Fox 5 sportscaster Bill Hartman retiring for good after half-century

Over the decades, he worked at both WAGA-TV (mostly when it was a CBS affiliate) and Channel 2 Action News (WSB-TV). He covered multiple Super Bowls, World Series and Olympic Games. He won several Emmys and the 1985 Georgia Sportscaster of the Year award. In 2012, he was inducted into the Atlanta Sports Hall of Fame.

Former Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter Thomas Stinson wrote a column about Hartman when the sportscaster stepped down from full-time work in 2012. Hartman told him he was getting out because “it seemed like the right time for me. And the business is changing.”

As Stinson noted, Hartman was “a bridge to Atlanta’s infancy as a major league city.”

Here are some excerpts from that column written before Hartman realized he would return on a part-time basis to sportscasting.

Bill Hartman signs off for the last time Sunday night.

You won’t see an act like this one again.

In a mercurial profession, defined by turnover, ego and the almighty ratings book, Hartman has spent an entire 35-year television career in the same city, sportscasting with the civility and amusement of a neighbor talking over the fence. And that ain’t so easy, folks.

If ESPN has lit the way for the boo-ya generation of anchors — louder, brasher, hipper — Hartman was simply Bill Hartman, hardly flashy, imperturbable and never, ever fired. To have done so for 35 years — he sat down at WAGA’s set to give his first run-down barely 48 hours after he graduated from Georgia — is to flaunt TV’s nature.

“That’s unheard of,” said Chuck Dowdle, sports director at WSB, where Hartman finishes out a 13-year run. “And it wouldn’t happen today.”

Now 60 — his birthday was July 21 — Hartman says he is getting out because “it seemed like the right time for me. And the business is changing.” But he takes a good chunk of history with him, a bridge to Atlanta’s infancy as a major league city.

He replaced legendary Ed Thilenius at WAGA and hosted (somehow) the international television feed from the IOC’s Atlanta Olympics announcement in Tokyo. He not only broke the story that Vince Dooley wasn’t going to coach at Auburn after all in 1980, but that it would be Ray Goff who replaced him eight years later.

Throughout, it has been hard to find anyone who doesn’t like him.

“You know what? I was in the Golden Ages,” he said. “I’ve been in it 35 years, but 25 of those years, you kind of made it up as you went along. I made the decisions on what we did and how we did it and how much time to spend.”

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“One of my great joys in life is to have somebody come up to me and say, ‘You know what? Man, 35 years ago you interviewed me after the Walton game when I scored that touchdown to beat Druid Hills,’ " Hartman said. “He’s a grown man with his own kids in high school, maybe in college now.”

It came down to the issue of air conditioning.

As a freshman in UGA’s Grady College of Journalism, Hartman had already been a paid correspondent for the Athens Banner-Herald (covering Athens High’s state runner-up team of 1965), as well as the Atlanta Constitution (stringing reports from Bulldog practices). His copy had been worked over by another young Banner-Herald part-timer named Lewis Grizzard.

But as Hartman sat sweltering in the un-air conditioned J-school classroom, he was aware of a new facility being built down Baldwin Street, which included facilities for telecommunications.

“It was air conditioned and had these neat TV cameras,” he said. “I stuck my head in there spring of my freshman year and said, ‘You know, I think I’m going to be an electronic guy.’ "

WAGA shortly thought so too, hiring him while still a senior, putting him on the air two days after his graduation in 1970. It was a special nine-month gig while regular sportscaster Bill Curry — yes, that Bill Curry — resumed his career with the Baltimore Colts for what would be their Super Bowl title year.

When Curry came back, Hartman fulfilled an ROTC obligation with a 22-month stint in the U.S. Air Force as a public information officer in Utah.

He spent 1973 as Dan Magill’s lone assistant in the UGA Sports Information office, which included public address duties at Sanford Stadium.

“I learned so many things on how to write from him,” Hartman said. “I mean, thanks to Dan Magill, I know after a comma, you space.”

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Hartman spent a career walking a fine line between objectivity and his UGA heritage. His father Bill Sr. was a College Football Hall of Famer at Georgia, as well as UGA’s kicking coach for 24 years. His mother Ruth was Miss UGA in 1937, the year Bill captained the Bulldogs.

While he pleads a strong case for impartiality — “If that wasn’t the case, I never would have lasted 35 years” — Hartman said he was rarely able to tap his father as a news source.

“My late mother was my best source at Georgia,” he said, crediting Ruth for tips on both the Dooley-Auburn and Goff stories. “My father wouldn’t tell me anything. My mother would tell me everything.”

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“The Bill you see on the air is truly Bill Hartman,” said Jennifer Rigby, a former WSB executive but now a consultant with the Los Angeles-based SmithGeiger media strategy firm. “He gives himself to the audience and he’s not putting on an act, and he’s not someone different than who he is when you sit down and have a cup of [coffee] with him. He is authentic.”