, going right to left across your radio dial. As he opens up his stride, the voice opens with him.
“Stutter step—he’s through! First down—forty, forty-five, fifty, forty-five, forty…!”
We’re well into the open field, but still the voice hollers out the increments every five yards, rather than every ten, as if challenged to cram twice as much into each split-second. The excitement becomes palpable as Green accelerates downfield, the vibrations of both voice and stadium intensifying as the crowd comes aroar.
Then William Green has a step on the final defender, and it’s a 40-yard dash to the end zone, and the voice does what it does best: It makes you forget that it’s not from Cleveland. Far from it. The voice is not from Ohio, not from the Midwest, not from anywhere liable to be flown over. That voice, the one you sort of assumed to have emerged from Lake Erie whole, alongside a shimmering walleye, maybe, is in fact from New England.
That voice—the voice of the Cleveland Browns—doesn’t belong to some guy named Jimmy whose dad cranked out fenders in Youngstown or radials in Akron. It belongs to a fellow named James Francis Donovan III who’s from Boston, for chrissakes. Went to Boston University and everything. Punched a clock up in Burlington, Vt., for a while.
But in that moment, as William Green (from Boston College, incidentally) races to the end zone, you don’t care that the voice is from Boston. You don’t care where much of anything is from. In that moment, you hear the voice rising out of its seat just like you’re rising out of yours. You feel like this guy on the radio, Jimmy, knows you, and better yet, like you know him. In that moment, Jimmy’s voice sounds like that of an old friend, a trusted mentor, someone with whom you share no blood yet know only as Uncle.
In that moment, as William Green is sending Cleveland Browns Stadium into hysterics, Jimmy’s voice is etching a phrase into your memory:
(Apologies that the NFL is a stingy bitch.)
Now, you know this doesn’t make any earthly sense. But in the time it takes the voice to say those three words—“RUN, WILLIAM, RUN!”—you swear that William Green runs faster than he ever has before or ever will again. He seems to ascend to a different plane of speed, of athleticism, of life. Through the voice you hear William Green becoming a blur as the defenders melt away behind him. As the voice beseeches William Green onward, you envision him less as a football player than a sprinter, an Olympian, a god.
You don’t hear announcers speak in the second person often, though beloved exceptions there have been. Chicago Bears radio announcer Jeff Joniak used to tell kick returner extraordinaire Devin Hester he was ridiculous after he took one to the house. When LeBron got on a roll, Cavs play-by-play man Fred McLeod was liable to tell him to stop it, cut it out, knock it off.
But run, William, run was not an after-the-fact celebration. It was a mid-play exhortation. This was the voice pushing William Green, driving William Green, believing in William Green perhaps more than William Green ever believed in himself. This was the voice framing William Green in the purest of lights, enabling we mere listeners to experience the game in its purest form, cheering on William Green as though he were our own teammate, brother, or son.
The last defender’s last-ditch dive falls short, and William Green coasts into the end zone and back down to earth. The voice shakes with excitement, an avatar of the revelry overtaking the stadium. It counts down the final yard markers in delirious joy— “Twenty, fifteen, TEN! FIVE!”—before unfurling a primal, elongated “TOUCH-DOWWWWWN!”
The 2002 season was just the new Browns’ fourth. To that point they had increased their win total each year since the franchise was reconstituted, from two to three to seven. This win over the Falcons kept alive the postseason hopes of Butch Davis and Co., though it wasn’t until the Jets beat the Packers later that day that the Browns’ playoff ticket was punched.
We know now of the chaos that would ensue in the coming decades, reaching a winless nadir in 2017. But at the time the air smacked of possibility. It’s bittersweet that some missteps of yore are fading from memory—where have you gone, Dennis Northcutt? Whither your helmet, Dwayne Rudd?—as fresher ones take their place.
Perhaps you already know: A recent flirtation with competence (read: finishing last in the division only once in the last five years) notwithstanding, the Cleveland Browns have been, broadly, when it comes to being an NFL organization, if you’ll pardon the pun, dogshit.
