Verne Lundquist thought he’d be a minister.
Lundquist’s father was a Lutheran minister, and there was a time in his early 20s that Lundquist thought he’d follow in his father’s footsteps. He went to a theological school for a year.
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Lundquist’s career took off while he was in Dallas in the 1960s.
Photo: COURTESY OF CBS
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“I’ve got 24 hours of credits, including six hours of Greek, which has not been particularly helpful,” he says.
For the self-described Kennedy liberal, that upbringing influenced his decisions.
“Because I grew up in a ministerial family, I had this instilled in me early in my life that you needed to do some good,” he says. “I still believe that.”
Verne Lundquist was in a rock ’n’ roll band.
In high school, Lundquist and four of his classmates formed a band called The Flat Tops that tried to get onto “The Dick Clark Show.”
Lundquist’s group was beaten out by a group from a rival high school called The Shields.
“Our lead singer got his girlfriend ‘in the family way,’ and there went our show-biz career because he could sing and the rest of us couldn’t,” he says. “I was the doo-wop guy. We had two guitars, a drummer and me going ‘doo wop.’ I was the guy with the tambourine.”
Verne Lundquist was the radio analyst for Super Bowl V.
A couple days before Super Bowl V between Dallas and Baltimore, the Cowboys still had not sold the local radio rights for the game. Cowboys general manager Tex Schramm finally cut a deal with a Clear Channel station called KRLD and summoned Lundquist to his hotel suite in Miami. Schramm asked Lundquist if he wanted to work the game as an analyst with Frank Glieber. Lundquist quickly said yes.
“There was no booth because we were so late to the party,” Lundquist remembers. “They set a table up on the roof. I’ve got a picture of Frank and me broadcasting Super Bowl V from the roof. A helicopter came over and blew all of our notes to hither and yon.”
— John Ourand
