By Peter Finney Jr.
Special to NewOrleansSaints.com
As Hap Glaudi might say, let's talk a little horse racing.
If New Orleans fans were asked to identify the three Louisiana-bred sportscasters over the last 70 years who belong in the Ninth Ward and the Down-the-Bayou wings of the Who Dat Elocution Hall of Fame, the photo finish might come down to Lloyd Alfred (Hap) Glaudi, Bernard Saverio (Buddy) Diliberto and Mike Detillier.
Detillier's unexpected death Sept. 6 at the age of 65 – just two weeks after doctors discovered he had stage 4 metastatic pancreatic cancer – elicited tears and prayerful condolences from legions of Saints fans who had come to appreciate him not just for his photographic knowledge of draft-eligible college football players but also for his folksy, Lafourche Parish demeanor, where a joke and a smile could disarm any anonymous caller bearing weapons of mass destruction in the age of anti-social media.
"He was kind of always playing the good cop," said Bobby Hebert, the former Saints quarterback who teamed with Detillier, his close friend, since 2005 on pre- and post-game shows, including "The Second Guess" on WWL radio. "He was from Central Lafourche, and I was from South Lafourche, and I used to joke with him that it was never a rivalry because they never beat us.
"Mike was just so knowledgeable. What put him on the map was his time with Buddy D, who gave him opportunities, and then his draft guide. A lot of organizations counted on that as another resource to add to what they were also doing with their scouting department. He remembered details – the players' lineage, where they went to high school. He was so easy to work with because he had a lot of football knowledge."
It's eerie how the trio of New Orleans' most-beloved sportscasters had Triple Crown pedigrees that included grit, closing speed and, quite often, fractured syntax in tight spaces. But the traits that each sportscasting icon shared were authenticity, an insider's knowledge and an indelible, man-of-the-people connection with fans, to whom they pledged their primary allegiance.
The horse racing analogy is apt.
As the dean of New Orleans TV sportscasters in the 1960s, Glaudi had cut his teeth as a premier sports columnist for one of the city's two afternoon newspapers, the New Orleans Item.
While working as a 14-year-old on the backstretch at the Fair Grounds, Glaudi famously earned his tuition money to Jesuit High School by turning a tip from jockey Pat Garrity into a $136 payday. A long shot named Tiger Flowers was his meal ticket to Carrollton and Banks.
The Ninth Warder turned Blue Jay went on to play baseball, basketball and football and then became sports editor and later editor of the school newspaper. He became the first sophomore to win the Jesuit English Gold Medal.
Still wearing his high school ring at age 70, Glaudi told Mark Lorando of The Times-Picayune in a 1982 interview: "I owe everything to Jesuit High School."
And, of course, to Tiger Flowers.
When the Item and the New Orleans States, the city's other afternoon daily, merged in 1958, jobs evaporated, and Glaudi took his talents and his typewriter to Indiana, where he spent three miserable years covering sports as a New Orleans ex-patriot for the Evansville Courier and Press.
The phone call that brought him back to New Orleans came from Phil Johnson, his former colleague at the Item, who was now working for WWL-TV as public relations director. Johnson knew Glaudi certainly had the writing skills and the sports expertise to thrive in TV, but the gamble was high stakes because Glaudi, by his own admission, did not have the smooth, king's English delivery considered foundational for television success.
Glaudi decided to tool his five-minute sportscasts – a lifetime in today's TV – with heavy doses of horse racing ("I've got the daily double for you"). His TV style mirrored the daily column he used to write for the Item – teeming with boxing, baseball, football and basketball notes and even obscure golden anniversaries and birthday announcements.
WWL viewers adored Hap's everyman's style.
"When I think of the time those sportscasts used to have – man, now it's sometimes two minutes at the most – it's hard to believe," said Dominic Massa, the former executive producer at WWL-TV and author of two books on New Orleans media ("New Orleans Television" and "New Orleans Radio"). "Hap would do the racing, the birthdays and the golden anniversaries. That's what Channel 4 tried to be to really make the connection with the audience."
Massa said a seminal footnote of media history is that New Orleans – primarily Glaudi – gave birth to "happy talk," the unscripted transition between the news anchor throwing the mic over to the sportscaster or weathercaster for their respective reports. "Happy talk" on newscasts began as a way to make "Hap" more comfortable on the set.
"The WWL consultants came in and saw it, and then they made it standard practice for other clients (across the country)," Massa said.
Mike Hoss, a Washington, D.C.-area native who worked for many years as a sportscaster and news anchor at WWL-TV, said he was shocked when he arrived in New Orleans in 1989 and saw Glaudi's colloquial style. Fans of Glaudi's old-school approach picketed in front of the WWL studios in 1978 when Jim Henderson, the smooth, buttoned-down Syracuse University communications major, unceremoniously replaced the Ninth Ward yat.
"I told people I was the first person to come to New Orleans and get run over by the Welcome Wagon," Henderson recalled, laughing.
