Football Preview | The Voice of Franklin Field signs off

You would think a man called ‘The Voice’ could send seismic waves through telephone speakers and part seas with his golden pipes.

But John Charles Thompson ‘C.T.’ Alexander —‘The Voice of Franklin Field’ — sounds like your typical 76-year-old man, worn from decades of vocal cord vibration.

“Have you ever heard somebody say that they don’t like a picture of themselves?” The Voice asks in the muffled, raspy tone that currently defines him. “I don’t think necessarily that I like my own voice.”

The Voice’s current workspace, from which he will step down after the upcoming season, consists of a battered wooden table located 24 rows up the lower section of Franklin Field’s north side — the visitor’s side — below the overhang. He doesn’t get a designated, enclosed booth like most announcers of his stature do; his quarters were moved down from the press box several years ago. There is no official certificate or label or emblem that designates him as Franklin Field's announcer. He doesn’t even get a paycheck.

Still, C.T. carries his distinction as The Voice as proudly as he does his days in the United States Marine Corps. A call to his cell phone is met with “you’ve reached the voicemail of C.T. Alexander, ‘The Voice.’” And as much as any fan, player or coach who has stepped foot inside Penn’s historic stadium, C.T. has made his presence felt at every University of Pennsylvania home football game over the last 49 years.

Well, at all but three of them.

C.T. runs through the three Quakers games he’s missed during his career as public address announcer — out of the 253 that have been played at Franklin Field since 1960 — as if they were a few of the dozens of plays he describes each game: two absences in the '60s for business, and once in 1992 when he was hosting a Dutch minister and treated her to an American football game from the fan section.

“I think it’s a self-imposed discipline. Once you take on a challenge, you really want to do it well,” he says from the road, on his way to a reunion of his Marine squadron in South Carolina. “I wanted to see whether I could, over a long period of time, hold down the fort and know that nobody would infringe on me and say, ‘wait a minute, you’re not doing a great job.’”

“When you think about Marines, their motto is semper fidelis — always faithful," explains C.T.’s son John, an ex-Marine himself. "I think he just lives and breathes that.”

It’s easy to see where C.T.’s loyalties lie. “When I went to get my blood drawn,” he quips, “it came out both red and blue.”

Indeed, it seems as though C.T. has all the intrinsic qualities of The Voice in his blood: an undying passion for sports and for Penn, an innate ability to command large groups of people and a sharp attention to detail. “It’s a natural fit for him,” John says of his father’s announcing job. All that’s missing is, frankly, the vibrant, booming voice that is typical of a legendary announcer. Perhaps God gave him all the other qualities as compensation.

The Voice finds its pitch

On another gray day at Franklin Field, C.T. announces with a sudden burst of enthusiasm, “And here they come, the 2010 Ivy champion Quakers!” The stands are devoid of the fans that normally serve as his audience, but you couldn’t tell that from looking at row 24, seat 1. An expression normally reserved for a child watching fireworks emerges on C.T.'s wrinkled face as he pronounces his favorite words.

At first, that was the simple nature of his interest in sports: a childhood fascination. The teenaged C.T., a two-sport athlete at his suburban Philadelphia high school, came to Penn in search of a business education. Not quite talented enough to play for the football team, he chose “the best alternative”: cheerleading on the Quakers’ all-male squad.

While getting a Wharton education and serving as both head cheerleader and president of his fraternity, C.T. also held a side job throughout his college career as a student assistant to Director of Sports Information Bobby Paul. When he returned years later after a post-Penn stint as a Marine officer, he was well connected. The new Director of Sports Information, Edwin Fabricius, a fellow Marine and fraternity brother, offered C.T. the P.A. announcing job to replace ex-Penn football player Ray Dooney.

C.T.'s youthful vigor for football lives on today. It seems that The Voice enjoys nothing more than announcing his Quakers as Ivy champions. He currently has 13 trophies on his mental rack.

