Max Falkenstien Tribute, 1924-2019

LAWRENCE, Kan. – The legendary 60-year voice of the Jayhawks died July 29th at the age of 95. He called KU football and basketball games from 1946-2006. In his 60-year career at the University of Kansas (1946-2006), Falkenstien covered more than 1,750 men’s basketball games and 650 football games, a span that included every game played in Allen Fieldhouse until his retirement, and was one of the longest announcing tenures in sports. By comparison, Vin Scully’s 67 seasons with the Brooklyn and Los Angeles Dodgers is the record for longest broadcasting tenure with a single franchise in all of professional sports.

Falkenstien’s father Earl was business manager of the KU athletic department for 33 years. Falkenstien’s biology class at Liberty Memorial High School trooped over to KFKU, then KU’s 50-watt radio station, in the early 1940s. “Each of us had to make some kind of comment — it must have been a boring show,” Falkenstien reflected, “and a lady came up to me afterward and asked me if wanted to be in radio because I had such a clear voice.”Falkenstien’s first job in radio was at WREN, then a Lawrence radio station. “A guy named Earl Bratten gave me some news copy to read and I got the job,” Falkenstien said. He worked before and after school and on weekends, usually 40 hours a week, and earned $90 a month. “The first time I ever went on the air was a Sunday morning to give a promo for an Eleanor Roosevelt broadcast,” Falkenstien said, smiling. “It was just a 30-second plug, but I was so scared when that red light came on.”

Falkenstien graduated from Liberty Memorial High School in 1942, six months after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. After a semester at KU, he enlisted in the Army Air Corps in hopes of becoming a meteorologist. He left the service in March 1946. After leaving the service, he went back to work for WREN. His first assignment was to do the play-by-play for the NCAA district final game between KU and Oklahoma A&M (now Oklahoma State University). He obtained a degree in mathematics from Kansas University in 1948.

He also did play-by-play on TVS Saturday telecasts of Big Eight Conference games for several years. He was joined by Kansas State University broadcaster Paul Deweese. Credited with founding the KU Sports Network not long after World War II ended, Falkenstien quickly gave up the network because he really wasn’t interested in earning a living as a play-by-play broadcaster. He was program and station manager of WREN radio from 1955 until 1967, when he had a falling out with the station’s owner, former Kansas Governor Alf Landon. He then became the head of news and sports at WIBW radio and television from 1967 to 1970. After a one-year stint as the first general manager of Sunflower Cablevision, Falkenstien spent 23 years at Douglas County Bank, retiring as a senior vice president in December 1994.

He has received many honors and awards during his lifetime and broadcast career, which included stops at WREN and WIBW in Topeka.

He was inducted into the Kansas Broadcasting Hall of Fame in 2000, received the KAB’s Hod Humiston Award for Sportscasting in 1982, and served as KAB Board President in 1962.

Kansas Athletics honored Falkenstien by making him the only non-player to have his “jersey” (60)
honored in the rafters of Allen Fieldhouse.

The Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame paid tribute to him
in 2004 with its Curt Gowdy Award, and the College Football Hall of Fame honored him in 1996 with
its Chris Shenkel Award.

The Sporting News in 2001 named Falkenstien “the best college radio
personality in the country,” and television’s Dick Vitale selected Bob and Max to his “Sweet 16” of the
best college basketball announcing teams in the country.

Stealing a quote from another Hall of Famer Bob Davis and published in the Topeka Capital Journal,
“Max was a member of the greatest generation,” said Davis, a Topeka native. “A pioneer sports playby-play broadcaster in Lawrence and Topeka, and just a fun guy to be around. In the years we worked and traveled together we spent much of our time laughing. He once said we should have been married. In all these years I don’t think we’d ever had an argument, so I guess we couldn’t have been
married!