“March Madness” is almost finished and HG has been enjoying the basketball battles of the lengthy athletes. When the ball goes in the basket, HG murmurs: “Good like Nedick’s !!”. The late Marty Glickman, the radio voice of New York sports for many years, used that phrase when Nedick’s, a New York hot dog chain, sponsored Knicks games.(Glickman also intoned “Swish!!” when a ball went into the net without hitting the backboard or rim). The phrases became part of New York street language. After making a good shot on the asphalt courts that dotted The Bronx, the player would shout: “Swish!!” or “Good like Nedick’s !!”. (HG had previously mentioned the excellence of the super-cheap Nedick’s lunch of the 1950’s: Two hot dogs on toasted buns. Special, tangy mustard relish. Good orange drink. Cost was less than a dollar). Glickman’s voice was ubiquitous on New York radio. Staccato delivery. Accurate coverage of games. In addition to the Knicks, he was the voice of the New York Giants football team; the Jets; college basketball from Madison Square Garden. Glickman was born in The Bronx of Jewish immigrant parents and raised in Brooklyn where he was known as the “Flatbush Flash.” He was a star football player (Scored two touchdowns in a famous upset of Cornell) and a track team sprinter at Syracuse University. Selected for the U.S. 400-yard relay team in the 1936 Berlin Olympics (along with another Jewish dash man, Sam Stoller). One day before the relay event in Nazi Germany, the Jewish athletes were replaced by Jesse Owens and Ralph Metcalfe, both African-American. The American team won the event in record time and helped Jesse Owens attain immortality by being the first athlete to gain four Olympic medals. Glickman claimed that he and Stoller were replaced because of the anti-Semitism of US Olympic Chairman Avery Brundage who wanted to appease Hitler by not having two Jews standing on the winner’s platform. Glickman was always bitter about the incident even after the US Olympic Committee apologized in 1998 and gave him a gold plaque (Sam Stoller had died earlier). Some other notes: Contrary to the legend, Hitler did shake hands with Owens and Owens carried a photo of the handshake in his wallet the rest of his life. Owens was angered that President Franklin D. Roosevelt never invited him to the White House or sent him a congratulatory message. (Hitler said Black athletes should be barred from future Olympic games because their physiques were “superior” to those of Whites). Two years after the Berlin Olympics, in 1938, Hitler awarded Brundage’s construction company the contract to build the German Embassy in Washington, D.C.
