ATHENS – Looking for some great entertainment while you’re out for a run or walk, working in the yard or riding in the car? Well, find a radio broadcast of Georgia baseball (usually on 1230/106.3 in metro Atlanta) and listen to Jeff Dantzler and David Johnston call a game.
It helps to care a little about the Bulldogs or the University of Georgia, but that’s not mandatory. These two guys have a blast, and their audience does as a result.
They talk about dogs, as in the kind people keep as pets, and encourage listeners to send in pictures of them. They talk about music, rock and roll mostly, but any kind really. They challenge the stadium organist to play this song or that. That recently resulted in Matthew Kaminski (aka @bravesorganist on Twitter) playing 11 different Led Zeppelin tunes in a single inning. Almost as amazing, Dantzler was able to identify the names of all 11.
Throughout home games, they interact with the Georgia baseball tailgaters on the scene, including those in the “Left Field Lounge,” the “Barking Lot” and the raucous student occupants of infamous “Green House” on top of “Kudzu Hill.”
And Dantzler and Johnston love Twitter. They’re always reading interesting and funny tweets on the air and ask fans to send in their thoughts during the game from wherever they happen. It makes for nine solid innings of lively interplay between the audience and the broadcasters, regardless of game situations.
“Twitter has been great for us to be able to connect with the listeners,” said Johnston, whose full-time job is sports director at 960 The Ref in Athens, the longtime flagship station for the Georgia Bulldogs’ radio network. “It’s been awesome. For us, it’s a way for us to kind of see the listeners while they’re out there listening to us.”
As a result, they have a lot of regulars who “tweet in” during broadcasts. Most of them have nicknames, like “Fireball Rodney,” “Strap Dawg,” “Ms. Jean the Music Teacher” and many others.
“I feel like we’ve gotten new friends through that,” said Dantzler, who also does play-by-play for UGA women’s basketball and hosts “The Fifth Quarter Show” on the Georgia radio network during football season. “The genesis of that for me is, when I was a kid, I wrote a letter to (the late Braves broadcaster) Ernie Johnson asking if he’d say my name on a Braves’ broadcast for my birthday, and he did. That was 1982. So, me and Dave started going, ‘Let us know where you’re tweeting in from.’ The first weekend we did that I think we hit 25 states. I think we’re up to five countries now.”
Calling the Dawgs
At their core, though, is Georgia baseball. The Bulldogs’ field a proud and storied team, one that has won a College World Series (1990), played in several and is always competitive in the ferocious world of SEC baseball.
When Georgia travels to Arkansas this weekend, it will face for the second time this season the nation’s No. 1-ranked team on the road. (The other was Vanderbilt on April 8-10.) Florida and Ole Miss, who the Bulldogs will face away and at home, respectively, in the final two weekends of the season, each have also been ranked No. 1 at some point this season.
Not coincidentally, this season has been bit of a struggle for the Bulldogs (27-16, 10-11 SEC). They have flip-flopped in and out of the Top 25 all year. Heading into the season’s final stretch, they have some work to do to earn a third consecutive NCAA Tournament berth for the first time in school history.
Georgia already would have checked that box if it hadn’t been for the pandemic shutting down the 2020 season. Armed with gas-throwing pitchers Emerson Hancock and Cole Wilcox, the Bulldogs were ranked No. 2 in the nation and headed to Gainesville to take on No. 1 Florida when the plug was pulled on the season in March last year. Those guys and many other pro-caliber players have moved on.
So, this season has been a bit of a rebuild project. But that hasn’t made the baseball broadcasts any less entertaining. Regardless of the in-game situation, Dantzler and Johnston tend to keep the mood light.
Meanwhile, attendance at Foley Field has been limited to a socially distanced maximum of 664, with fewer fans than that showing up most nights. Thanks in part to that and the increased number of digital platforms that carry the Bulldogs’ broadcasts, more fans than ever are listening in.
“With the advent of Internet streaming and the various apps, you can listen to games worldwide,” said Alan Thomas, Georgia’s associate athletic director for external operations. “That has added another whole element to it, and those guys do a fantastic job.”
Gaining new fans
Among the many new listeners is one who’s very familiar to Georgia baseball followers.
Bulldogs coach Scott Stricklin doesn’t get to hear the radio broadcasts very often. He tends to be kind of busy during games. But thanks to a case of COVID-19, he found himself quarantined at home for a couple of weeks in April and in need of a way to follow the action.