The Browns’ name has long been mud, what with the mismanagement, the incompetence, the losing, the losing, oh god, the losing. The Berry–Stefanski administration has made inroads toward creating a winning culture, if a bland iteration thereof. Two straight wins in season openers! They’re even over .500 this decade! But also they tossed a quarter-billion into the infamous lap of Deshaun Watson, which freed the football world to celebrate anew that most renewable resource: the Browns finding a new way to be bad.
Any way you slice it, a few decent seasons have scarcely changed the notion that the reputation of the Cleveland Browns is not good. You might even say that the soul of the Browns is not good. You might go on from there, saying that the heart of the Browns, the brain of the Browns, the gut of the Browns, the essence of the Browns, deep down, the very thing that makes the Browns, the Browns—dump it in, the whole lot of it—is not good.
But there is at least one component of this cursed Operation board that stands apart, one organ fighting to make the broader body respectable: that voice, the one from Boston. Since 1999, Jim Donovan has been the one charged with making the Cleveland Browns, who have won a third of their games in that time, sound like something worth paying attention to.
He was born, it seems, to be an announcer. As a tween he lugged a tape recorder into the Boston Garden so he could practice calling Bruins games live. Nights at home found him searching the airwaves for out-of-town action, and occasionally enjoying Joe Tait calling the Cavs on WTAM 1100. When he was a freshman at BU, he did a Marv Albert impression on the radio show of this senior named Howard Stern.
His first gig out of school, in 1978, was jack of all play-by-play trades for WJON in St. Cloud, Minn. He got to drive a car with the station’s call letters on the side—for this perk, his salary was knocked down to $8,500 from $10,000—and he rented a room in a basement. (His parents fretted.) From there he moved to Burlington, where for years he called college basketball, minor league baseball, and any other game being played in the Green Mountains.
Then, in 1985, he was spotted by a young agent from William Morris named Ken Lindner, whose agency today will tell you it “choreographed the careers” of broadcast talents including Lester Holt, Mario Lopez, and Sanjay Gupta. (At the end of that list, not inconspicuously: Tucker Carlson.) Lindner aimed Donovan toward WKYC, the NBC affiliate in Cleveland. The young broadcaster demurred, seeing his path to the play-by-play booth there blocked by veterans. His father, the lore goes, urged him to take the chance and head to Ohio anyway.
That was in 1985.
The voice maintained its brightness even as it announced that its owner had experienced a relapse. You couldn’t help but be impressed by Jim Donovan’s composure when announcing in May 2023 that it was back. His eyes were still bright, voice still peppy like he was ginning up spirit for a class field trip. Hints of pain managed to show, but they had to fight to do so.
The leukemia first reared its head all the way back in 2000, having turned up in a routine blood test. Subsequent trips to the doctor confirmed that Donovan had chronic lymphocytic leukemia, or CLL; he remembered his father once saying that he had some three-letter thing. Donovan underwent chemotherapy, which put the cancer in remission for years. But circa 2005 it returned, this time needing more intensive, exhausting treatment. Then in 2008 it was back again, even more resistant to the previous care. A bone marrow transplant was recommended.
Donovan hated the idea of a transplant. Hated the thought of months in a hospital, away from work. He hoped the previous treatments would take. But in that time he only grew more fatigued, more diminished. Quietly, he was taken off the WKYC desk for much of the summer of 2008.
He returned to the airwaves in time for football season but continued to put off the transplant. It showed. In December 2009, climbing into the press box at Arrowhead Stadium for a late-season tilt with the Kansas City Chiefs, he was feverish, unsure that he could call the game. For three hours, however, you couldn’t tell. He rose to the occasion as Josh Cribbs returned two kickoffs for touchdowns and Jerome Harrison had a 286-yard, three-touchdown out of body experience, the Browns triumphing in a 41-34 thriller.
