To this day, especially in major-league baseball and major-college sports, a radio play-by-play announcer has a special bond with his listeners. They invite him into their home, game after game, and they trust him as a family friend. A lot of folks have the voice to be announcers. But only the best have the special blend of talent and personality to be the one-and-only "voice" of a team or a program.
            One of the best ever was Claude Sullivan, who was only 42 when he died of throat cancer in 1967. At the time of his death, Sullivan was the play-by-play man for both the Cincinnati Reds and the Kentucky Wildcats’ football and mens’ basketball teams. To be fair, he wasn’t the sole "voice of the Wildcats." He shared that distinction with Cawood Ledford, his friendly rival who did the UK games for 50,000-watt giant WHAS in Louisville.
            Sullivan did the Wildcat games for the Standard Oil network, which had WVLK of Lexington as its flagship station. Beginning in the late 1940s, UK basketball was so popular that four or five stations or networks originated live play-by-play broadcasts.  But Claude and Cawood both were so good, so big-league in every respect, that eventually there was only the two of them.
            Bernie Shively, who then was UK’s athletics director, wanted to establish a single UK network. However, he drug his heels because he refused to pick between Sullivan and Ledford. When Sullivan died, the UK network was born, with Ledford as its sole voice and WHAS as 
the anchor station. By the time he retired after the 1992 season, Ledford had become an icon throughout Kentucky.
Unfortunately, as Ledford’s legend grew, Sullivan’s legacy receded. But this year, almost 40 years after his death, Sullivan finally is getting some long overdue recognition. Last spring he was inducted into the Kentucky Journalism Hall of Fame, and this fall he will join seven others as the newest additions to UK’s sports Hall of Fame.
His son, David, himself a sports announcer, pulled some of Claude’s old tapes out of the family archives and put together a video tape just to remind everyone of how good — and how versatile — his dad was.
            The tape includes snippets from UK’s football victory over Tennessee in 1953 (Bear Bryant’s last year in Lexington), the victory by Adolph Rupp’s basketball team over Seattle in the final game of the 1958 NCAA tournament, a win by the U.S. basketball team in the 1960 Olympic Games in Rome, a call of Lucky Debonair’s victory in the 1965 Blue Grass Stakes (he went on to win the Kentucky Derby), and a home run by the Reds’ Frank Robinson during the 1965 season.
            Sullivan had no bigger fan than Ledford. After Sullivan’s death, in fact, Ledford always gave Claude his due whenever people would ask him about his favorite announcers. “When I first started,” Ledford said, “Claude told me, ‘We’re only competitors a few hours every week; there’s no reason why we can’t be friends the rest of the time.’ That made sense to me.”
A native of Winchester, which is located only 16 miles east of Lexington, Sullivan was known for his modesty. Up until he got the Reds job, he frequently called high school games with his longtime sidekick, Ted Grizzard. One of his protégés was Tom Hammond, who went on to become an important member of NBC’s network TV team.
Both Sullivan and Ledford had the talent to work at the network level. However, their love of Kentucky was greater than their ambition. So Ledford was content with the national exposure he got by calling the Kentucky Derby for CBS radio and doing the NCAA Final Four when UK wasn’t a participant.
For Sullivan, getting the Reds’ job moved him up to a new level.
He succeeded Waite Hoyt, who got into radio after a Hall of Fame pitching career with the New York Yankees (he was a 20-game winner on the teams built around Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig). In fact, Hoyt was at his best during rain delays, filling the time with stories and anecdotes from his playing days.
Throughout most of Hoyt’s career, the Reds were owned by the innovative Powell Crosley of the Crosley Broadcasting Co. Under Crosley, the Reds became the first big-league team to play at night and the first to do all its games on the radio.
Historically, the Reds have drawn heavily from Kentucky, West Virginia, and Indiana, in addition to southern Ohio. It’s the same territory where UK basketball reigns supreme, so Sullivan was a natural choice to follow Hoyt. Although not Hoyt’s equal as a raconteur, Sullivan had a better voice and was more crisp in his delivery.
Sullivan was the Reds’ play-by-play man in 1965, when Judge Roy Hofheinz opened the Astrodome in Houston.
“The Astrodome is like the Grand Canyon,” he wrote to a friend after working in it for the first time. “Like the Canyon, a picture of the Dome doesn’t really give you the idea of size. It’s amazingly clear and clean inside. A habit I’ve developed over the years is to always anchor any piece of paper around a ball park, football stadium, or race track. But here…no wind.”
After Sullivan’s death, the Reds went through two or three play-by-play men – including Al Michaels – until hiring Marty Brennaman before the 1973 season. Like Sullivan, Brennaman had basketball roots. He graduated from North Carolina and cut his teeth in professional sports with the Carolina Cougars of the old ABA.
In addition, Brennaman spent a couple of years in the late 1980s doing UK’s television broadcasts with Larry Conley, the former UK player and ESPN color analyst. As Sullivan’s spiritual descendant, Brennaman was delighted to hear that Claude finally had been inducted into the two halls of fame.
“Claude was a great one,” Brennaman said. “A lot of people thought he was better than Cawood Ledford, hard as that is to believe.”