Signing Off: Harvard Senior Prepares To Call Final Game

UPDATED: March 19, 2015, at 6:23 p.m.

“McNabb! To Pinkston! The thirty, the twenty, the ten, he’s got nothing but grass ahead of him!”

The shouts rang out, loud and animated. Six-year old Emily B. Zauzmer '18 turned over in bed, wondering how the Eagles could be playing this early on a Saturday morning. It wasn’t noon yet, and by the sounds reverberating through her house, Philadelphia was deep in the fourth quarter.

Stumbling downstairs, she found her brother, Ben T. Zauzmer '15, in front of his computer—the blinking lights of Madden capturing his complete attention. It wasn’t your typical eight-year-old at the controls, however. Ben was indifferent about winning, focused on the game itself. Volume turned off, he’d taken the role of his hero—play-by-play man Merrill Reese—calling the game for both sides.

Sister Julie M. Zauzmer '13 had caught Ben at the trick months earlier, sneaking up on her little brother as he announced his NHL games before school. Julie, a former Crimson managing editor, gave Ben his first profile; before little brother was written about in the Boston Globe and the Daily Mail, he found his way into her fifth-grade writing assignment.

Years later, Ben joined WHRB 95.3 FM, the Harvard student radio station. Over the next four years, he took over play-calling responsibilities for football and basketball, calling games at Fenway Park and TD Garden. His tone became the voice of Crimson sports; the man who self-describes his second religion as “Harvard sports” became its radio prophet.

Yet, as friends and family testify, Zauzmer’s career in broadcasting is about more than becoming the voice of Harvard basketball. Those close to him talk of an inspiring mentor, a transformative leader, and an artisan of his craft—a savant modifying the technology of the future to bring his listeners the quintessential experience of the past.

THE SHOW MUST GO ON

Ben has a hundred stories about his broadcasting career. Name the biggest sports moments in recent Harvard history, and it has been his voice on the air covering them. Princeton’s four touchdowns in 13 minutes to beat Harvard? Check. Upsets of New Mexico and Cincinnati in the NCAA Tournament? Check. The Game? Check.

His favorite story, however, deals with a Crimson loss. The game was two years ago in Princeton, with the Harvard men’s basketball team looking to break a quarter-century of futility at Jadwin Gymnasium. The defending league champion and a victor at home over the Tigers that season, Harvard came in as the favorite. It led almost end to end, but faltered late as a raucous crowd egged the Tigers on to a conference-changing win.

“After the win, the players run to where I am and the students run from behind—at some point in the celebration I get knocked down and fall to the floor,” he recalled. “I try to get up and see this sea of orange-painted legs…. At this point, I am broadcasting into a cellphone and so I crawl under the table and I am screaming into the phone, no idea if anyone is listening. I am doing the full five to 10 minute postgame show solo as they rampage around me.”

He stops and smiled: “It’s a great moment of ‘the show must go on’ attitude in broadcasting.”

Senior Ben Zauzmer has called 28 of the last 30 football games and every Harvard March Madness game since 2013. By Connie Yan

His dedication to the craft is the first thing his co-hosts reference. Tessa A.C. Wiegand '15, Ben’s counterpart on the broadcasts for the Yale playoff game and the NCAA Tournament contest tonight, says she thought he was joking when he began to reference facts about the grandparents of the Yale players. He wasn’t.

“I don’t think I know anyone who puts as much effort into something like this, which is not something he plans to do next year,” Wiegand said. “This is not his career plan, this is something he does for fun, and he is so passionate and so dedicated.”

Former co-host Zack W. Guzman ’14 said Ben was the only person he knew to go through the pregame media packets cover to cover. The preparation is key to Ben, who said that during the quickly-moving action of basketball games, you have no time to look down at a roster—it has to be memorized.

A man his co-hosts call a “walking almanac” for Harvard sports, Ben throws out references to players from the early 1950s offhand. His eyes twinkle when I ask what’s the fact about Harvard sports that nobody knows.

Like a man remiss to share state secrets, he wants to keep his facts for the broadcast, but lets slip one golden nugget—that Harvard’s Thursday night contest against North Carolina matches the oldest private university in the country with the oldest public one.

“He appreciates Harvard sports, which is such a uniquely-rich, historical thing,” Julie said. “You don’t have to be the best sports team to have the best history, and he gets that.”

Beyond his encyclopedic knowledge of the game, his peers said that he does what all good broadcasters do—puts his audience at ease.

“The thing that makes radio broadcasters good is when they are friendly and relatable,” said WHRB hockey co-host Savanna M. Arral '16. “Ben has that kind of persona. He’s easy to listen to and makes you feel as though you are a part of the team.”

“It’s very enjoyable to listen [to him] because you feel that he is sharing everything he knows with you,” said roommate John A. Elzinga '15, a former Crimson blog exec. “He is both excited and knowledgeable in a way not a lot of people are.”

