Jim Donovan fought off tears as a room full of friends, family, his wife Cheryl, his daughter Meghan, athletes and strangers stood by with a roaring ovation. Given the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 16th Annual Greater Cleveland Sports Awards on Thursday night, the “voice of the Cleveland Browns” struggled to keep it together as he set off to begin his acceptance speech. While the ovation may have caused his emotional cauldron to froth over, it also gave the long-time broadcaster time to compose himself as he was flanked by his good friend and radio partner, former Browns offensive tackle Doug Dieken, and the team’s veteran quarterback, Josh McCown.
In Donovan’s defense, the downward spiral of emotion was set in motion well before he joined Dieken and McCown on the stage to receive his award. Not long after the event kicked off, those at the 100-plus tables inside of Cleveland’s Renaissance Hotel Ballroom were treated to a journey-like montage of Donovan’s arrival from Boston (curly hair and all), to his foray into covering the NFL on a national level, and finally settling in as the one man who, in 2016, can make tuning in to either local sports talk station a tolerable act for at least three hours every Sunday afternoon in the fall—something that is remarkable considering the evolution of televised football and the improvements made to the in-stadium experience.
The entire journey started in South Boston when his father, Jim Jr., would take him to Boston Bruins games with a voice recorder in hand. He’d keep one eye on the field and one eye on the broadcast booth, whether it be in the old Boston Garden or historic Fenway Park. As much as he adored the legendary athletes who suited up for any of the Boston teams, it was the broadcasters to whom he looked up.
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Going to Boston University alongside Howard Stern and being a part of a sports fabric as thick as that of the New England area, it would be easy to see why someone in Donovan’s position would have merely used Cleveland and its multiple volumes of sports horror as a stepping stone for bigger and better things. But Jim stayed. He met his wife in Cleveland. His daughter was born in Cleveland—her first game was Bottlegate. And as men like Tait retire and Hamilton sees his family growing older and larger by the year, it’s Jim Donovan who has been able to rise up as the face of a medium that shows none.
It’s oftentimes easy to take Donovan for granted. The Browns have been historically bad since their return in 1999, and he has spent the bulk of his career with Tom Hamilton and Joe Tait as peers. Not only did this trio follow in the wake of legendary local broadcasters like Herb Score, Nev Chandler, and Casey Coleman, it doesn’t help that Hamilton is one of the most celebrated play-by-play men in all of baseball and Tait’s name is hanging from the rafters at Quicken Loans Arena. Both men, as it were, happened to be on that very stage years before Donovan, receiving their own, respective, lifetime achievement awards.
Being the radio voice of the Browns since 1999, it’s also easy to forget about the struggle that Donovan went through just several short years ago when he revealed that he had spent several years of his own battling chronic lymphocytic leukemia. He took a leave of absence in 2011—and was forced to sit out a game in 2012—as he underwent countless hours of medical attention in hopes of triumphing over such a body throttling disease. When he announced that he was going to have to step away, during a time when most people would put themselves first, Donovan stated that his goal was to return to the booth to do what he loved in calling football games. “My goal is to get healthy and be back covering Cleveland sports as soon as possible. I’m going to really miss my job—I love what I do,” he said back in a live airing of WKYC’s nightly news.
To love calling games for a team that forces fans to make players like William Green and Ben Gay and Mohammed Massaquoi become household names—well, it takes a special kind of person. He loves sports to the point where he once listened to Wimbledon unfold on the radio during a weekend road trip. Jim famously will not go out the night before a game on the road, preferring to study the opposing team’s roster in order to ensure that he does not mispronounce or misattribute a play. He stands through the duration of every broadcast, pacing with enough nervous energy to fill whichever stadium he’s in. As players break for big yardage, he’s oftentimes wheeling his arm around as if he were a third base coach providing direction. Jim cares little about the final score or the team’s record at the end of a season, but says with conviction that when (not if) the Cleveland Browns win the Super Bowl, it will be the greatest story in the history of modern sports.
Donovan closed his acceptance speech by imitating his late mother, complete with a thick Boston accent.
“Fortheloveagahd, Jimmy, when are you coming home?”
“Mom,” he said. “I am home.”
