Albert John DeRogatis (May 5, 1927 – December 26, 1995) was an
American football
American football (referred to simply as football in the United States and Canada), also known as gridiron, is a team sport played by two teams of eleven players on a rectangular field with goalposts at each end. The offense, the team with ...
player and
television
Television, sometimes shortened to TV, is a telecommunication medium for transmitting moving images and sound. The term can refer to a television set, or the medium of television transmission. Television is a mass medium for advertisin ...
and
radio
Radio is the technology of signaling and communicating using radio waves. Radio waves are electromagnetic waves of frequency between 30 hertz (Hz) and 300 gigahertz (GHz). They are generated by an electronic device called a transmit ...
Newark, New Jersey
Newark ( , ) is the most populous city in the U.S. state of New Jersey and the seat of Essex County and the second largest city within the New York metropolitan area.Central High School, earning All-State honors at
center
Center or centre may refer to:
Mathematics
*Center (geometry), the middle of an object
* Center (algebra), used in various contexts
** Center (group theory)
** Center (ring theory)
* Graph center, the set of all vertices of minimum eccentricity ...
. At
Duke University
Duke University is a private research university in Durham, North Carolina. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present-day city of Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1892. In 1924, tobacco and electric power industrialist James ...
, after a
knee
In humans and other primates, the knee joins the thigh with the leg and consists of two joints: one between the femur and tibia (tibiofemoral joint), and one between the femur and patella (patellofemoral joint). It is the largest joint in the hu ...
injury shortened his junior season, he made the 1948
All-America
The All-America designation is an annual honor bestowed upon an amateur sports person from the United States who is considered to be one of the best amateurs in their sport. Individuals receiving this distinction are typically added to an All-Am ...
team as a tackle.
He was drafted the following year by the
New York Giants
The New York Giants are a professional American football team based in the New York metropolitan area. The Giants compete in the National Football League (NFL) as a member club of the league's National Football Conference (NFC) East division. ...
of the
National Football League (NFL)
The National Football League (NFL) is a professional American football league that consists of 32 teams, divided equally between the American Football Conference (AFC) and the National Football Conference (NFC). The NFL is one of the ma ...
and played
defensive tackle
A defensive tackle (DT) is a position in American football that will typically line up on the line of scrimmage, opposite one of the offensive guards, however he may also line up opposite one of the tackles. Defensive tackles are typically the la ...
. He was an NFL
All-Pro
All-Pro is an honor bestowed upon professional American football players that designates the best player at each position during a given season. All-Pro players are typically selected by press organizations, who select an "All-Pro team," a list th ...
in both
1950
Events January
* January 1 – The International Police Association (IPA) – the largest police organization in the world – is formed.
* January 5 – 1950 Sverdlovsk plane crash, Sverdlovsk plane crash: ''Aeroflot'' Lisunov Li-2 cr ...
and
1951
Events
January
* January 4 – Korean War: Third Battle of Seoul – Chinese and North Korean forces capture Seoul for the second time (having lost the Second Battle of Seoul in September 1950).
* January 9 – The Government of the United ...
. A recurrence of the knee injury he suffered at Duke ended his playing career after four seasons of professional football. For thirty-three years beginning in 1953, he served as a vice president with
Prudential Insurance
Prudential Financial, Inc. is an American Fortune Global 500 and Fortune 500 company whose subsidiaries provide insurance, retirement planning, investment management, and other products and services to both Investor#Retail_investor, retail and i ...
.
From 1966 through 1975, the bespectacled DeRogatis served as a
color commentator
A color commentator or expert commentator is a sports commentator who assists the main (play-by-play) commentator, typically by filling in when play is not in progress. The phrase "colour commentator" is primarily used in Canadian English and t ...
for professional and college football telecasts on
NBC
The National Broadcasting Company (NBC) is an Television in the United States, American English-language Commercial broadcasting, commercial television network, broadcast television and radio network. The flagship property of the NBC Enterta ...
, primarily with
Curt Gowdy
Curtis Edward Gowdy (July 31, 1919 – February 20, 2006) was an American sportscaster. He called Boston Red Sox games on radio and TV for 15 years, and then covered many nationally televised sporting events, primarily for NBC Sports and ABC Sp ...
on the network's top broadcast team for
American Football League
The American Football League (AFL) was a major professional American football league that operated for ten seasons from 1960 until 1970, when it merged with the older National Football League (NFL), and became the American Football Conference. ...