BUILDING FROM THE ROOTS

It is that same attitude, Arral said, which makes Ben an excellent leader for WHRB, where he works as head of the sports department. Since he took over, the department has more than tripled in size. Arral and Wiegand both credit him as being the reason they joined, the latter recalling a late night men’s basketball conversation with him about co-captain Steve Moundou-Missi as the reason she signed up.

“The personality that he has [on air] is the same that makes him a good leader,” Arral said. “Everyone feels like they can be a part of something inclusive and something happy.”

“He has done a great job making people know that it exists…bringing in people who are passionate and aren’t saying “I am here to cover hockey” but “I love sports and would like to cover everything”,” Wiegand added. “There’s such a sense of growth and new life.”

Austin B. Harcarik '18, a beneficiary of Ben’s policy that freshmen be able to call football and basketball games—that everyone be treated equally—said that the department head has been a big brother personality for the department.

“There is not one other person or program on campus that has made me feel more welcome than Ben Zauzmer and WHRB Sports,” Harcarik said. “You can really feel lost when you enter Harvard as a freshman, but Ben has always made me feel like I’m part of something great.”

Harcarik and Arral both mentioned the technological improvements Ben has made as one of his key contributions. By doing what he humbly describes as “a lot of Googling and twisting dials,” he created the station’s first online-only broadcasts, creating airtime from, well, thin air. The station, which at one point could not cover games and play music at the same time, had its first three-sport simultaneous broadcast earlier in the year. That night, Zauzmer played producer, walking the listeners through the rotating feeds from women’s basketball, men’s basketball, and men’s ice hockey.

“Ben is the most knowledgeable member of WHRB sports,” Zack W. Royle '17 said. “He has backup plans for his backup plans, and whenever there is any issue with tech, he always knows what to do.”

Julie, the ever-proud older sister, remembers both sides of Ben. As a freshman, the little brother often let his upperclassman sister stay on his couch in Weld, taking care of her when she needed it. As for the intellect, Julie calls Ben “the smartest person I know.”

“He picks up anything and everything with ridiculous ease,” she said. “I remember coming home one day and he told me that he learned how to play the harmonica. I thought he’d play ‘Twinkle, Twinkle,’ and he started playing ‘Piano Man’ [instead].”

SIGNING OFF

Barring a miracle, Ben’s radio career will end this weekend at the NCAA Tournament. Harvard, the winner of one Big Dance game each of the last two years, has never advanced to the Sweet Sixteen and is a massive underdog in its second-round matchup against the Tar Heels.

For Ben, a lifelong March Madness fan, there is no place he’d rather go out.

“I love the Tournament for what it is, the greatest tournament in sports,” he said. “I don’t think there’s anything that competes with the excitement of that first weekend. There is no greater adrenaline rush than when you go live on air and you know you are live for 2.5 hours and it’s your job to communicate the excitement I’ve always felt.”

Of course, the Tournament is the site of his most famous call. In Harvard’s third-round game against Michigan State last spring, CBS cut away from its main feed out of a timeout—switching to WHRB’s. The moment was poetic in its symbolism: the entire country getting to enjoy what his sisters had found 15 years earlier—Ben belting the play-by-play without knowing they were there.

Ben laughed at the memory, remembering how his phone blew up because “everyone I’d ever met was apparently watching the game.” A year later, he’s proud of the call.

“I think the call itself was over the top for television, but I thought it was good for radio,” he said. “I was happy with it because it was over the top for an over-the-top moment.”

The unabashed Crimson fan won’t tell who he has in the Harvard game this year, a sly grin playing at the corners of his mouth as he admits how much he wants to win the pool he runs every year, which is now up to 91 participants. He won in eighth grade and has come up empty handed ever since.

In an hour of speaking with me, the other thing he won’t talk about is his final sign-off. He maintains that broadcasts are about the participants, saying “it would be quite selfish to steal that spotlight that I get to control.”

His sisters have another theory. Julie harkens back to Harvard’s final regular-season game against Brown. With a win, the Crimson put itself in a position to make an end-of-season playoff against Yale—so long as the Bulldogs fell in Dartmouth that same night. Harvard ended an hour before Yale, so Julie (who was in town visiting), Ben, and his friends headed to Shake Shack.

“I have never been so riveted by a game that I couldn’t see or hear,” she said. “Ben was doing his radio thing and calling the game based only on the ESPN app. There was a circle of us so glued that we couldn’t order our burgers.”

When Dartmouth won—coming back from five points with 35 seconds to go—Ben dropped the phone, running out into the night screaming, knowing that he had one more game left. When Harvard beat Yale the week after, the senior got to put off his final call one more time.

As Ben prepares for his final call a third time, Emily, now a freshman at Harvard and a Crimson FM writer, says that the final sign-off—the end of his era—weighs more heavily on his mind than he’d care to admit.

“He takes so much pride in WHRB and his work as an announcer,” Emily said. “He has been very hesitant to give his last sign-off on all the recent games.”

“He just keeps hoping there is one more.”

—Staff writer David Freed can be reached at david.freed@thecrimson.com.