Hoss reveled in soaking up the oral history surrounding the Glaudi mystique.
"I was from an area where there were poster cutouts of news people from one station to the next," Hoss said. "Hap was my first watching tape, and I was like, 'Wow, this is unbelievable.' It was so uniquely different than what I was ever used to. This was my first, 'Whoa! This is a unique place.' I never was in a place where the community revered their news, sports and weather anchors as much as they did here. Where I'm from, they're just people. There were ones you liked, but they weren't family. They were family here, and Hap was the first one to show me that."
At 50, Fletcher Mackel of WDSU-TV is a little too young to have watched Glaudi on TV, but he said the stories that have been passed down about his down-home New Orleans delivery helped convince him and his newscaster brother Travers not to homogenize their voices for the soulless Nielsen ratings. Hap passed on his delivery style to Buddy D and Detillier.
"When I first finished Loyola and was trying to move into broadcasting, I think I thought you had to sound like Tom Brokaw or have this great voice," Mackel said. "But authenticity matters. We are not this transient city like Miami or Las Vegas or L.A. With all three of those gentlemen, they are one of us. They came from where we come from. They sound like how a lot of our people sound.
"You know Buddy is a New Orleanian, just like you know Mike Detillier is from down the bayou, and it's not fake. It's not Brian Kelly showing up and trying to be from Louisiana. These guys are from Louisiana. My brother and I – sure, we do have a little yattiness to us every now and then in how we say certain words – but that's authentic. These people are iconic because of their authenticity and the way people resonated with them."
When people ask me if Buddy Diliberto could have played in Peoria, I always give thanks that Peoria is someone else's focus group.
Buddy D, who died at 73 of a heart attack on Jan. 7, 2005, didn't need a focus group to tell him what played in New Orleans because, in a very real way, he was New Orleans.
His exotic speech patterns had potholes large enough to swallow a Mitsubishi (there's a 30-second commercial somewhere out there to prove it), but we all understood what he said and where he stood. What does that say about us? Actually, it makes me feel pretty good.
And Buddy D's heart was bigger than his 50,000-watt mouth. Like Glaudi, Buddy was an award-winning print journalist for The Times-Picayune long before he made the lucrative move into TV and radio.
"We're all in this multimedia world now right now where we have to write and then do these vertical videos," Times-Picayune columnist Jeff Duncan said. "The amazing thing is Hap and Buddy were doing that back then. They had those skills. They were writers. They went into TV. They were in radio. It was unique to be able to do all of that. You can't just be some blowhard. You have to have that background in journalism. That's one of the things I always respected about Buddy D. He came up in print."
As a sportswriter in New York during the 1980s, I had the good fortune to cover a series of Super Bowls, where on the Tuesday before the game, hundreds of reporters and photographers crowded around quarterbacks such as Joe Montana and Jim Plunkett to ask inane questions, and then followed up by asking incredibly inane questions.
On one occasion, someone asked Plunkett, whose parents were disabled: "Jim, let me get this straight. Is your mother blind and your father deaf, or is your mother deaf and your father blind?"
From the back of the pack, waving his microphone like a drawn sword, Buddy D would cut to the chase, bellowing out a question of actual substance with an inflection only a Barq's-swigging, crawfish-sucking New Orleanian could truly appreciate.
When Buddy D's voice rang out, I remember a reporter next to me asking: "Who is that guy?"
That was Buddy D, the guy who asked the questions everyone else wanted to ask but who didn't want to do the heavy lifting.
In his 55 years covering local sports in New Orleans, Buddy D championed a fan-first mentality because he was a fan, first and foremost. His mission often cost him dearly in terms of warm-and-fuzzies with owners, coaches, general managers and players, but his job was to protect the fan. He had the access. He was the imbedded reporter. He would not compromise that trust.
Buddy D connected with New Orleanians because he had equal doses of passion and humility. The Mike Ditka train wreck, which he helped orchestrate by directly lobbying Gov. Edwin Edwards at the governor's mansion, became a rich lesson on the proper way to accept responsibility for an Eden transformed into a Chernobyl.
(An aside: As Buddy walked into the governor's mansion on his lobbying mission that day, Edwin introduced Buddy to his brother Marion, who was playing poker with his buddies in a sleeveless muscle shirt: "He's the sportscaster from New Orleans who talks funny.")
Years later, assessing the "Fire! Ready! Aim!" carnage of the Ditka regime, Buddy D essentially told his audience, "Hey, I screwed up. I'm out of the coaching business."
Weakness became strength. His fans forgave him.
No retelling of the Buddy D story would be complete without a few of my dad's favorite stories. He and Buddy were out in Los Angeles early to cover a Saints game, and Buddy had to get to Hollywood Park in time to bet the daily double. Unfortunately, one of humanity's worst drivers was preoccupied – and lost.
"Buddy saw a state trooper with flashing lights on the side of the highway," my dad told me. "The cop had pulled someone over for speeding. So, Buddy pulled his car onto the shoulder, got out of the car and walked up to the trooper, 'Hey, I'm from New Orleans. Can you give me directions to Hollywood Park?'"
