No way could a young Reds’ fan, Joe Zerhusen, have known that his hikes from his Park Hills’ home through Devou Park to meet a buddy in West Covington, then on down Highway Avenue to Ludlow and across the Southern Railroad bridge through Union Terminal and on to Crosley Field, would provide him a road map – and a career path.
To Great American Ball Park, where for 23 seasons now, Joe has been the friendly and familiar voice of the Reds. Much the way the man he idolized – also from Park Hills and Covington Catholic High School – Paul Sommerkamp — did for 34 seasons at Crosley Field and then Riverfront Stadium.
A long and winding road for sure, Joe will tell you. How he did get to announce the news in Jim Schworer’s communications class from the CovCath TV studio. But then, everybody in the class did. Or how that one customer at the gas station on the Dixie Highway where Joe worked through high school told him he had “an interesting voice . . . you should do something with it.”
But Joe’s focus in high school was, on football and a walk-on opportunity as a defensive back at Eastern Kentucky University. When that didn’t work out, Joe went into sales – auto parts, he says, but that didn’t keep him from doing something that he’d long been thinking about – radio.
There are lots of Cincinnati radio stations on Joe’s resume but his first shot came at WLQA-FM (“beautiful music” they called it in those days) that became WARM-98 and they needed someone to convert their 1,000 or so vinyl records to carts, a process that could take a half-hour easily for each one.
Joe was up for it and on completion, he was full-time there, doing overnight DJ’ing. No big deal but a foot in the door that saw Joe move to “adult contemporary” WLLT that became “The Fox” where he was music director and program director and “since we didn’t have a sports guy – self-appointed sports director,” Joe says with a laugh.
Which set him on his way to GABP. One day, the University of Cincinnati’s Tom Hathaway asked Joe if he’d like to call UC basketball and football games and there he was, the voice of a big-time UC basketball program with Bob Huggins in Conference USA with the likes of Louisville’s Rick Pitino and Memphis’ John Calipari.
But it was his call of the UC-Ohio State football game at Paul Brown Stadium that got the Reds to notice him. The GABP was under construction and they were looking for a new PA guy to start with the new stadium.
Joe nailed the audition that had Reds’ people sitting in the yet-to-be-finished GABP and there he was, calling the first-ever Reds’ game there.
“I’d been used to big events,” Joe says, and that helped him handle the moment. He’d also done Busch/NASCAR races at Kentucky Speedway. And he’d gotten to work with the likes of Nick Clooney and Bob Braun in radio here.
“But it was the history,” Joe says – his own and the Reds – that was in his head that day. “You just put on the blinders and do it.” But not as an “announcer.”
“I’m not an announcer,” Joe says, “I’m doing the same thing I did in radio.”
Just talking baseball to people in the stands. No “announcer’s voice,” Joe says, although with his rich natural tones, he didn’t have to worry about that.
What he did have to worry about was the news in 2017 right as he prepared to head off to spring training that the lump in his throat was cancer.
Chemo and radiation allowed Joe to beat it, even to make it back for Opening Day, but the treatments eventually cost him 23 games that season when he lost his voice. Otherwise, in his more than two decades, he’s missed just three games.
His greatest moment, even though he’s gotten to do the postseason playoffs and an All-Star Game, missing just a World Series in his career, Joe says came on the day he returned to his booth that season for a Dodgers’ game.
As he announced Reds’ Hall of Famer Joey Votto, Joe saw Votto with a raised first saluting him. When he saw Votto later, Joe thanked him and asked him why he did it.
“He told me that for a hitter like he was, you have a rhythm when you come up to bat and he missed that with me being gone,” Joe recalls. “He was happy I was back. I’m glad he didn’t strike out. Luckily for me, he got a base hit.”
With his longevity now, Joe has noticed how when he’s out and just talking somewhere as any of us might do, he’ll notice people’s heads turn around.
They know that voice. How often does it happen? “Often,” Joe says with a shake of his head.
“In this borderline career,” he calls it, “it’s not lost on me that I’m following a Paul Sommerkamp who I listened to all those years growing up. It’s not lost on me how lucky I am – right place, right time.”
And the right guy who was willing to take a chance on himself and work hard when he got that chance.
“I’m 70 now and retired from the (Reds’) radio network,” Joe says of his duties overseeing what were some 43 local stations carrying the Reds’ games to a high of 115, and more than 100 now. He still does the production work on commercials for Reds’ advertisers. And does so in his wood-paneled office and studio at the back of the Bourbon Club (the old press box) that they kept when they remodeled with its cool secret entrance.
“Luckily they still want me around,” Joe says of that voice you know you know if you’ve ever been to Great American Ball Park.
Contact Dan Weber at dweber3440@aol.com. Follow him on X (formerly Twitter) @dweber3440.