If Bob Murphy, ’53, had never found his place in the broadcast booth, his name would still be firmly etched in Stanford Athletics’ lore.
A standout pitcher on the Cardinal’s first College World Series team as a senior, Murphy—who died August 22 at 86—was Stanford’s sports information director from 1964 to 1974. His instinct for promotion helped rouse Heisman voters from their legendary obliviousness to West Coast stars to bestow the award upon Jim Plunkett in 1970.
“It became kind of a joke between us,” Plunkett, ’71, said soon after Murphy’s death. “He spent $175 on my Heisman campaign. Just a folded piece of paper that he mailed to writers around the country.”
Murphy was best known as the tale-telling, passionate and unapologetically partisan radio voice of Cardinal football and basketball. His love for the university ran deep—he was born at Stanford Hospital—and he was unafraid to show it. “If there was ever a homer broadcaster, it was Murph,” says Dick Gould, ’59, MA ’60, his longtime friend and a former Stanford tennis coach.
Murphy’s most iconic call describes Mark Madsen, ’00, MBA ’12, slamming home a basket to cement Stanford’s last-minute comeback in the 1998 NCAA Elite Eight. “Madsen stuffed it,” he screamed. “Madsen stuffed it. . . . And . . . he . . . was . . . fouled.”
For John Platz, ’83, JD/MBA ’89, who was calling the game with Murphy, the call remains as majestic as the action it captured.
“His voice and choice of words conveyed the suddenness of it all, the surrealness of it all, the joy of an instant realization that defeat was turning into victory and that a holy grail of sorts — a ticket to the Final Four — was firmly within grasp,” Platz says. “And it constitutes, in my mind, the greatest broadcasting call in Stanford Athletics history.”
