At some point in the coming days, I’m going to take a drive or long walk and have a good cry over the loss of my friend and longtime colleague, Jim Donovan.
But the greatest tribute I can pay to Jimmy right now — and help anyone unfamiliar partly understand why Cleveland sports fans loved him so much — is to explain that, when I got the call Saturday telling me he had died, the first place I went was the Pro Football Reference website.
Somewhere out there was the name of some backup Chargers tight end who Jimmy and I once spent way too long going over in his preparation for a radio broadcast. There was more than one of those, as I recalled, and it was fairly often that we nerded out going over minute details and diving deeply into depth charts. But every second was an honor. And as I started to process the news of Jimmy’s passing, I just kept going back to that one name, from one random game I somehow remembered, and how that summed up the time Jimmy put into his craft.
He was a relentless worker who spent hours in game notes and research preparing for every single broadcast. He spent nearly 40 years at WKYC-TV in Cleveland and was the full-time radio play-by-play man for the Browns from the team’s 1999 return to the NFL to this past summer. That was the public part. The truth is Jimmy was a broadcaster almost 20 hours a day, seven days a week, nearly every day of the year for nearly every year of his 68 on this earth.
He loved the games. He listened to all sports — soccer, hockey, football, everything — to learn something new, stay on top of things and improve himself.
He called MLB, Olympic soccer and big NFL games on NBC. He did a lot of TV games for the Browns in the preseason and, until he needed a bone marrow transplant in 2011, was on every radio call. Then and last season, he was back in the booth the second he was cleared to return — and was as ready as ever.
As I got to know Jimmy as a young person trying to navigate the sports business, I learned a lot about him spending late nights drinking various hot drinks for his vocal cords and poring over notes, biographies and stats to prepare for games. At the core of it, he was just a big nerd who started out recording himself broadcasting hockey games as a kid and ended up calling big games for huge audiences, never taking for granted that he was living his childhood dream.
I, also, was a hopeless football nerd. And for years — especially when I worked as a writer for the Browns’ official website — Jimmy would seek me out for what we both knew was otherwise useless information on some player or team that he could weave into his broadcasts. He’d bring up random games or obscure draft picks and see what I might know about them. In some cases, he already knew. There were times, too, when he had no idea how I would know some of the things we discussed. But he’d note what I said because he was always working. And that’s why no one is surprised that Jimmy was still working this summer through training camp and the Browns’ preseason, right up until the last possible moment that he could.
If some player had been a sixth-round pick in 2004, Jimmy was going to get that detail exactly right. If some player had gone the long way and played in the Arena Football League or Canadian Football League before cracking an NFL roster, Jimmy was going to know exactly which team or teams that player had previously been with. And if there was some question about how to pronounce that player’s name, Jimmy was going to stay up ’till the wee hours trying to get the name right — and then he’ll ask again on Sunday morning just to confirm.
From his first to his final call and all the memorable moments in between, The Voice will echo for generations to come. pic.twitter.com/KTh0mVdrF6
— Cleveland Browns (@Browns) October 26, 2024
So, Brandon Manumaleuna, wherever you are now, just know there was nobody more prepared for that one target you got versus the Browns on Dec. 6, 2009, in Cleveland Browns Stadium than Jimmy Donovan.
We’d spend hours on flights to and from games talking sports. And it was an honor not just to hear Jimmy’s stories and perspectives, but to almost see his wheels spinning when he went into full broadcaster mode. He wouldn’t just casually ask who’d won the game the day before between, say, Kansas and Texas. He’d ask who was on the call, then start loudly setting the scene for the game like nobody else was in the room (or on the plane). He’d ask who was winning the Big Ten and then instantly turn into Keith Jackson narrating the open to his own imaginary Rose Bowl.