Initially, Stricklin said he watched the Bulldogs’ games on the SEC Network’s stream during his 14-day quarantine. But at the peak of his particularly difficult illness, he couldn’t even do that. That was the case when the Georgia traveled to Clemson on March 30. Stricklin said he felt so lousy he couldn’t even sit up to watch the game on a computer screen.
“So, I turned out the lights and laid in bed and just listened to those guys,” said Stricklin, Georgia’s coach the past six years. “That’s the first time I’ve never watched our game in any way, shape or form. I just listened. And it was really good. I knew they were good because I hear them on highlights and playbacks and on their radio shows, too. But that’s the first time I was following the action with them. They’re entertaining, they know our team and they know Georgia history.”
Readily recalling Georgia sports history is a gift that Dantzler is well known for. The 48-year-old Statesboro native has a photographic memory for all things Bulldog. Stricklin once put Dantzler on the spot with that.
“I was sitting at a restaurant in Athens with some friends, and Jeff came in to eat with his wife,” Stricklin shared. “I started telling them, ‘That guy knows more about Georgia sports than anyone I’ve been around.’ I go, ‘Watch this,’ and I say: ‘Jeff, who was the starting right guard for the 1983 Georgia football team?’ He didn’t hesitate for a moment and he told us who it was (Warren Gray), and then he gave us a little biography on that right guard. He’s that way with every sport at Georgia. He’s passionate about it.”
Johnston, 53, is the more laid-back of the duo. It might be because he has to get up so early every day. He does “The Morning Show” every weekday from the Cox-owned studios off Georgia 316 in Bogart, which airs at 6 a.m. But whether the Bulldogs play nine innings or 20 innings, as they did against Clemson in April 2019, Johnston dutifully reports for duty at his day job.
“For a 20-inning game it actually could have been a lot worse,” Johnston said of the 6½-hour contest that ended at 1:30 a.m. “There’s always going to be a few times a year where you’re not going to get a lot of sleep. That was one of them.”
Married to baseball
Behind the scenes of these two Georgia alums are a pair of very understanding wives, Emily Dantzler and Carol Johnston. In a typical year, the Bulldogs will play 60 games in a season, not including extended postseason runs. UGA typically sends both broadcasters on the road.
That means from February through the first of June, Dantzler and Johnston are not eating dinner at home very often.
“We definitely talk to each other more than we talk to our wives,” Johnston cracked. “They’re baseball widows this time of year.”
Said Dantzler: “They might come on the road with us occasionally, but it’s rare. It helps that they’re good friends, too.”
Both men are veteran broadcasters. Dantzler started doing Georgia baseball in 1995 and was the full-time play-by-play man by 2000. About that time, Johnston started filling in for Dantzler when he had conflicts with women’s basketball, which are common in February and March.
Johnston did such a good job that soon they were both occupying the radio booth at Foley Field for every game. They’ve been calling the games together since 2013.
“Everybody is going to say they have the best radio broadcasters, but those guys, with the amount of time they’ve been on it and you add the history and knowledge of the game and the locality, there’s probably not one that’s better,” Georgia’s Thomas said. “What they’ve done especially well is adapt to social media. We’ve always had thousands of people listening, but now they have a way to interact and Dave and Jeff do a really job with that.”
Typically, Dantzler does the first three innings, Johnston the middle four, then Dantzler the last two. That has left Dantzler describing the majority of the dramatic, game-ending moments over the years. He has coined many classics, but one of his most replayed calls remains the one of Jeff Keppinger’s game-winning home run in the NCAA Super Regional finals of 2001.
Johnson gets fewer chances, but recently got to call Fernando Gonzalez’s sixth-inning grand slam that lifted Georgia to a 4-0 win over Auburn.
They’re like an old married couple now. They have strong opinions about visiting radio booths, travel, food and weather. Both point to the lightning storm at Kennesaw State that knocked them off the air in 2017 as their most memorable moment.
“Because we almost died,” Johnston quipped.
Fortunately for everyone involved, they did not. And Georgia baseball is the beneficiary.
Having listened to that 2-0 win over Clemson in his pitch-black basement in March, Stricklin knows now better than ever how good Georgia radio listeners have it.
“Darren Pasqua got the save in the ninth and pitched really well,” Stricklin recalled. “The way they described it and the excitement in their voices let you know what just happened was a big deal. I’m lying there in my bed in the dark, and I’m giving a fist pump when they made the final call.”
