Jeff Kaye was a legend unafraid to follow other legends. Who else could have succeeded both Clint Buehlman on Buffalo radio and John Facenda on NFL Films?
Liev Schreiber, the actor who voices "Hard Knocks," credits his sonorous speaking style on the show to Facenda, whose baritone narration was known as the "Voice of God."
But let's not forget Kaye, who died in 2012 at age 75, a luminary of local radio who left Buffalo in 1984 for NFL Films, where his deep-voiced delivery offered similarly godlike resonance.
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Jeff Kaye
You can hear Schreiber tonight on Episode 4 of "Hard Knocks: Training Camp With the Buffalo Bills,” on HBO Max. The show follows the formula forged decades ago by NFL Films, turning ordinary football plays into high-drama spectacle through the cinematic techniques of slow-motion video, symphonic music – and portentous narration.
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Facenda was a fixture on Philadelphia television long before becoming the voice of NFL Films in the mid-1960s. For the company's first few years, founder Ed Sabol and his son, Steve, had done the narrations competently enough. But when Facenda came along, his basso profundo made the mundane sound momentous.
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Facenda died of cancer in 1984, at 71. The company needed to find a replacement with not just a deep voice, but also a deep understanding of football.
Enter Jeff Kaye.
"It was sort of like being the coach who followed Lombardi in Green Bay – it was that daunting a task," longtime Philadelphia sportswriter Ray Didinger told Philly's CBS affiliate. "Jeff had the quality of a natural storyteller. He was a real football fan. He understood the game. To be frank, he understood the game more than John did."
Kaye was born Martin Jeff Krimski in Baltimore in 1936. He got into radio in Providence and Boston before arriving at WKBW Radio in the mid-'60s, around the time that Facenda joined NFL Films.
"Kaye blazed into Buffalo as KB's nighttime teeny-bopper leader," says his bio in the Buffalo Broadcasters Hall of Fame, "and soon was at the rudder of the K-Big giant ship as the station's program director."
At WKBW, Kaye joined Dan Neaverth, another giant of Buffalo radio history.
"Jeff had the most fantastic voice," Neaverth says. "Of all the people I've worked with, he was the most talented as a writer and as a voice."
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The KB Yo-Yos basketball team included disc jockeys (sitting) Stan Roberts, Dan Neaverth, Fred Klestine and (standing) Jeff Kaye and Rod Roddy.
They were longtime colleagues at WKBW until Kaye left for WBEN where he would eventually take over the morning show that had been hosted by Buehlman for decades.
"Jeff was working at 'BEN, competing against me at KB, when he got contacted by NFL Films," Neaverth says. "They wanted him to voice one of their features. He always felt it was an audition, like they wanted to see what he sounded like and what he could do."
Weeks later came the call from Ed and Steve Sabol telling Kaye that the job was his. What happened next is a story Neaverth had never heard until he went to visit his old friend some months before he died.
"Jeff gave notice at WBEN and sold his house," Neaverth says of the then-pending move to be near NFL Films in Mount Laurel, N.J. "Two weeks before he was supposed to go down there, he gets a letter in the mail: 'We appreciate you sending us your tape and we thought it was really wonderful but we've already made up our minds on someone else so we will not be using you.' And Jeff thought, 'Holy (crap)!' "
But after a while came a call from one of the Sabols asking Kaye where the heck he was.
"And Jeff said, 'You sent me a letter saying you didn't need my services.' And Sabol said, 'What? I gotta hang up now. Don't go anywhere.' So half an hour later he calls back and says, 'Jeff, I really want to apologize. That was the form letter we sent to all those other guys who auditioned for the job. And my secretary accidentally sent one to you.' "
Here Neaverth lets out the laugh familiar to generations of Western New Yorkers. "And the rest," he says, "is history."
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Kaye held the narrator's mic at NFL Films for more than 20 years, sometimes splitting time with Harry Kalas, voice of the Philadelphia Phillies.
Cruelly, Kaye died of throat cancer. For a man with a velvet voice, it was like something out of Greek tragedy.
Kevin McLoughlin, a postproduction director for NFL Films, put it this way to the Los Angeles Times after Kaye's passing: "His voice, so smooth yet booming, was always a pleasure to listen to."
You can listen to it even now in clips on YouTube. For instance, click here to hear him narrate (starting at around the 30-second mark) an eight-minute NFL Films program on O.J. Simpson. Kaye had witnessed the Buffalo portion of Simpson's career, serving as the producer on Bills radio broadcasts during the few seasons when WKBW held the radio rights, including the 1973 season when Simpson topped 2,000 yards.
"Jeff was a super producer," Neaverth says. "He was putting music and great writing into pregame shows before anyone else was doing all of that."
Kaye was a triple threat – producer, writer and on-air talent. Didinger, who worked with him at NFL Films, said he had an uncanny ability to elevate the words he was given.
"He would take your script," Didinger said, "and almost without exception he would make it better than you ever thought it was going to be coming out of your typewriter."
Schreiber, too, has the sort of voice that can invest meaning into meaningless preseason games. He credits Facenda for showing the way. That's fair, as Facenda was the original.
But listen closely to the narration on "Hard Knocks" tonight – and you just might hear echoes of Jeff Kaye, too.
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