Меррилл Риз начал свой 50-й сезон в качестве голосового комментатора «Филадельфии Иглз»

Merrill Reese sat in his living room chair, awaiting the rapid-fire questions from his wife as she prepared the longtime Eagles broadcaster for another game. “Thirty-one,” said Cindy Reese, reading off an index card listing Cincinnati Bengals running backs. Reese — who begins his 50th season on Sunday as the voice of the Eagles — needed a moment to think. Cindy, who has a doctorate in education and spent 20 years teaching middle schoolers, quizzes him the night before each game on the opposing players. She reads him a number and he spits out a name. They repeat the numbers until he masters it, like a student preparing for a big test. » READ MORE: Meet the 2026 Eagles: What to know about every player “I can drill,” she said. “I know what to do.” Reese grew up a Birds fan in Overbrook and would stare at the broadcast booth at Franklin Field while dreaming of being there one day. Now it’s hard to remember a time when Reese wasn’t calling the action in a voice that the Daily News once perfectly described as an “urgent baritone.” Reese voiced two Super Bowl wins, told you the Eagles stopped ‘em again, and can make the word “good” sound great. He turned 84 earlier this month and has no plans of retiring. His 50th season, Reese said, isn’t a farewell tour. “Forever,” Reese said of how long he plans to call the action. “My word is always forever. I always kiddingly say they’re going to have to remove me with a crane. Look, I love to golf. But I’d rather broadcast an Eagles game than anything in the world. My greatest pleasure is to sit there and broadcast an Eagles game. There’s nothing I love more. I even enjoy doing the preseason games. I can truly tell you that I love it as much or more as I ever loved it. I have no intention of stopping.” Reese golfs three times a week, stays active, and says his vision is crisp after having cataract surgery a few years ago. And his recall, which he credits to his work as a child actor, stays sharp thanks to those study sessions in his Blue Bell living room where his wife sits on the sofa and asks him who wears No. 31 on the Bengals. “Kentrel Bullock,” Reese said as Cindy nodded and moved to No. 35. Chasing a dream Reese was making $125 a week in the late 1960s at WBCB in Levittown when he heard KYW was having auditions for a radio newscaster. This was his chance. He nailed his tryout, wrote a strong script, didn’t flub any words, and felt good. KYW’s news director brought Reese into his office and told him he was going to do him a favor. Reese, who went to Temple before serving in the Navy, started his radio career in towns like Pottstown. Now he thought he was finally going to land a job in the big city. “I said, ‘Boy this is great,’” Reese said. “But he said, ‘I’m going to tell you that he would be wise to find another profession because you’re never going to work in a major market station.’” » READ MORE: Now out of A.J. Brown’s shadow, is DeVonta Smith ready for his close-up? ‘The guy was built to do this’ Reese was crushed. He went home and hid in his bedroom until his mother asked him what was wrong. He told her what the KYW boss said. “He’s right,” his mom said. Reese was stunned. His mom didn’t think he could cut it? She told her son that if he could be deterred by one detractor then he would never make his dream come true. She was right. Reese went back to work the next day in Levittown, kept pushing, and was working six months later at WWDB in Philadelphia. That news director? Reese said he soon got canned. Reese’s mother was a kindergarten teacher who loved the performing arts. She took Reese to the theater and signed him up for acting lessons when he was a boy. He was an extra in a Cecil B. DeMille movie starring Jimmy Stewart, regularly appeared on local TV shows like Chuck Wagon Pete, and did commercials as an 8-year-old. Reese had a part in a live radio drama but was instructed to memorize his lines while the adult actors were allowed to read a script. They thought it would sound too rehearsed if the kid read. So Reese spent every afternoon studying with his mom before going outside with his buddies. The memory that is now sharpened in his living room was being formed. “I have an unusual memory because I was trained at that age,” Reese said. ‘How about next Saturday?’ Reese and his wife met on a blind date, went out in the city, and didn’t talk again. “I was geographically undesirable,” said Cindy, who grew up in Wallingford. They reunited two years later and went on a double date on the Main Line with Reese’s sister and brother-in-law. “We had a great time,” Cindy said. “I said, ‘Are you going to wait another two years to call me again?’ He said, ‘How about next Saturday?’ That was that.” » READ MORE: This defense won’t be the best in Eagles history. But it will be plenty good enough. Even great. By then Reese parlayed his WWDB job into a gig at WIP, which hired him to do five minutes of sports every hour each morning before naming him the host of their Eagles pregame and postgame show. He joined the broadcast booth in 1975 as a color analyst and then became the play-by-play man at age 35 in December 1977 after his partner Charlie Swift died by suicide. Reese got a call in the middle of the night that Swift died. That Sunday, Reese had to call the action. “I’m standing there in the booth and the Eagles held a moment of silence for Charlie Swift,” Reese said. “All the players on the sidelines turned and looked at the booth. My knees are literally knocking into each other. I’m hoping something can just come out of my mouth. After that, they queued me and I went on. I did a little remembrance for Charlie Swift, broke for a commercial, and from there on it was all football.” Reese finished the 1977 season but there was no guarantee that the job would be his in 1978. The station tried to land Al Meltzer, the popular broadcaster