Class notables

American Magazine | Summer 2005

http://www.american.edu/weekly/summer05_notables4.html

Class Notables

Joe Pellegrino, CAS ’57, ’62
BY matt getty

As a kid in the 1940s Joe Pellegrino sat alone in his bedroom calling play-by-play for a baseball board game. Some 30 years later as Channel 4 sports director in Detroit, he sat between baseball hall-of-famers Al Kaline and George Kell in the Tiger Stadium press booth covering a Tigers game for the entire state.

“That first day in Tiger Stadium was one of the biggest thrills of my life,” Pellegrino recalls. “After doing all those games by myself, to be doing the real thing into a microphone that went out to all of Michigan . . . It was just a dream come true.”

Much of Pellegrino’s Emmy-award winning sportscasting career has been about making childhood dreams come true. From playing golf with Arnold Palmer to covering the U.S. men’s hockey team’s gold medal run in the 1980 Olympics, he has turned sports fantasies into a living through a TV and radio career spanning more than two decades and a half-dozen cities.

Pellegrino attended AU on an athletic scholarship, lettering in both basketball and baseball and winning the university’s outstanding senior athlete distinction in 1957. Though he nurtured professional sports ambitions, he understood early on that sportscasting offered a back-up dream job.

After coming back to AU to earn a master’s degree in communications in 1962, Pellegrino climbed the sports broadcasting ranks in a career marked as much by movement as by the memories. “In this business,” he explains, “you always have to be willing to pick up and move on to the next big opportunity.” In posts in Boston, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Detroit, and Cleveland, he called play-by-play for the Detroit Tigers and the Philadelphia Eagles and covered such major sporting events as the Boston Bruins’ first Stanley Cup victory in nearly 30 years.

A year ago, American magazine caught up with Pellegrino when a cover photo and a report of his death grabbed his attention. Featured in the “yesterday” photo for American’s fall 2003 issue, Pellegrino was identified by a classmate in a letter to the editor that mistakenly reported that the sportscaster had died in a skydiving accident. “I may have been engulfed in stupidity at times in my life,” a very much alive Pellegrino quipped in his subsequent letter to the editor, “but not enough to dive from an airplane.”

Instead Pellegrino has found his thrills in his career. Still regarding sports through the wide eyes of a child, he counts meeting such former heroes as Joe DiMaggio, Ted Williams, and Rocky Marciano among his life’s most exciting moments.

“When I shook hands with Marciano,” he recalls, “I put my hand in his, and man, I couldn’t find mine. He had knuckles like golf balls . . . These guys were just bigger than life. I think that’s part of what makes sports so captivating, to see these amazing people do things we never could. You watch sports just to get close to that. My work gave me the opportunity to get closer than most, and for that I consider myself lucky.”