But C.T. also had a bird’s-eye view of “the doldrums of the '60s and '70s,” as he calls them, when the storied program endured a dreadful stretch of losing. Penn had just one winning season between 1959 and 1972 and suffered a title drought that lasted 22 seasons.

Even for a dedicated P.A. announcer, it was tough to carry on. “Some of it was being masochistic,” C.T. explains now. “We didn’t have the brightest of all seasons for a number of years, and that was a challenge just to see if the following year would be better and the following coach would be better.”

It was one of many challenges that The Voice embraced. Another was remaining objective, despite having Red and Blue blood.

“You have to be very careful, at least the way I view being a professional stadium announcer. You can’t let your emotions run away with you,” C.T. says. “What you should be doing is being matter-of-fact and … suppressing the emotion.”

That was especially tricky during Princeton games, when Princeton graduate and Philadelphia City Council member — and eventual friend of C.T. — Thatcher Longstreth would sit in the Franklin Field stands. “I would announce, ‘And in the Dartmouth-Princeton game, Dartmouth: 27, Princeton: nothing,’” C.T. recalls with a laugh. “That would make Thatcher Longstreth very upset.”

The Voice possesses the rare ability to insult people with even the subtlest change of inflection.

And, in serving as The Voice, he possesses a great deal of power. “He likes being in the limelight,” his son says.

“It is exhilarating, with all those minds waiting to hear you,” C.T. says as he peers at the red and blue back seats across from him. “It was more exhilarating talking to 30,000 then talking to 8,000, I can tell you that.”

The Voice has eyes

The younger John Alexander’s voice is strikingly smooth.

Like his father, he is a Penn football enthusiast. So when John received an invitation from his father to join him in the press box after spending many of his childhood days sitting in the nosebleeds of Franklin Field with his two sisters, the then-12-year-old was thrilled. That’s when his eyes were opened to an obscure yet vital position in a football game: the spotter.

The spotter is the P.A. announcer’s right-hand man. Binoculars in hand, the spotter carefully observes each play, making sense of the details of the often-convoluted mess that unfolds after the snap of the football — who applied pressure on the quarterback, who was the intended receiver, who was closest in coverage, whether there is a flag on the field, and so on. He then relays that information to the P.A. announcer, who notifies the rest of the stadium.

An excellent spotter has a keen eye, impeccable concentration and quick reactions. According to his father, John is a natural.

It took years of practice and hours of cramming himself into the press box for John to achieve spotting excellence. He recalls squeezing into the box and helping the primary spotter — at the time, an older Penn alumnus. “I was kind of a sponge in the beginning," he says. "[But] I slowly evolved into the primary spotter.”

Thirty-four years later, John has missed just one game of spotting duty (not counting the four years he spent in the Marines after graduating from Penn). Over the last 10, John and C.T. have been accompanied by a third veteran spotter in their current, 24th row home: John’s older sister Linda. She joined the team at her stepmother’s request, moving up from the seats she used to occupy as a toddler, when women weren’t allowed in the press box.

What John can’t catch, Linda does. “I’m his second pair of eyes, so we collaborate,” she says. “I’m watching, but I’m the silent one, and I’m the backup to make sure he calls it right.”

“She’s got a keen eye,” C.T. says of his daughter. “It’s been very good, having family to depend on.”

Dependability on game days is the result of meticulous pregame preparation. Since the rosters provided by the sports information offices are often difficult to decipher, C.T. arrives an hour before each contest and creates a grid that features each player’s name and uniform number.

John’s duties are twofold: first, confer with the staff on the opposing team in order to go over names that may be difficult to pronounce and second, stop by the Penn training room to check if there are any players who definitely won’t play and therefore won’t need to be mentioned, especially if there are multiple players wearing the same number.

While John’s busy working, his dad is taking the final, perhaps most important step. “I triple gargle,” C.T. deadpans. “I have an endorsement offer from Listerine, but I’m putting it off because I got another offer from Scope.”

