Joe Starkey is a native of Chicago who earned a bachelor’s degree as well as an MBA at Loyola University.
He didn’t set out to be a broadcaster. Starkey was a corporate vice-president at Union Bank in San Francisco when he decided to change career paths. He recorded games on his own tape recorder and applied for play-by-play jobs, finally succeeding when California Golden Seals owner Charles O. Finley hired him to call hockey on the radio.
His trademark call, whenever the Seals scored a goal, was “What a bonanza!” He’d use that phrase for decades to punctuate a big play for the home team.
Starkey served as the radio voice for University of California football games from 1975 to 2022, was the lead announcer for the San Francisco 49ers from 1989 to 2008, and was sports director at KGO for many years.
He is, of course, probably best known for his frenetic call of “The Play: in the 1982 Big Game between Cal and Stanford: “Oh, the band is out on the field!” Starkey nearly lost his voice describing the action, calling it “the most amazing, sensational, dramatic, heartrending, exciting, thrilling finish in the history of college football!”