Posted by
Ed Lilly on Tuesday, May 27, 2008 12:19:21 PM
I read a fascinating book over the weekend by Mark Frost titled The Match: The Day the Game of Golf Changed Forever. Frost tells an amazing and true story about a 1956 best ball golf match played at Cypress Point ostensibly to "settle" the question, still unresolved at that time, whether top flight amateur golfers or professional golfers were better. What does this have to do with the title of this post? I'll get to that in a minute. Here's the quick and dirty synopsis of the book:
Eddie Lowery, who started his rise to fame and fortune as Francis Ouimet's 10 year-old caddy when Ouimet won the U.S. Open in 1913, backed a team of amateurs, comprised of a young Ken Venturi and another young player named Harvie Ward. Lowery claimed there were no two golfers in the world who could beat his team of amateurs.
George Coleman, a wealthy industrialist, avid golfer, and long-time friendly golf rival of Lowery's, made Lowery put his money where his mouth was and put up a professional duo made up of Byron Nelson and Ben Hogan.
From Frost's description of the match, there isn't a golfer alive who wouldn't record the broadcast had there been cameras on the course. Thankfully, Frost was able to get the story from Ken Venturi (the only surviving member of the foursome) and others who were at Cypress Point that historic day, as well as friends and family of the deceased golfers.
Frost also wrote The Greatest Game Ever Played, about Ouimet's 1913 U.S. Open championship upset of Harry Vardon. This story may not translate as well into a movie, but it was a first rate golf, human interest, and popular history story just the same.
So who has the most recorded voice in history? This was just one of the almost throw-away pieces of information I found in the book. For whatever reason, it stuck in my head. Certainly the answer was someone I and probably every person over the age of 30 in this country will have heard of. But I never would have come up with the right answer if I had been given 100 guesses.
I'll update this post with an answer, but figured I would leave it hanging out there for now to see if anyone happens to drop by and wants to take a guess, or perhaps already knows who it is.
UPDATE: Some excellent guesses, certainly from the right time period, and the Mel Blanc guess is, in it's way, very close. According to The Match, and from taking a quick look online I see that the Wikipedia page for this person makes the same claim, though that's certainly not an exhaustive search, the most recorded voice in history belongs to....
Bing Crosby.
Crosby started the celebrity pro-am golf tournament with his Crosby Clambake, which moved up the coast from Rancho Santa Fe to the Monterey Peninsula after WWII. It was during dinner at Crosby's house at the start of festivities surrounding the 1956 Crosby that the wager creating the fabled match between Hogan, Nelson, Venturi and Ward was made, and during the practice rounds the next day that the fabled match took place.
I knew about Crosby's connection to his own tournament, of course, but didn't realize the depth of his passion for golf. He was a caddy at a young age, and was a single digit handicap, taking his tournament invitations and golf matches very seriously. And if I knew it I had forgotten that Crosby died of a massive heart attack suffered walking off a course in Spain after finishing a round of golf.
Between his radio, film, television and recording careers, Crosby's voice is apparently the most recorded ever. Kind of surprising. I thought perhaps a long-time broadcaster, like Winchell, Cronkite, etc., might have the distinction.
How is Mel Blanc related? Well, there are several Looney Tunes cartoons in which Bing makes an appearance, along with other Hollywood stars of the 30s, 40s and 50s. Blanc did the voices for the Looney Tunes characters, though I'm not sure if he also impersonated the stars who appeared in the cartoons.