The comedown came on the flight home to Cleveland, and it was harsh. Donovan accepted that a bone marrow transplant was necessary.
He would have to wait a year for a suitable donor, but in time a match was found and the transfusion was a success. Days of fevered hallucinations followed, sure, but he was finally out of the woods. It was June 2011. He was committed to making the Browns opener in September.
Alas: Just when it appeared that Jim Donovan had kicked out, it was revealed to have been a false finish. A follow-up test after the transfusion, just weeks before opening day, found a concerning mole on his ear. Melanoma, a new threat to his depleted immune system. It was surgically removed, but fear abounded that it had spread. More tests. More waiting. A week of idling, wondering, worrying. Success; it hadn’t. When kickoff time came, Jim Donovan was there.
He announced on TV in May 2011 that he would be undergoing the bone marrow transplant. Before that, he kept this close. Somehow, his voice never let on.
All of this history makes the May 2023 announcement all the more remarkable: Even as Jim Donovan was explaining that he needed a more aggressive treatment plan, heavier artillery in the decades-long fight going on inside him, he spoke plainly, clearly. He conveyed the gravity of the situation while taking care not to upset or cause undue alarm.
When he distilled such a fraught message into such a simple phrase—“This is going to be kind of a long and winding road”—I thought of Fred Rogers.
That matter-of-factness reappeared on Sept. 10, 2023, shortly after the Browns completed their 24-3 demolition of the Cincinnati Bengals. At the end of the broadcast, after hours spent telling you how the receivers were aligned and whether the running back was on the QB’s left hip or his right, Jim Donovan explained that he would be taking a leave of absence.
“Here’s what’s gonna happen here on the Browns radio network: I am going to have to step away to continue treatment of this relapse of leukemia that I have had, and I will be away for a while. You will be in great hands with Nathan (Zegura) and Je’Rod (Cherry), and Chris Rose will come in and handle the play-by-play.
“And I promise I’ll be a listener, and I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
https://twitter.com/Browns/status/1701342945213829245
It wasn’t until the last sentence that his voice so much as quivered. Here Jim Donovan was, explaining that he would have to remove himself from the microphone he has commanded for a quarter-century, because this damn thing was still trying to kill him, and it seemed his chief concern was letting his faithful listeners know that they would be taken care of. He wanted us to know that we’d be okay.
The broadcaster–audience relationship is a parasocial one. That needn’t render it any less meaningful.
I imagine play-by-play announcers always having a struggle simmering within, a battle to restrain the performer’s urge to become more of the story while obeying the journalistic directive to remove oneself from it. Their job is downstream of the action itself, and thus they are dependent. Yet also they are essential, for theirs are the only voices we trust.
With enough reps, enough broadcasts, enough time, even the most objective voice can’t help but become a character in its audience’s collective story. As listeners we learn the voice’s ways, its rhythms. In time we think of events just as the voice describes them—a field goal attempt is distilled, aptly, into three points: snap is back, ball is down, kick is up. You feel after a while like you know the voice, understand it, love it, even, for the stability and reliability it has provided. You can’t imagine a radio dial without it.
You come to hope that you, and all the others out there who have long rejoiced in that same, perfect parasocial relationship, whether they’re in Avon or Independence or Timbuktu, can will it to become better, stronger, healthier, so that it can become the voice soundtracking memories for the next generation. Again you know this probably doesn’t really make sense. But you know it doesn’t need to.
Because you remember that December day when the voice willed on William Green, whose career was otherwise forgettable, to become transcendent. Because you remember how that one voice performed the miracle of capturing the essence of a single moment on Earth. Because you remember how that voice made you feel then, and still makes you feel now. Because you remember—no matter how cynical you might become, no matter how jaded the world might make you, no matter how few games your dumb football team wins—how one voice, in one moment, made you believe: That better days were ahead. That our better selves might prevail. That something better could yet be.
Terry Pluto’s articles were an essential resource in writing this.