Big Al Holds Book Signing on 'Fifty Years of Adventures in Sports Broadcasting'

VILLANOVA–Local sports legend and resident Al Meltzer met his neighbors for some reminiscing and a book signing on Thursday, Dec. 8, at the Radnor Valley Country Club. 

A 10-time Emmy Award winner, Meltzer signed copies of his new memoir: Big Al: Fifty Years of Adventures in Sports Broadcasting, published by Philadelphia’s Camino Books.

The memoir was released in October of this year and co-authored by Robert S. Lyons, who covered professional and college sports for the Associated Press for more than 40 years.

Philadelphia's Camino Books described the synopsis of the memoir with:

"As Al Meltzer so vividly describes in his exhilarating autobiography, he may be the only person in broadcasting history to have experienced everything in radio and television during a career that began in Syracuse and Buffalo and continued to the major markets of Philadelphia and Chicago. It is believed that he is the only sportscaster to have worked at five TV stations in the same city. He s witnessed television grow from its infancy to the breathtaking technological advances of satellite TV.

Big Al was there at the beginning, recreating baseball games, sight-unseen, literally out of thin air. He helped to introduce sports on that newfangled medium called UHF television when viewers needed a special adapter and a circular antenna to pick up a frequently fuzzy black-and-white picture. This was long before the arrival of videotape and instant replay. He stood in front of the camera for the first Monday night football game ever telecast, and sat in the studio as host for the debut of cable TV s longest-running series in history HBO s award-winning Inside the NFL.

Big Al s autobiography is also an invigorating chronicle about the personalities that he s had the pleasure of knowing, most memorably Wilt Chamberlain, who granted Al his final exclusive interview. Other notables who play a part in Al s story include Carmen Basilio, Chuck Bednarik, Tom Brookshier, Jim Brown, Bobby Clarke, Mort Crim, Mike Golic, Dallas Green, Alex Hannum, Wayne Hardin. Harry Kalas, Harry Litwack, Nancy Lopez, Arnold Palmer, Bernie Parent, Joe Paterno, Jack Ramsay, Buddy Ryan, Lou Saban, Dolph Shayes, Fred Shero, Mike Schmidt, Sylvester Stallone, Bobby Thomson, Leonard Tose, Dick Vermeil, Mitch Williams, and Pat Williams."

Find out more about the memoir on the publisher's website here. You can order this local legend's memoir on Amazon.com here.