JANESVILLE — The door to the The Gazette building on Parker Drive in Janesville had barely closed behind him when Josh Golberg reached for his cell phone.
It was 2016. Golberg had just finished his interview for the open sports director job at WCLO 1230 AM radio. Golberg was confident he would get the job to replace the retiring Al Fagerli, who had been the station’s sports director for 36 years.
He had to call Bill O’Leary, his defensive line coach when Golberg played at Janesville Craig High School going on 20 years earlier. In Golberg’s thinking, his ex-coach was his ideal sidekick to describe fall football games—even though the retired teacher/coach had no prior experience behind a radio microphone.
“I just knew he would be a really good broadcaster with his personality, his terminology and his knowledge of the game,” Golberg said Tuesday.
For O’Leary, who had retired from teaching (35 years) and coaching (40 years in football, 25 in wrestling) the previous year, the offer was unexpected.
“What!?” O’Leary remembers thinking at the time. “I’m a pretty happy retired guy.”
Golberg told his former line coach that all he would have to do would be talk to players and coaches prior to games and then comment on game action.
“Let’s see,” O’Leary reasoned. “No parental involvement; I don’t have to go to practices, all I got to do is sit on my butt in a booth. Yeah, I can pretty much do that.”
The pairing has worked out great. While Golberg has a great time doing basketball games alongside fellow Craig and UW-Whitewater graduate Dan Saunders during the winter and baseball games with long-time friend and fellow Big Radio man John Barry, the fall football season with O’Leary is his favorite time.
They are in their eighth football season doing Craig and Parker high school games Friday nights. They begin their third season together doing UW-Whitewater games on Saturdays this week when the Warhawks open their season at home against John Carroll (Ohio) University.
Say what?Golberg got an idea what was in store for him during one of the first games the pair worked together.
“He says something like, ‘This guy at this position, he’s a real whizbang,’” Golberg said. “The first time he said it, I got a couple of text messages asking, ‘what did he call him?’
“After eight years, I still don’t know what a whizbang is,” Golberg said.
Both Golberg and O’Leary are area natives.
Golberg is a 1998 Janesville Craig and 2003 UW-Whitewater graduate after spending his first two years at UW-Rock County.
O’Leary grew up on a family farm just outside Milton. He graduated from Milton High in 1970 and from UW-Whitewater in 1974.
Golberg began his professional radio career while at UW-Whitewater working part-time at WCLO. His first full-time job out of college was an on-air night shift playing country tunes on WJVL, 99.9 FM. He moved to a West Bend station for two years, before moving back to Janesville and taking a job at 105.9 The Hog where he got his first taste of doing football play-by-play.
Golberg then moved to a station in Lake Geneva, where he was at when he learned that Fagerli was retiring. He was hired to replace Fagerli, which set up the opportunity to work Friday nights with O’Leary.
O’Leary says over the eight years, he has become a better listener and feeds off Golberg’s game descriptions better.
“If I can make the game more understandable to listeners, through (Golberg), I’m all for that,” O’Leary said.
Making his pointO’Leary doesn’t always hear that happening on other broadcasts and telecasts—even at the NFL level on Sundays.
“It drives me nuts,” he said. “They’ll say, ‘There’s a flag on the field.’
“Well, where is it?” O’Leary said. “Is it the umpire throwing it? Is it the referee throwing it? The back judge? You can get a pretty good inkling of what the penalty is going to be by who threw it.
“To leave it hanging by saying ‘there is a flag on the field, and then 10 seconds of nothing, it’s not helpful. I try to get across to people what’s happening on the field.”
And if the officials take a bit longer to sort out a penalty, O’Leary might start humming the “Final Jeopardy” tune.
But he does not criticize high school or college officials on the air.
“If (critical fans) can do better, they should sign up,” he says.
The three commandmentsThat is just part of O’Leary’s announcing etiquette. He writes three things, sometimes a few more, on a piece of paper before every broadcast.
The main three items are: Talk slow, be positive and—admittedly the most important--don’t curse.
Anyone who knows Bill, and his two younger brothers—Jim and Russ—know the O’Learys can be somewhat colorful at times during conversations.
Bill admits he’s been close to dropping a “hell” or some other mild phrase during broadcasts in the seven-plus seasons he has been talking over public airwaves.
“Josh knows I’m close if I take off my glasses and rub my fingers through my hair,” O’Leary said. “Josh will go, ‘things are not going well here folks in wherever we are.
“I’m telling you, we have been really close a couple of times.”
