In the last couple years of his life, Hank Goldberg occasionally would call when hooked up to a dialysis machine. He didn’t want anything other than someone to pass some time and gloat with over his latest bet.
“I took 13-seed Chattanooga and three-and-a-half points against the fourth seed, Illinois,’’ he said the last time I talked with him in March during the NCAA Tournament. “Chattanooga lost by a point — so I won.”
By then, his kidney disease had a choke hold on his life, his body no longer obeying, his left leg below the knee amputated in October. His fight was almost done, he knew.
Goldberg died Monday, his 82nd birthday on the country’s birthday, a Yankee Doodle Dandy all the way. His passing won’t mean much to anyone who’s come to our transitory town the past 15 years, an era by sports standards.
But anyone who goes back a little further understands an era passes with him. Goldberg was a giant at the start of sports talk radio — a loud, harsh, opinionated, funny and self-consuming giant who defined the medium for years in South Florida.
He was defined by it, too. He was called, “The Hammer,” and he loved the name as much as he enjoyed wielding one behind a microphone. If you weren’t ripped by Hank — and I was, often — you weren’t anyone in town. Many of his rants resulted in public dust-ups.
Here’s a story: He went after Marlins manager Rene Lachemann’s proclivity to use relief pitchers to the point a reliever, Joe Klink, called Goldberg, “a fat, 12-sandwich-eating piece of crap whose only decision is deciding between a jelly and a glazed donut.”
Goldberg sent Klink a dozen glazed and a dozen jelly donuts the next day.
There always was a show-business schtick to him, as well as an underlying, professional humanity. He broke the news of Don Shula’s exit from the Miami Dolphins. He’d covered Shula for decades, been there in the team’s radio booth for the 1972 Perfect Season.
“You finally got rid of me,” Shula said when Hank called after the 1995 season.
“Coach, that’s not a story I ever wanted to report,” Goldberg said.
That’s one way to remember Goldberg, followed by his calling someone on the phone to his show a “putz.” Or “moron.” Or his how his criticism of Dolphins-Marlins-Panthers owner H. Wayne Huizenga that got him suspended from the station that aired those teams’ games.
That suspension was 1998 and, by his count, the third of four suspensions at various radio stations.
“That’s not counting my firing,” he said.
That came 15 years ago when he said took his radio boss to task — on the air, in a very Hammer fashion: “He shouldn’t be running a radio station.”
Goldberg had his ESPN horse-handicapping and NFL game-picking gigs by then. But it hurt him not to have voice in the market he cared about most. You’d hear it in his voice, understand it by his talks.
Goldberg moved to South Florida on the edge of another time, back in the 1960s when he was an advertising man and got a start in sports ghost-writing Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder’s syndicating gambling column.
He left South Florida 15 years ago for Las Vegas. His ESPN gambling work continued as did some with other gambling sites. He didn’t miss everything about South Florida.
“It’s still a minor-league town,’’ he’d say in those occasional phone conversations, noting some poor attendance at another game, before noting he’d won $1,200 for betting Odell Beckham would score the first touchdown in the Super Bowl.
All those years, this minor-league town was his town in some fashion. Hank had a voice, a show, a presence in the manner great ones always do. That voice went silent Monday.
