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Where did sports announcers get the tag "color man"?

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A color commentator is usually a former player or coach who has insights and colorful anecdotes that complement the matter-of-fact style that a journalistically trained play-by-play announcer brings to the game. The play-by-play announcer gives the facts of what is going on in the game, and the color commentator adds interest ("color"), especially when there is a lull in the action (i.e. between pitches or plays).

I would advise against using "color man," unless referring to a specific man. Tara Lipinski, the former ice skating star, is a well-regarded color commentator in her sport.

From Wikipedia--

The term color refers to levity and insight provided by a secondary announcer. A sports color commentator customarily works alongside the play-by-play broadcaster.

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  • Now I understand a Tony Hart BC Cartoon from years ago. Two of the characters were providing a sport commentary, leaning on their rocks as they do in BC. One provides the main commentary, something like 'and Smith loses the____ ball in the ____ sun' while the other character interjects with 'red' and 'yellow', because his job is 'Color Commentator'. Being Scottish where we either don't have that or we call it something different, I never knew it was a joke on a real thing. If anything I thought it was some sort of joke about black and white TV giving way to colour. You live and learn.
    – Spagirl
    Jul 22, 2016 at 11:29
  • @Spagirl: I believe that in the UK, the color/colour commentator is called the analyst. If you follow sport(s), such as soccer/football, there'll be two sportscasters commenting on the action. One is a play-by-play announcer. This person describes what's happening ("Smith loses the ball in the sun.") The other, your analyst, will explain why Smith has a habit of losing the ball in the sun, provide a statistic on who loses the ball in the sun the most, or give a humorous anecdote about someone losing the ball in the sun in the olden days. These two maintain these roles through the game. Jul 22, 2016 at 15:25
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Uses of the word color can relate to vividness of expression (Oxford English Dictionary). The word can also mean interest or excitement (MacMillan, definition 2). The adjective colorful can mean 'full of interest; lively and exciting' (Oxford).

In sportscasting, a color man or color commentator livens up a broadcast by providing (ostensibly interesting and colorful) background information, analysis, and anecdotes to it. He or she supplements the work of the play-by-play announcer, who describes the events or "plays" that are going on during a game such as baseball or football. The term was perhaps first used with regard to the 1938 or 1939 World Series. This correlates with a similar usage in 1938 regarding foreign correspondence in the novel Scoop by English writer Evelyn Waugh.

We find this definition of colour (color) in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED):

  1. Features that lend a particularly interesting quality to something; vivid, evocative detail added to a story, description, etc.

One example of this usage, from 1938, refers to print journalism:

1938 Evelyn Waugh Scoop v. 87 We're paid to supply news... Of course there's colour. Colour is just a lot of bull's-eyes about nothing.

Note that Waugh's work Scoop is satire, so his comments about colour have to be taken with that mind. Also, his work is not about sports but about foreign correspondence. Waugh talks about colour vs news several times in the work, which has made more than one list of Top 100 novels.

I found an entry from October 10 1938 Motion Picture Daily (archived here) referring to the radio broadcast of the 1938 World Series:

World Series Air Coverage Is Extensive

... NBC Has Two Staffs Working

NBC particularly extended itself this year, for the first time assigning two separate staffs of sports commentators to describe the play-by-plays and color for the Blue and Red audiences. Previously, NBC placed but one staff on the air for both of its networks. The Red commentators : Red Barbour [sic] of WLW and Tom Manning of WTAM, play-by-plays, and George Hicks handling color from the National League parks. Paul Douglas of CBS took over Hicks' assignment from New York. John O'Hara of KWK and George Higgins of WTCN handling play-by-play on the Blue, and Al Rosewell of KDKA doing color. The CBS staff comprised Francis Laux of KMOX and Bill Dyer of WCAU doing play-by-play, and Mel Allen of WABC, the color. Mutual's sports battery was Bob Elson of WGN broadcasting from Chicago and New York ; Stan Lomax, WOR, New York games; Dave Driscoll, WOR, New York games, and Quin Ryan of WGN, doing the Chicago games.

The first usage of the specific term color commentator in the OED refers to the radio broadcasts of the next year's World Series (1939):

1939 Capital Times (Madison., Wisconsin) 3 Oct. 7/3 All play-by-play broadcasts will be given by Bob Elson and Red Barber. Edwin C. Hill, Lowell Thomas, Stan Lomax, Grantland Rice and Gabriel Heatter will alternate as color commentators.

Note, many newspapers of this specific date (October 3, 1939) carry this same information, and they use the terms color commentator and color commentary with no explanation, suggesting their meanings are self-evident. I am not convinced that the OED dates are the first time the terms were actually used with regard to sports announcing.

In fact, I found a usage of color commentary that precedes the one in the OED (see below) by five years.

Here is a snapshot of the Lima (Ohio) News for 10-3-1939:

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Note that in this case none of the broadcasters are former players but all are bona fide sports and/or newscasters. Grantland Rice, famed sportswriter, had been the play-by-play announcer of "the first radio chain broadcast of a World Series" in 1922. Red Barber had been the broadcaster of the first telvision broadcast of a professional baseball game in August 1939 (American Sportscasters Online).

Both 1938 and 1939 were landmark years for radio broadcasts of the World Series: in 1938, 357 radio stations broadcast the games (Chicago Tribune, cited on wikipedia). In 1939 Gillette bought exclusive rights to the World Series broadcast, and from that year till now only one network (as opposed to "all the networks") has carried the broadcast (see wikipedia).

The OED lists as its first recorded use for color commentary the 1943 Long Beach Independent, referring to the 1943 Cotton Bowl Classic (college football). Again, this dates to five years after the one I found.

1943 Long Beach (Calif.) Independent 1 Jan. 22/1 Assisted by Earl Harper who will handle the color commentary, Don Dunphy will present a play-by-play description of the clash between Georgia Tech and the University of Texas.

The first OED recorded use of colorman/colourman is

1947 Billboard 8 Feb. 13/4 Sportscasters shall be paid $125 per event for play-by-play; $85 for ‘color men’.

and gives a 2005 entry for the term:

2005 J. MacGregor Sunday Money xiii. 336 Up in the NBC booth, color man Benny Parsons is incredulous. ‘This can't be happening!’

The 2015 book Calling the Game: Baseball Broadcasting from 1920 to the Present (SABR link) uses the term "color man" throughout.

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  • Thorough and well researched—nice.
    – Sven Yargs
    Jul 22, 2016 at 7:45

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