That is what makes the broadcasts entertaining. Just like John Madden was in NFL telecasts, O’Leary is a people’s person, which translates over the air. His brother, Russ, is the same way while he is the analyst with Big Radio play-by-play man Lorin Cox.
The 40-40 clubO’Leary goes out of his way to mention as many players by name as he can. Being a Wisconsin Football Coaches Association Hall of Fame inductee in 2022 and having coached football for 40 years, O’Leary knows the reserves put in as much time on the practice field as the starters.
“Those 40-40 guys—the ones that come in when they are ahead by 40 points or behind by 40—I want their names on the radio,” O’Leary said. “They are at practice every day like the big dogs are, but no one ever talks about them.”
O’Leary also enjoys talking to players during the week for the halftime shows. He knows some of the 17- and 18-year-old kids might be hesitant talking to a somewhat loud and intimidating 71-year-old broadcaster, but O’Leary usually can get them comfortable in the first few minutes.
“I tell them it is going to be 15 minutes about you,” O’Leary said. “I want to know your number and position you play, but then I want to know about your family, your school, a teacher who made a difference in your life.
“I tell them to tell me something that makes them unique from everyone else,” O’Leary said. “What I love about that, both at the collegiate and high school level, is people have to understand these young men are young men 24 hours a day.
“They play football and go to practice and all those things, but when they get done, they have to go to class; they have to go study. For 99 percent of them, they are such fabulous kids. People need to know they are in the hallways, they are helping kids out, they remember teachers who influenced their lives. They are fabulous young men.”
O’Leary can relate to high school students. He spent 40 years in the Janesville school district, at both Edison Middle School and Craig High School, teaching special education along with helping in history and math classes.
Road trips are specialIn the two seasons Golberg and O’Leary have done UW-Whitewater games, the pair has made several out-of-state road trips for nonconference and NCAA Division III playoff games.
“It is an absolute riot,” Golberg said of the hours spent driving with O’Leary.
With the history buff O’Leary in the car, Golberg knows it won’t be a direct drive from southern Wisconsin to wherever they are headed.
When the announcing team went to Georgia to do the Whitewater vs. Berry College game in 2022, the pair stayed overnight in a hotel in Chattanooga, Tennessee. En route to the hotel, they passed Chattanooga National Cemetery, the burial grounds for thousands of soldiers who died fighting the Civil War.
Golberg was tired and wanted to get to the hotel. O’Leary wanted to stop and see the cemetery.
“We got to the hotel, and I’m exhausted,” Golberg said. “Coach said, ‘I’m going to take the car back out. I’m going to that cemetery.’”
The next morning, the two headed to the Berry College campus. They came upon the site of the Battle of Chickamauga, a famous Civil War battlefield.
O’Leary insisted on visiting the battleground.
“He made sure we went through and stopped at all the memorials,” Golberg said. “I had to keep an eye on my watch. He would have stayed there all day.”
In last year’s season opener, the pair traveled to the Cleveland, Ohio area to announce the Whitewater-John Carroll University game. While they exited a parking garage in Cleveland at night after the game, O’Leary spotted a giant statue. He asked a parking garage attendant about the statue.
“The kid didn’t know anything about it,” O’Leary said, as the irritation of that moment returned. “I said, ‘don’t you live here? What do you mean you don’t know anything about it?’”
“That drove Bill up a wall,” Golberg recalled.
“I wanted to know everything about it because we might never go back there again,” O’Leary said.
“He always wants to find out something about everywhere we go,” Golberg said.
O’Leary loves providing new information to his younger play-by-play man.
“I’ve expanded Josh’s historical perspective,” O’Leary said. “Whether he wanted it or not. I’ve given him agricultural ones, too.
“I’ve told him about soybeans,” O’Leary said while chuckling. “He’s a city kid. He needs a lot of help.”
A fortunate callNone of those experiences and games alongside his ex-line coach would have happened had Golberg waited until he officially got the sports director to call O’Leary about joining him in the booth.
Just a few days after Golberg called, O’Leary got a call from Mike Zweifel, who was the play-by-play announcer for high school games at 105.9 FM, The Hog. Zweifel asked O’Leary to join him on game coverage.
O’Leary declined that offer, saying he had to wait until Golberg was told if he had the WCLO job.
“If I hadn’t had called him, he would have been somewhere else,” Golberg said.
WCLO listeners are grateful it worked out the way it did.
And one of these days, O’Leary will tell his younger partner what a “whizbang” is. Stay tuned.
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