In Memoriam: Greg Sharpe

When I was a little boy I was part of a boy's program at our church that always held a fall campout for the boys and their dads. It being Nebraska, the campout could absolutely not be scheduled the weekend of a Husker home game. Really it was best if it could be on a bye week. But sometimes that wasn't possible and we'd settle for doing it the weekend of an away game.

On Friday nights, the dads and sons would be together—fishing, tossing a football, sitting by the fire. Saturdays, however, saw all the dads huddled around the radio listening to the game. We could've reinvented The Lord of the Flies at the lake and not one of the fathers would have been any the wiser. Back in those days it was Kent Pavelka on the call. We all grew up with him not just because of those weekends camping, but because Nebraska fans back then (and sometimes still) will have the Husker game playing on the TV with the TV muted and the radio turned on in the background. By the time I got to college Pavelka had left the booth.

The man who arrived for the tail end of my sophomore year and would provide the soundtrack for literally all of my adult memories of Husker football was Greg Sharpe, who went to his rest last Friday, roughly one year after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. My first memory of one of his calls came from my junior year when we beat Colorado in the final home game of the season. I was at the game and, unlike some of the old timers, did not bring a radio with me so I could listen to the broadcast while watching the game in the stadium. But, good Nebraskan that I am, I did listen to a recording of Sharpe's call of Alex Henery's game-winning 57 yard field goal more times than I can remember in the subsequent weeks:

The call Sharpe is most known for, however, came several years later after our move to the Big Ten:

That said, I think his best call was probably one of his most understated. In July of 2016, Nebraska punter Sam Foltz and Michigan State punter Mike Sadler both died in a car crash. The season kicked off about a month later and on Nebraska's first punting situation in the game, Huskers coach Mike Riley sent ten players out onto the field to set up in punt formation. The punter, however, was missing. Sharpe had the call:

He somehow always knew what the moment required. It's what made him an exemplary broadcaster. 

A few weeks ago Sharpe, in what I believe was his last public appearance, was shown the newly renamed Greg Sharpe Radio Booth at Memorial Stadium.

What made Sharpe remarkable, as one local media figure noted the other day, is that he managed to have one of the five most public jobs in the state of Nebraska (truly), a job where it is basically impossible to please everyone and he... pleased everyone. He was, so far as I can tell, universally beloved across the entire state of Nebraska. And he managed that through a time when Husker football was in a seemingly never ending death spiral, when the most beloved institution in the state was in the worst condition it had been in since the Kennedy administration.

To my Nebraskan ears, Sharpe's voice meant "Home." It meant the sight of downtown Lincoln on perfect fall Saturdays bursting to the seams with red-clad Husker fans. It meant the sound of baseball in the spring, which somehow just belongs on the radio. It meant the hope that carries us through every fall and the quiet refusal to resign ourselves to something less than that, even as the results on the field kept going against us. It meant "Nebraska," is what I think I'm trying to say.

How did he do it? How was he able to convey so much with nothing more than his voice and the atmosphere of Nebraska? Probably there are several answers. One answer is that the man was a genuinely outstanding broadcaster. The best local sports broadcasters know how to straddle the line between objective witness and fan—Sharpe did it, I think, perfectly. They also know how to feel the game, how to tell when their voice is needed and when to let silence do its job. His call of the Henery field goal was perfect—the burst of exuberant, joyous noise as the kick sailed through, several seconds of silence so the game could breathe, then letting his colleagues in the booth add color. Perfect.

But, of course, there are plenty of excellent broadcasters who are not beloved broadcasters. That was not Greg. Listen to how his family and his colleagues, the people who knew him best, talked about him last year:

Sharpe was beloved not because he was excellent, but because he was good. And his goodness was not limited to the way he treated his colleagues. I only found out after his death that he had been a longtime mentor to local youth through a mentorship program established by Tom Osborne, the former Husker football coach. This is how the principal of a public high school here in Lincoln described him:

What stood behind that goodness, though he did not speak of it often, was a deep love of God and trust in his promises. One of his friends shared this after Sharpe's passing:

In one sense, it might seem odd to publish an obituary for a sports broadcaster in a Christian ideas magazine. But hopefully by now you understand why I am writing this, beyond the fact that, as a Nebraskan, Sharpe has been a strangely large part of my life for nearly 20 years despite the fact that I never had the privilege of meeting him and saying "thank you." There's a lesson in Sharpe's example, I think, that Christians of all types would do well to learn.

Sharpe's excellence as a broadcaster is what allowed him to reach and impact as many people as he did. But it was his kindness, humility, and love that made his impact so deep. 

We live in a moment in which Christians seem to have a hard time drawing those two things together. On the one hand, some Christians seem to go through life with a sense of what we might call social entitlement, acting as if a certain kind of life, certain kind of social deference, is owed to them not because of their conduct, but because of something intrinsically superior about them. These people care nothing for excellence—and they are alienating and irksome to their neighbors, who find their entitlement tiresome and obnoxious.

On the other hand, it is easy to find Christians who simply reject huge swathes of Scripture's moral teachings, who explain them away or dismiss them, and they let themselves be governed by something other than the law of love. And this, we are sometimes told, is simply what one must do, what our moment requires of us.

Sharpe's example demonstrates that this is not the case. He demonstrates that the need for ordinary Christian kindness and generosity, grounded in love for God and love for neighbor and offered by people whose life and work we admire, is still with us. The harvest remains plentiful. One worker has now gone to his reward. But the work he gave himself to remains with us.