In October 1962, Buddy and my dad drove up together to Baton Rouge to cover Charlie McClendon's Tuesday press conference for the upcoming Ole Miss game. This was in the middle of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which had the slight potential of obliterating the Earth.
My dad mentioned there was a genuine fear this could lead to world war with Russia.
"I'm not worried about any war," Buddy D shot back. "They're talking about canceling the LSU-Ole Miss game. That's serious! If that happened, I'd never forgive that guy Khrushchev."
Each year, WWL radio sponsored a one-day radiothon so that listeners could phone in pledges in support of Children's Hospital. As part of the station's coverage, Buddy spent the morning at the hospital getting a feel for its fund-raising mission. When he got on the air at 4 p.m., he told his audience how the visit had genuinely moved him: "It was tough walking down the hallways seeing all those kids hooked up to their RVs."
Will Peneguy, who worked with Buddy at the T-P, tells a story I had never heard:
"Your dad and Buddy were in New York at a Broadway show, and they're playing the overture. The curtain, of course, is not open, right? And it's a long overture, probably three or four minutes, and then it gets to a point where the music kind of lulls a bit. They're still playing it softly, but that's when Buddy turns to your dad, and in that voice you could probably hear you three or four rows away, he says: 'Pete, they can't get the (bleeping) curtain open.'"
Not many knew it, but Buddy was a daily communicant at St. Agnes Church in Jefferson, where his funeral Mass was celebrated. Often on major feast days, Buddy D would call the Clarion Herald offices to see if a downtown church had a noontime Mass to accommodate his work schedule.
"Every morning he got his USA Today and went to Mass," said DePaul Smith, director of Saints sales for WWL radio, the Saints' flagship radio station. "He would go to Mass on Sundays with his two boys, and they would go out to eat breakfast afterwards. Mass was the cornerstone of his life, not only in dealing with himself but also in reaching out to his kids."
That faith was put to the test in 2004 when Buddy D and Smith had a tense moment at work. Venting his frustration that Saints owner Tom Benson was remaining mum on making changes after a disappointing 2003 season, Buddy D suggested on the air that Saints fans might have to force changes by not renewing their season tickets.
Smith never tried to put the handcuffs on Buddy D but explained to him how those statements might backfire against employees in the Saints' ticket office, people whose jobs might be affected.
After sleeping on it, Buddy D wrote a thoughtful letter to Smith that evidenced his keen passion and humility, explaining that he had had a restless night and probably should have not been so blunt.
"Probably a better way might have been to just say, 'Hit 'em where it hurts most' and left the interpretation up for individual choosing," Buddy wrote to Smith. "Maybe I shouldn't have said anything at all. But I never lose sight of the people less privileged. … New Orleans is a very forgiving town, which it is as long as people think you share their pain, think like they think. Abdul the Tentmaker and his dancing friend Mouse, members of Charlie's Saints Marching Club – these are the real fans.
"I love you, DePaul, but remember how lucky we are to be in our jobs. But that luck also confers one more important thing – opportunity, the opportunity to have a platform, a pulpit, an opportunity to influence others for good or for naught. Opportunity makes a difference in one's community. - Buddy D"
Yes, that would play in Peoria.
The Glaudi-Diliberto-Deteillier lineage placed the fans directly at the top of the family tree.
"None of those would have existed without the other," Massa said. "They all would credit each other. Mike credited Buddy, and Buddy always credited Hap. Mike actually was the most polished of the three in some ways. They really wouldn't exist anywhere else like they did here. You wouldn't have those three in Cincinnati or in Detroit."
No one knows that more than Hebert, whose accent, coupled with Detillier's, became the ultimate Cajun harmony.
Hebert sensed something was wrong with Detillier in early August, when he heard his colleague talk about coughing fits and the strange dreams he was having about his late mother.
"Mike told me, 'I don't know why I'm dreaming this, but I'm talking to my mom, and she's telling me to come home,'" Hebert said.
The last time Hebert talked to Detiller was the evening of Sept. 5, when the LSU-Clemson kickoff was delayed by lightning for two hours. Detillier was able to see some of the game and passed away at 1:30 the next morning.
"I was able to tell Mike, 'You know, we're all raised Catholic-Christian on the bayou, and here's where you've got to have faith and hope in Jesus, right? Life on earth is so short compared to eternity.' And he was glad I shared that with him.
"The public may not understand it, but there are no atheists on the deathbed, right? You can't think like, 'Oh, this is all there is?' No, you've got to have hope. You've got to have faith."
It's a language Hap, Buddy and Mike could understand.
Visitation services for Mike Detillier will be held Saturday, Sept. 19, at 8 a.m. at St. Hilary of Poitiers Catholic Church, 333 Twin Oaks Drive, in Raceland, with a funeral Mass at noon.
Peter Finney Jr. writes a Substack column about all things New Orleans at *peterfinneyjr.substack.com.*
