Larry Munson
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Larry Munson is a famous sports announcer and talk-show host who has been based in Atlanta for over three decades. He has been the play-by-play voice of the University of Georgia Bulldogs throughout that time, and has also hosted sports-related talk shows and was involved in many years of Atlanta Falcons broadcasts as well.
A native of South Dakota, his voice is distinctively different from most of his many listeners, fans, and admirers. He first rose to real prominence as a broadcaster in Nashville, Tennessee in the late 1940s where he announced, among other things, minor league baseball and the football and basketball games of the Vanderbilt University Commodores, a position that he held until his move to Georgia in the 1960s. He was also a pioneer television sports announcer in the Nashville market as well, and after getting involved with the University of Georgia broadcasts continued to commute through the week to Nashville, particularly to produce and appear in an outdoor sports program about hunting and fishing, for several years into the 1970s.
Munson is still very active today and is widely regarded as one of the most distinctive announcers in all of U.S. collegiate sports, and an integral part of University of Georgia athletics, despite his now being well in advance of eighty years of age as of this writing. Like many of his peers, most of whom he has outlived, Munson's style is to avoid any pretence of journalistic objectivity during his broadcasts. He is an unabashed Bulldogs fan, and his broadcasts reflect this, in a way that generally would not be accepted coming from a younger person. His unique turns of phrase are a part of most Bulldogs fans' vocabularies, sometimes in knowing admiration or gentle mocking, sometimes subconsciously, which may be the highest tribute that can be paid to him.