Marty Glickman

Martin Irving Glickman (August 14, 1917 – January 3, 2001) was an American radio announcer who was famous for his broadcasts of the New York Knicks basketball games and the football games of the New York Giants and the New York Jets.

Glickman was a noted track and field athlete and football star at Syracuse University.

He was a member of the U.S. team at the 1936 Summer Olympic Games held in Berlin, Germany.

The unexplained, last-minute decision to remove Glickman and Sam Stoller—a fellow Jewish American athlete—from the 100-meter relay at the 1936 Olympics, where they were replaced by Jesse Owens and Ralph Metcalfe, who easily won the gold medal, has been widely viewed as an American effort to avoid embarrassing or offending Adolf Hitler, then the Chancellor of Germany, who had been directing anti-Jewish discriminatory policies since 1933.

Glickman would later talk and write extensively about the controversial decision.

Glickman was an 18-year-old sprinter who qualified for the U.S. team in the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, Germany.

Glickman traveled to Germany and spent two weeks practicing as part of the 400-meter relay team.

However, on the morning of the day that they were scheduled to compete, Glickman and Sam Stoller (also Jewish) were replaced on the 4 × 100 m relay team by Ralph Metcalfe and Jesse Owens.

Foy Draper and Frank Wykoff, the two other runners with whom they'd been practicing, remained on the relay team.

The U.S. team won the event by fifteen yards.

It is generally thought that the relay team would have won fairly easily without the substitution of Glickman and Stoller, who were the only two members of the U.S. Olympic team who did not compete after arriving in Berlin.

During the entire history of U.S. participation in the Olympic Games, it is extremely rare that uninjured team members don't compete in any event at all, and indeed after practice trials, Glickman and Stoller had been assured that they would be running in the relay event.

No written sources have ever emerged that conclusively account for the last-minute decision to remove Glickman and Stoller from the relay event.

Glickman himself was convinced that their removal was done primarily to avoid embarrassing Adolf Hitler, the chancellor of Germany, and the National Socialist (Nazi) regime he led.

Under Hitler's leadership, Germany had enacted severe anti-Jewish race laws, and the profound prejudice of the National Socialist regime against Jews was obvious by 1936.

With the two Jewish sprinters, an American team's victory in the relay would have been awkward for the German hosts to the games in Berlin, their capital city.

The head of the 1936 US Olympic Team, Avery Brundage, dismissed these allegations as "absurd" in a written report shortly after the games, but David Large wrote more than seventy years later that "While the removal of Glickman and Stoller never bothered Brundage, it haunted the American Olympic establishment for decades after."

Glickman graduated from Syracuse University in 1939.

In addition to his prominence in track and field, he was a star running back for the varsity football team.

He had brief careers in professional football and basketball.

Following the American entry into World War II in 1941, Glickman joined the US Marines.

He joined the radio station WHN in New York City, and by 1943 he was its sports director.

He was an officer in the 4th Marine Air Wing from 1943 until the end of the war in 1945.

Glickman became a distinguished sportscaster, beginning as the voice man for the sports newsreels distributed by Paramount News, between 1948 and 1957 when Paramount News' newsreel production ended.

He covered all local, national and global sports during that era in every genre.

Glickman's poetic lilt and slight New York twang made him a favorite in those early years of news production.

After Paramount News, he became best known as the voice of the New York Knicks (21 years) and New York Giants (23 years).

He also did some New York Rangers broadcasts.

As a testament to Glickman's ability as a sprinter in 1963 (at age 46) he lined up and outran all New York Giants running backs in a race.

In 1998, the then-president of the U.S. Olympic Committee, William J. Hybl, honored Glickman and the memory of Sam Stoller, who had died in 1985, by presenting Glickman with a plaque "in lieu of the gold medals they didn't win" in Berlin.

Hybl noted that although there was no written proof that their removal was an appeasement of the German regime's anti-Semitism, it was clearly the case.

"I was a prosecutor," Hybl said.

"I'm used to looking at evidence. The evidence was there."

For having been pulled from the relay, Glickman blamed Brundage and track coach Dean Cromwell.

According to Glickman, Cromwell favored Draper and Wykoff over Glickman and Stoller for two reasons, the coach's anti-Semitism and his favoring Wykoff and Draper because they ran for Cromwell at USC.

Glickman thought Brundage was an anti-Semite and did too much to please Hitler.

James L. Freedman has produced a documentary film, Glickman, that was broadcast nationally in the United States on HBO in 2013.

Glickman was born in the Bronx, New York City, to a Romanian Jewish family.

His parents, Harry and Molly Glickmann, had migrated to the United States from Iaşi, Romania.

He was a track star and football standout at James Madison High School in Brooklyn and at Syracuse University.