Jimmy knew broadcasting and broadcasters. He didn’t just know the business — he lived it. He was relentless, authentic and competitive. If the announcer on the previous day’s Kansas-Texas game had a gravelly voice, Jimmy would use a gravelly voice. If the announcer had a cheesy catchphrase or bad hairpiece or started talking super fast when a big play happened, Jimmy would include those things, too. He’d instantly transform himself into whichever broadcaster he was impersonating, and sometimes 30 seconds would go by before he’d stop himself.
He made everybody laugh, including and most importantly himself. And if he’d spit and slobbered all over himself by the time his impersonation was over, the rest of us participating in broadcast boot camp at 30,000 feet were usually laughing too hard to notice.
One year, my brother was living out of state and met us on a Browns road trip. We were in a hotel bar watching college football when Jimmy came and joined. He bought my brother’s drink and asked what he’d missed in the first quarter of the Notre Dame game. I don’t remember the exact year or exact names, but when my brother explained that Michigan State had been dominating until Notre Dame returned an interception to set up a touchdown, Jimmy immediately went into game mode.
He hadn’t seen the play, and he didn’t know my brother or anyone else in the bar other than me and longtime Browns sideline reporter Andre Knott, but Jimmy used his drink as a microphone and began narrating.
“Smith is back to pass. He’s looking, he’s looking … sideline left, and it’s picked off! Merriweather’s got it and he’s sprinting down the sideline. He’s all the way down to the 10 and the Irish are in business!”
The Irish were, in fact, in business, even though the game broadcast at the moment was showing some Ford truck commercial. And the volume wasn’t even on.
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I was in my 20s back then. Those hotel bars were (too) often the first quarter to trips to other bars for me and Andre, but Jimmy would head upstairs early. There was always more studying to be done.
I treasured those times, as I often had the privilege to listen to Jimmy’s longtime partner, Doug Dieken, tell stories about the old Browns that I probably couldn’t repeat even if I fully remembered them. Jimmy would usually stop by for one drink — and one more run-through of the next day’s opponent and the Browns’ depth chart. One time in particular, I remember Dieken telling me about the old, rickety pressbox at Veterans Stadium and the ceiling being so low that he hit his head while putting on his headset at the start of a Sunday broadcast.
When I told Jimmy the next morning that I’d heard the Veterans Stadium story, he had a simple reply.
“If you believe that’s why Diek has a headache on a Sunday morning,” he said, “then you’ll probably believe anything.”
Jimmy was barely 30 when he came to Cleveland and WKYC, but he was a fast-rising star. NBC had the standard AFC Sunday afternoon TV package in the late 1980s, and Jimmy was one of the network’s national play-by-play men. He said he’d usually been on games between bad teams that went to smaller audiences, but somehow ended up with a big assignment on a Bills-Dolphins game, one that would feature star quarterbacks Jim Kelly and Dan Marino.
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Jimmy, as he told it, was a nervous wreck in the days leading up to the game. He was a nervous wreck as they went through pregame production meetings at the home team’s practice facility. His partner on that broadcast, the legendary Paul Maguire, sensed the nerves and told Jimmy he’d be fine. But if he wanted to come by for some extra prep once they got back to the hotel, he was welcome to stop by Maguire’s room.
So Jimmy said he went back to the hotel, grabbed his notes and went downstairs to Maguire’s suite. He said he walked in for what he thought would be a cram session to find Maguire in a bathrobe, drinking a Budweiser and tracking his list of college football bets on a legal pad. Jimmy wanted to talk about the Dolphins’ offensive depth chart, and Maguire was screaming at the television because some linebacker from Rice didn’t recover a fumble.
Eventually, Maguire told Jimmy he’d be fine, that he should trust the work he’d already done and trust the network’s decision to put him on a game of that magnitude.
“Listen, kid, you’re gonna be fine,” is how Jimmy translated Maguire’s pep talk years later. “You don’t need to be nervous. You’re ready for the big leagues.”
He was. He always was. Probably because he was always working.
(Photo: David Richard / Associated Press)
