Brad Nessler apologized for dropping the phone in the middle of the interview. Van Brocklin, one of the three cats that he and his wife, Nancy, have in their Duluth, Ga., home, had jumped on Nessler’s desk and startled him.
Yes, Van Brocklin. As in Norm Van Brocklin, the Hall of Fame football player. The Nessler family has a tradition of naming their felines after Hall of Famers — there’s been a Butkus, a Nitschke, an Elway and a Lambert, among others. So it was fitting that Van Brocklin, whose namesake also was the first coach of the Vikings, interrupted his owner while he was talking Minnesota football.
Nessler, the lead play-by-play announcer for CBS on its Big Ten football broadcasts, is a native of St. Charles, Minn., about 25 miles east of Rochester. He will be back in his home state to call the Gophers vs. fourth-ranked Penn State on Saturday at Huntington Bank Stadium. It’s Nessler’s first Gophers home game since calling their 29-26 loss to Michigan on Oct. 31, 2015, on ESPN.
Nessler is looking forward to his Minnesota return, “especially after everybody’s been sending me texts all day of the snow on their deck,” he joked Wednesday. Nessler has been reunited with analyst Gary Danielson, his old ABC/ESPN partner going back to the 1990s, for CBS’ first year with the 18-team Big Ten. “This is gonna be our first taste of Big Ten football in November,” he said, pointing to Saturday’s forecast of temperatures in the 30s.
Nessler’s Minnesota roots run deep — from St. Charles to what was then called Mankato State College and to the Vikings as their radio voice in 1988 and ‘89. “When I got the Vikings job, my dad was busting buttons on his shirt, he was so proud,” Nessler said.
From age 11 or 12, Nessler wanted to be a sportscaster, and he remembers the early days of calling high school games in the Mankato area when he was his own, “producer, engineer, spotter and stats guy. I had to try to climb a telephone pole to plug in a phone line,” he said. “This is crazy, and I’m making 50 bucks on a Friday night when I should be wooing my future wife at the time.”
His early influences included a who’s who of Minnesota-based talent in the field: Ray Christensen, Ray Scott, Herb Carneal and Halsey Hall. His first major network role came in 1990, when he worked NFL, college football and college basketball games for CBS.
Nessler is known for his work on SEC games for CBS, and the transition to the Big Ten has been a homecoming of sorts. He’s renewed friendships from more than 30 years ago when ABC/ESPN had the Big Ten’s rights.
