The voice of the Pack and the most famous Ball State alum crossed paths
Gary Hahn and David Letterman were standing at the urinals in the bathroom of the Indianapolis television station where they worked together when a weatherman colleague boisterously walked in, showing obvious signs of a three-, maybe four-, martini lunch.
It was not the first time.
When the guy demanded that Letterman — the station’s quirky, untrained weekend meteorologist — prep his report for that night’s broadcast, the future comedian and late-night talk show host absolutely refused.
He slapped the guy across the face, shook him by the shoulders and gave him an early version of Cher’s famous scene in Moonstruck: “Snap out of it.”
“He told the guy to go downstairs, have some coffee and pull yourself together,” Hahn recalled.
“I had to watch that night just to see what would happen. When he turned on the microphone, no one could tell there was anything wrong. It was a perfect broadcast.”
A few hours later, the inebriated forecaster gave a detailed and seemingly sober report and no one in the studio or the greater Indianapolis viewing area had any idea that the weatherman wasn’t at his best.
“It was one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen in broadcasting,” Hahn said.
Hahn, celebrating his 30th year as the “Voice of the Wolfpack,” has seen a lot in his radio and television career. He was the play-by-play announcer for Louisville when Denny Crum’s Cardinals won the 1980 NCAA men’s basketball championship. He called the Rose Bowl in 1985 as the play-by-play announcer for Ohio State football and the Buckeye’s 1986 National Invitation Tournament championship.
He also worked at WNBC in New York City and at Alabama.
But since 1990, Hahn has called football, basketball and baseball games for the Wolfpack Radio Network, working alongside Tony Haynes, Johnny Evans, Francis Combs and many others through the years to bring Wolfpack wins and losses to those who couldn’t be there in person.
This weekend is kind of a milestone of sorts for Hahn when NC State plays for the first time ever in football or men’s basketball a game against Ball State, a school known primarily for being named after a glass jar manufacturer and as Letterman’s alma mater.
Hahn was a fledgling student broadcaster at Butler on Jan. 3, 1972, when the Bulldogs traveled to face Ball State. It was the first time the spindly sophomore ever participated in a radio broadcast.
“I was a little nervous,” Hahn said. “I just got thrown into the deep end of the pool.”
He felt the same way two years later when he went to work at Indianapolis television station WLWI TV-13 as a news intern. Letterman was the weekend weatherman who often went off script on his forecasts, entertaining viewers and infuriating management.
Letterman also often served as the station’s booth announcer on weekdays, a union job that required about 15-to-30 seconds of voiceovers on an hour-long broadcast. He spent most of his time in the booth working on comedy and preparing for his late-night gig as the host for Freeze-Dried Movie, a local forerunner of Mystery Science Theater 3000. When Letterman left his television gig for an afternoon show at an end-of-the-dial AM radio station, Hahn was hired as his full-time replacement as booth announcer to sit and do mostly nothing in front of an RCA 77-DX microphone.
Shortly thereafter, though, a new general manager told Hahn he had to be the weekend weatherman the way Letterman was, but after one brief audition in front of a U.S. map Hahn was shown the door.
“And that’s how I got fired from my first decent job in broadcasting, because I couldn’t do the weather on the weekends the way David Letterman did,” Hahn said with a laugh.
After a year or so, Letterman left his job as a radio show, packed up all his belongings and moved to Hollywood to try his hand at stand-up comedy. Hahn and Ball State’s most famous alumnus never spoke again after Letterman left the television station.
“But he’s always someone I admired, even though we were pretty different,” noted Hahn. “I was a student news intern, and he worked the weather on the weekends. He was an off-beat guy who did his own thing.
“He always made me laugh.”
Later on, Hahn worked on the fourth floor of New York City’s Rockefeller Center, a few floors away from the studio where Late Night with David Letterman was taped from 1982-93. He never summoned the courage to track the rising star down to talk about their overlapping careers at WLWI.
“I’m not exactly a wallflower, but I’m not the most outgoing person in the world,” admitted Hahn.
“I thought about reintroducing myself, but I wasn’t completely convinced he would remember me.”
Hahn has stayed in sports broadcasting his entire career, earning his place in the legacy created by well-remembered NC State predecessors like C.A. Dillon, Ray Reeve, Bill Jackson, Wally Ausley and Garry Dornburg.
Hahn has been behind the mic for more games and broadcast more games than any of them.
Tim Peeler is a regular contributor to The Wolfpacker and can be reached at tmpeeler@ncsu.edu.
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