who was returning to Philadelphia after a year in Chicago. They told Reese that “Big Al” could sell more advertisements. Reese understood. But he wanted that job. » READ MORE: Can the Eagles’ Riq Woolen be Howie Roseman’s next one-year success story? “I used to dream many times that winter that they called me and told me I had the job,” Reese said. “I would wake up depressed because I didn’t have the job. It was just a dream. Other times, I would go to sleep and dream that they called me and said they decided to go into a different direction. I would wake up relieved because I still wasn’t out of it.” Meltzer turned down the Eagles’ gig to become the sports director at Channel 10. Reese was thrilled. The job was his. “It was very exciting,” Cindy said. “It really did launch the trajectory of our relationship because that was going to be our lives.” Members of the family Reese and his longtime broadcast partner, former wide receiver Mike Quick, are so popular that fans delay their TV feeds and hit mute to sync their screens with the WIP-FM broadcast. The broadcasters even have their own beer. In Super Bowl seasons or super bad seasons, Merrill and Mike give you a reason to tune in. “I believe we’ve become like members of the family,” Reese said. “We’re like their old friends who’ve been with them for many, many years. They grew up listening to us and we’ve become somebody who is able to react the way they react. We’re not homers. We don’t paint phony pictures. We don’t make a game exciting. I try to transmit the excitement, but when they’re bad, I’ll say they’re bad. I think people appreciate that. They can identify with us. They feel comfortable with us.” Reese’s voice — the one that every Eagles fan has tried to imitate — somehow sounds the same year after year. » READ MORE: Their fantasy football league started 40 years ago with a fax machine. It’s still going strong. He said he isn’t a smoker or drinker. He doesn’t scream and tries not to talk on the phone the day before a game. He builds his vocabulary by reading everything from the newspaper to mystery novels. But the secret to Reese’s longevity may be his wife. “My wife is my partner and basically in everything we do,” said Reese, who married Cindy in June 1979. “Cindy has always helped me prepare. Cindy is my confidant and my friend. We golf together. We do a lot of things together and Cindy is also very accomplished in her own right. She’s a great writer, an environmentalist. She has so many interests. We have a wonderful life together with two great kids and two wonderful grandchildren.” Cindy listens to each game and gives her husband feedback when he’s off the air. She understands football but isn’t a crazed fanatic. “I’m an Eagles fan, but I’m really a Merrill fan,” Cindy said. The couple raised two children — Nolan and Ida — but Reese’s broadcasting gig took him away to training camp every summer, practices during the week, and games on the weekend. There were radio shows, appearances, and hours of preparation. The job is more than just four hours on a Sunday afternoon. So it was often up to Cindy to make sure everything was in line at home. “It’s been teamwork. We had to be a team because of the nature of raising a family under those circumstances,” Cindy said. “The thing that makes our relationship different from a woman married to a football player is that there’s a time limitation. There might be four years or six years or whatever that their husband is involved in. With coaches, and people like Merrill, there’s no time frame. It just went on. Here we are. Fifty years.” » READ MORE: It's Week 1 in the NFL! We found an Eagles or Philly connection on the 31 other teams. The broadcaster used to study the opposing rosters on his own before his wife stepped in. Cindy, who now mentors student teachers at Gwynedd Mercy University, turns their living room into a classroom. They’ve been doing it like this since Reese got the Eagles gig. Her husband has to be quick during games as an assistant in the booth points to a number after a play to indicate who tipped a pass or forced a fumble. No. 31? No. 97? No. 56? Cindy says the numbers as rapidly as a football shoots from a JUGS machine. The former sixth-grade science teacher makes sure her husband knows them all. “He’s amazing,” Cindy said. “He can memorize all these numbers. I’ll do the cards with him and when I leave the room, I don’t know the numbers. But he does. I don’t have that kind of memory. He has an amazing memory.” Reese has called Eagles games from Jaws to Jalen Hurts but still wakes up nervous every Sunday. It’s because he cares so much, he said. So Cindy always does her best to make sure the house is calm in the hours before her husband leaves. He’s too uneasy before kickoff to eat at the stadium so she makes him a stack of apple cinnamon pancakes every Sunday morning to hold him over. First, she sharpens his memory. Then, she fills his stomach. They’ve done it for 50 years and hope to do it forever. “The station has changed many times, the ownership has changed many times, the coaches have changed many times, but Merrill is the constant,” Cindy said. “He just loves the seat and being involved. He says he wants to do it forever and as long as he’s able and happy with it then it’s great.” Listen to the latest episode The regular season is almost here! All the preseason talk has been about Jalen Hurts and new offensive coordinator Sean Mannion. But there’s somebody else who will have a big say in how high the Eagles fly. The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Jeff McLane explains why this year, in the absence of traded star A.J. Brown, DeVonta Smith has to take the next step, while also taking charge of the Eagles’ wide receivers group. Plus, Jeff dips into the mailbag for listener questions about Jalen Hurts and some key roster spots.  Listen here. Listen to all episodes  here  or wherever you get your podcasts.