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 four decades. He has been the play-by-play voice of the University of Georgia Bulldogs football team throughout that time, and has also hosted sports-related talk shows. He has been involved in Atlanta Falcons radio broadcasts in the past as well.
A native of Minnesota, 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. He announced at Vanderbilt until he accepted a similar position as the announcer for University of Georgia football move in the 1960s. He was also a pioneering television sports announcer in the Nashville market as well. After getting involved with the University of Georgia broadcasts he would make the commute from Athens, Georgia on game weekends back to his home in Nashville for several years in order to continue producing an outdoor sports program about hunting and fishing.
Now aged in his eighties, Munson is nevertheless still very active today. His graveley voice is one of the most distinctive in all of U.S. sports announcing and is endeared by Georgia Bulldog fans. 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 is considered unacceptable amongst the modern generation of announcers. His unique turns of phrase – which are virtually always made off hand – are a part of most Bulldogs fans' vernacular.
Some of Munson's well known calls include:
- "Run Lindsay!...Lindsay Scott! Lindsay Scott! Lindsay Scott!...I broke my chair!" - calling wide receiver Lindsay Scott's 92-yard touchdown reception from quarterback Buck Belue against Florida in 1980
- "Hunker down, you guys!...I know I'm asking a lot, but hunker down one more time!" - in a defensive series late in the game against Auburn in 1982, which clinched the SEC title for Georgia
- "Look at the sugar falling out of the sky!" - at the end of the Auburn game
- "We just stepped on their face with a hob-nailed boot and broke their nose! We just crushed their faces!" - calling Georgia's last-second win over Tennessee in 2001