(later,
American Football Conference
The American Football Conference (AFC) is one of the two conferences of the National Football League (NFL), the highest professional level of American football in the United States. The AFC and its counterpart, the National Football Conference ...
) regular-season and playoff matches,
Super Bowl
The Super Bowl is the annual final playoff game of the National Football League (NFL) to determine the league champion. It has served as the final game of every NFL season since 1966, replacing the NFL Championship Game. Since 2022, the game ...
VII VII or vii may refer to: the Roman numeral 7
Art and entertainment
* The Vii, a video game console
* vii, leading-tone triad, see diminished triad
* ''VII'' (Blitzen Trapper album)
* ''VII'' (Just-Ice album)
* ''VII'' (Teyana Taylor album)
* ...
Rose Bowls
The Rose Bowl Game is an annual American college football bowl game, usually played on January 1 (New Year's Day) at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California. When New Year's Day falls on a Sunday, the game is played on Monday, January 2. The Rose ...
. He also was paired with Jim Simpson to call a few Orange Bowls. Prior to joining NBC, DeRogatis had begun his broadcasting career working with
Marty Glickman
Martin Irving Glickman (August 14, 1917 – January 3, 2001) was an American radio announcer who was famous for his broadcasts of the New York Knicks basketball games and the football games of the New York Giants and the New York Jets.
Glickman w ...
on New York football Giants radio broadcasts on WNEW-AM from 1960 through 1965. DeRogatis was among several veteran announcers who returned to call some NFL telecasts for NBC in September 1988, while many of the network's regular broadcasters were busy calling that year's
Summer Olympics
The Summer Olympic Games (french: link=no, Jeux olympiques d'été), also known as the Games of the Olympiad, and often referred to as the Summer Olympics, is a major international multi-sport event normally held once every four years. The inau ...
in
Seoul
Seoul (; ; ), officially known as the Seoul Special City, is the capital and largest metropolis of South Korea.Before 1972, Seoul was the ''de jure'' capital of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea) as stated iArticle 103 ...
.
DeRogatis can be heard with Gowdy calling a football game in the 1978 film '' Heaven Can Wait''.
DeRogatis was inducted into the
College Football Hall of Fame
The College Football Hall of Fame is a hall of fame and interactive attraction devoted to college football. The National Football Foundation (NFF) founded the Hall in 1951 to immortalize the players and coaches of college football that were vote ...
in 1986. A resident of
Spring Lake, New Jersey
Spring Lake is a borough situated on the Jersey Shore in Monmouth County, in the U.S. state of New Jersey. As of the 2010 United States census, the borough's population was 2,993,cancer
Cancer is a group of diseases involving abnormal cell growth with the potential to invade or spread to other parts of the body. These contrast with benign tumors, which do not spread. Possible signs and symptoms include a lump, abnormal b ...
at Jersey Shore Medical Center on December 26, 1995.
Legacy
''
Sports Illustrated
''Sports Illustrated'' (''SI'') is an American sports magazine first published in August 1954. Founded by Stuart Scheftel, it was the first magazine with circulation over one million to win the National Magazine Award for General Excellence twic ...
'' magazine's "Dr. Z" (aka Paul Zimmerman) has rated DeRogatis as his #1 football analyst of all time.
Upon his death in 1995, DeRogatis was eulogized in the ''
Boston Globe
''The Boston Globe'' is an American daily newspaper founded and based in Boston, Massachusetts. The newspaper has won a total of 27 Pulitzer Prizes, and has a total circulation of close to 300,000 print and digital subscribers. ''The Boston Glob ...
'' as a prototype for what it means to be a
gentleman
A gentleman (Old French: ''gentilz hom'', gentle + man) is any man of good and courteous conduct. Originally, ''gentleman'' was the lowest rank of the landed gentry of England, ranking below an esquire and above a yeoman; by definition, the ra ...
, in the sense of displaying a gracious, polite, kind and generous nature. The ''Globe'' also published a picture of DeRogatis in the NBC booth together with Curt Gowdy and
Don Meredith
Joseph "Dandy" Don Meredith (April 10, 1938 – December 5, 2010) was an American football quarterback, sports commentator, and actor. He spent all nine seasons of his professional playing career (1960–1968) with the Dallas Cowboys of the Na ...
in the ''2006: The year in photos'' series, after Curt Gowdy's death in 2006.2006: The year in photos The Boston Globe, retrieved June 23, 2007.