Jim McKay died over the weekend at the age of 86 and it's another reminder that those of us who are older than 40 are seem to see the days passing us by a little quicker.
McKay was a tremendous sports broadcaster and yet he wasn't a guy you ever associated with football, baseball or basketball as he worked for decades for ABC Sports.
Yet he was an original.
He was a wordsmith. There is no such thing anymore in an era when there's so much sports media coverage out there. Heck, there are at least three all sports format radio stations just in the Upstate.
But once upon a time (1960s and 1970s) you only had sports coverage nationally on ABC, CBS and NBC.
McKay was one of those guys who took you to places - through the infamous series Wide World of Sports - where ice barrel jumping, cliff diving, lumberjack log rolling and wrist wrestling became regular sports staples.
He was also the TV voice of the Indianapolis 500, professional golf, Triple Crown horse racing and the Olympics.
(Not to knock NBC Sports, but while they've had the Olympics for longer in my memory than ABC and I still think of ABC being the network of both the Summer and Winter Games.)
And yet McKay wasn't a guy that people (like me) tried to impersonate when we were young and dreaming of being in the business. Howard Cosell was an easy guy to do and most kids growing up anywhere in the northeast did a poor Marv Albert when they tried to mimic play-by-play.
And yet McKay was such an original giant of a figure in this business. I never met him, but I've never read a cross word attributed to him.
I wouldn't trade the access we have to information that we enjoy today thanks to cable/satellite TV and the internet, but I also have a great fondness for those old days when a guy like McKay took you to an event and you would have missed something if he hadn't been there.
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