Humor helps C.T. cope with the cruel reality that The Voice will eventually go silent. Come next fall, a new voice will be sitting in row 24, seat 1, introducing the Quakers and recapping each play. C.T. is doing everything in his power to make sure that the voice will be John’s.

“This would be the pertinent time if ever to have any chance to transfer the legacy onto my son,” C.T. reiterates. His efforts already include personal letters to both Penn President Amy Gutmann and Director of Athletics Steve Bilsky. “I hope it takes place because it really would make for an excellent Penn sports and family tradition.”

Thus far, however, the Penn Athletics Department has yet to give the Alexanders a definitive answer. Senior Associate Director of Athletics Alanna Shanahan had this to offer in an e-mail: “He will be hard to replace, and there will be many candidates interested in becoming the public address announcer at Historic Franklin Field.”

Besides having the unique pleasure of sitting beside The Voice for three decades, John also has a little bit of experience behind the microphone at the stadium he calls his “home away from home.”

“It’s always a little nerve-wracking when you start — getting used to the repetition and reverberation of your voice,” says John. “But once I got into the game flow, it seemed like a natural thing.”

If there’s anybody else who understands what it takes to be P.A. announcer at Franklin Field each Saturday, it’s John, The Voice’s Echo. He is even blessed with the powerful baritone his father lacks.

When asked about his retirement, — which will include a ceremony in his honor, Oct. 2 at the Dartmouth game — The Voice begins to quiver.

“It’ll be sad, and yeah, I’ll cry at the end,” C.T. says. “But then I’ll do a double gargle.”

The Voice remembers

At times, The Voice seems to work like a tape recorder. At any moment, it can be rewound to an earlier point in time, when he described something particularly memorable.

“Certainly the fondest [memory] was 1982, when we defeated Harvard on Dave Shulman’s field goal,” C.T. says, reminiscing on the precise details of the moment: the “electric” atmosphere, the players’ names, the yard line, the zero time left and the penalty call.

With an Ivy League championship on the line, the Quakers received new life when a roughing-the-kicker penalty against Harvard gave Shulman a second opportunity at a game-winning field goal. C.T. recaps the ultimate result like he’s spoken the words a million times before. “And-the-kick-was-good-with-no-seconds-left.”

“The fans, everyone in the press box even, went bananas. And that was the day — at least one of them because it was the Ivy League championship — that the fans tore down the goal posts and they ended up in the Schuylkill River,” says C.T.

And John’s fondest moment?

“In 1982, Dave Shulman made a field goal that won the Ivy League Championship,” he says.

John, too, has the tape recorder memory. “In the '70s, the first player that comes to mind is Adolph Bellizeare. He would just electrify the stadium even though the team was terrible.”

As for the '80s? “There are so many memories there, because not only did I come to school and get to know the players, but Jerry Berndt turned the program around.”

But C.T. can think back even further, to moments that resonated beyond football. “Four days after Kennedy was assassinated, we played Cornell,” The Voice begins. “I was asked by the business manager to have the stands rise and give a moment of silent tribute for the slain President of the United States. And at no moment did I ever see or observe Franklin Field in a more quiet moment.”

The Voice marvels at the history of the oldest operating stadium in the United States and not just the events he’s witnessed inside it. C.T. knows all the facts, and recites them frequently: site of the first scoreboard, of the first football radio broadcast, of the first two-tiered stadium, and more.

After all, ‘The Voice of Franklin Field’ needs to appreciate his sanctuary.

And history keeps unfolding before C.T.’s watchful eyes — only now those eyes require stronger prescription glasses. In between the traditional questions of “Did you catch that receiver’s number?” and “How do you pronounce the linebacker’s name?” is the increasingly more customary, “Whaddya say?”

“At one time John was wondering why I kept repeating, ‘whaddya say, whaddya say?” C.T. explains. “I didn’t have the presence of mind to say, ‘John, I’m failing with my hearing.’”

The Voice is next to go.

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