Giving voice to the Aggies for four decades, retiring broadcaster calls his last Aggie/Lobo football game

Jack Nixon’s second career path seemed to work out alright for him.

As the 74-year-old “Voice of the Aggies” prepares to call his final New Mexico State University/University of New Mexico rivalry football game Saturday night in Las Cruces, Nixon says the memories and relationships he’s made in 45 years of being the radio play-by-play announcer for the Aggies have made up for that “dream job” he left behind in high school in Omaha, Nebraska, more than a half century ago.

“There are two things in life that I really wanted to do; that really mattered to me,” Nixon said in an interview this week on the Talking Grammer podcast, available to watch or listen to at ABQJournal.com or wherever you download podcasts.

The latter was being a sportscaster, a career the highly decorated Nixon has mastered in the southern New Mexico desert.

The first dream, the one he would eventually leave behind, started to form at the age of 10 when Nixon’s parents bought their lanky boy an accordion and said they wanted him to learn music.

He did get pretty good at it after three years of lessons at Johnny Swoboda’s Accordion Studio.

“Then, the Beatles came around,” Nixon said. “And, you know, the Beatles seemed a lot cooler than the Johnny Swoboda’s Accordion Band. And, in fact, they were. ...

“I wanted to be in a band. I wanted to be in a rock band when I was 13.”

So, Nixon, of course a singer, but also now armed with a guitar, and four friends put on their sunglasses and formed The Shades.

That lasted a couple years. And when a second band later in high school called the Jaguars got into trouble over a stolen fire extinguisher at a sock hop, Nixon’s dad made the call that the boy’s music days were over.

Career choice No. 2

Career choice No. 2 came when Nixon went to college and started working at the student radio station. By his senior year, then at the University of Kansas, he got a job for calling high school basketball games, for $5 a game, in Lawrence, Kansas.

“I always just wanted to get a job where I can cover sports,” Nixon said. “... just get a chance to do it, to show you can do it. And that’s really what it was for me. That it’s dovetailed to this, and people have enjoyed it, has been nice, but I just wanted the chance to do it. And thankfully, I’ve been able to do it.”

Nixon was a play-by-play announcer for the student radio station the year the Jayhawks went to the 1971 Final Four in the Astrodome in Houston.

“I remember we get into the Astrodome and for the first time, and we are just blown away,” Nixon recalls. “It was amazing. My God, it’s just so huge — here in this gigantic building. And you know, we’re just these corn muffins from Kansas down there, and looked at this place. ... So, my first year doing play-by-play, I got to do a Final Four on the student station. That was kind of a nice start.”

At 26, Nixon got a job with NMSU.

And while there have been other gigs along the way — from working for a short time with the USFL to other radio gigs like the one he has now as a news director at Bravo Mic Communications in Las Cruces — there is only one that has really led to people stopping him in supermarkets to thank him — something he enjoys, but still feels surprised by anytime it happens.

“When people have come up and greeted me, people perhaps I don’t know, personally, or maybe a clerk in a store, and they say, ‘You’re the guy retiring, right?’ I go, Yeah, and they say they really like what I’ve done, which is so gratifying,” he said.

So, why retire?

Nixon said it was in January when he first started getting close to making the call to step down.

“The reason that I decided that this would be it is, frankly, the travel is too much for this old man,” Nixon said. “Last year was particularly kind of brutal. The Aggies went to Hawaii, and then they went to Auburn, and they went to Lynchburg, Virginia — I went three times (the Aggie football team played Liberty in Lynchburg twice and the basketball team once). And those are long trips.”

So, even if you’d never know it by listening to his voice on the radio, the body of the seasoned veteran behind the mic was starting to feel those long flights, late nights and early-morning wake-up calls of four-plus decades.

Nixon decided to do one more year. This year. This Aggie football and the upcoming Aggie men’s basketball season will be it for Nixon.

“I wanted to leave before I stayed too long at the fair,” Nixon said, spoken like only a veteran radio storyteller from Omaha could do. “I’ve seen this happen to other announcers and other people and other jobs where they like it so much, and it’s very hard to say goodbye.

“I thought, well, I don’t want to be in that position. I don’t want people saying, well, we used to like listening to him. So, hopefully that’s not the case.”

Hardly.

Give a listen

Come March, if any Aggie fans are missing hearing him call games, there’s a cure.

Nixon donated his entire collection of tapes and digital recordings to the NMSU Library’s Archives and Special Collections Department.

From the Aggies beating a Larry Bird-led Indiana State Sycamores team to that time Brian Urlacher fumbled a punt in University Stadium leading to NMSU pulling off a huge rivalry win in Albuquerque, they’re all there.

“I wasn’t sure they’d want them because — I just thought, well, is this something they really want? Is this significant enough? It’s not really academic ... but, yeah. They thought that was great,” Nixon said. “I guess librarians really like collections and stuff and and they felt that it had value which, which made me feel good.”