He grew up in Brooklyn, the son of Jewish immigrants from Romania. He graduated from James Madison High School in 1935, and enrolled at Syracuse University, where he played football and ran track. He made the U.S. track team for the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. The 4x100-meter relay team was supposed to be Glickman, Sam Stoller of the University of Michigan, Ralph Metcalfe of Marquette University in Milwaukee, and Jesse Owens of Ohio State. The 1st 2 were Jewish, and the last 2 were black.
Owens won the 100 meters, with Metcalfe finishing 2nd for the Silver Medal. And he won the long jump, defeating German jumper Carl "Luz" Long. The sound of German fans cheering on a black American, flying in the face of the myth of "Aryan supremacy," infuriated the host nation's head of state and head of government, who were the same man, Chancellor Adolf Hitler.
After this, Avery Brundage, Chairman of the U.S. (and later of the International) Olympic Committee, dropped Glickman and Stoller from the relay team, replacing them with Foy Draper and Frank Wykoff, the latter of whom had already won Gold Medals in 1928 and 1932. Draper and Wykoff were blond and blue-eyed, neither black nor Jewish. Glickman and Stoller fumed, but there was nothing they could do except cheer the team on to their Gold Medals.
(Draper and Long would both be killed in action in World War II in 1943 -- on opposite sides, of course. Metcalfe would later be elected to Congress from a Chicago district in 1970, serving until his death in 1978. Wykoff became a teacher in Los Angeles. Owens became what he called "a professional good example." He and Wykoff both died in 1980. Stoller became an actor and a singer, and lived until 1983. Glickman survived them all, by plenty.)
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His athletic career over with his 1939 graduation, he continued a path he had begun at Syracuse: Radio. He was hired by WHN, 1050 on the AM dial. His career was interrupted by World War II, and he enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps.
A Marine? From Brooklyn? Who had played football at a major university? You know he was tough. A Jew who'd already been robbed of his chance to embarrass Hitler on the field of play? You know he was ready to do so on the field of battle. They made him an officer, and he survived The War without a scratch. Hitler, and the Nazi government and Reich (Empire) he built, of course, did not.
He returned to WHN, and became its sports director. (1050 AM is now ESPN Deportes, the Spanish version of ESPN radio in New York.) In 1946, with the founding of the league that would become the NBA, he became the 1st voice of their charter and flagship franchise, the New York Knickerbockers -- the Knicks. In 1967, he would also become the 1st voice of what is now the other NBA team in New York, the New Jersey Americans of the American Basketball Association -- later the New York Nets, the New Jersey Nets and the Brooklyn Nets.
As Knick broadcaster, he was preparing his broadcast while watching the Knicks practice. He saw All-Star guard Carl Braun -- a fellow Brooklyn Jew -- practicing free throws, and when one went through the net without going off the backboard, what would later be called "nothing but net," Braun would imitate the sound it made, saying, "Swish!" Glickman picked up on it, and when it would be done during a game, he would say, "Swish!"
Those of us who grew up in the 1980s and '90s, who heard Warner Wolf do the sports on WCBS-Channel 2 on the 11:00 broadcast, we thought he invented "Swish!" Nope, he got it from Marty Glickman. I don't know where Warner got "Boom!" for a home run, but he came up with "Come on, give us a break!" on his own, and "Let's go to the videotape!" happened unintentionally, as the result of a blooper -- not his own.
Glickman practically invented TV sportscasting in New York. He did the pregame and postgame shows for the Yankees and the Brooklyn Dodgers -- making him, in a way, the father of the MSG Network, SportsChannel, YES and SNY. He served as sports director of WCBS, 880 AM. He also did Jets games, college basketball, track meets, wrestling meets from St. Nicholas Arena, and harness races at Yonkers Raceway. He did University of Connecticut football and basketball for the Connecticut radio network, and Ivy League football on PBS.
In 1991, the Basketball Hall of Fame gave Marty Glickman their Curt Gowdy Media Award, tantamount to induction for broadcasters. He was only the 2nd person to receive it. The 1st was Gowdy himself.
He retired in 1992, wrote a memoir titled Fastest Kid On the Block, and continued to make public appearances until heart trouble hospitalized him in 2000. He died on January 3, 2001, from complications from surgery. He was 83.
He was survived by his wife, Marjorie; 2 daughters, Elizabeth Alderman and Nancy Glickman; 2 sons, John and David; 10 grandchildren and 6 great-grandchildren. He was cremated, so there is no gravesite.
In his New York Times obituary of Glickman, William N. Wallace wrote, "Glickman's voice had the clarity of a bell and the authority of a bank." Considering he came of age during the Great Depression, and considering what we've seen from banks since he died, maybe we should say he had more authority than a bank.
Marv Albert called him "my idol." And Marv -- at least, before his 1997 scandal -- was a lot of younger sportscasters' idol.
Marty Glickman was the 1st New York TV sportscaster. He was the best. Because he was such a good example, several others have come close. And he deserves to be remembered on what would have been his 100th Birthday.
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