Eli Gold's journey back to Alabama radio marked by his own brand of fall camp | Goodbread
As Nick Saban barked coaching points during Alabama football’s first fall scrimmage Saturday, doing all he can to foster improvement in a team now just three weeks away from its first game, a fall camp of a very different sort concurrently worked out some kinks of its own.
High atop Bryant-Denny Stadium, Eli Gold’s fall camp was also well underway.
With headset on and lineup charts at the ready, Gold called scrimmage action as if it were a real game on a closed-circuit broadcast that not a single fan could hear. It was, in a very real sense, his personal scrimmage. The longtime play-by-play voice of the Crimson Tide has triumphantly beaten advanced-stage cancer. After missing all of last season, he’ll be back in the radio booth this fall for his 35th season calling Alabama games. And just as the clock is ticking on Saban to have his team operating at peak performance by the time it hosts Middle Tennessee State on Sept. 2, so too is Gold working to have his radio chops at full strength in time for the Blue Raiders’ arrival. He’ll go through the same exercise next Saturday when Alabama scrimmages for the second and final time of the preseason.
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As with the players, his efforts are a lot more involved than simply showing up at the stadium on Saturdays. And like the UA coaching staff, he’s got specific points of emphasis.
“It’s my legs, my air, and my memorization,” he said.
All three were impacted by Gold’s 243 days in hospital and rehab care.
His legs were the first to go, mysteriously betraying the 69-year-old one morning in the spring of 2022 when attempting to get out of bed and, inexplicably, could not walk or stand. Doctors were confounded, tested for signs of a stroke, and found none. They tested for cancer and, at that point, found none. Gold was eventually prescribed a regimen of steroids to help rehabilitate the use of his legs, and said the prescription instead helped mask the cancer. Months later, in December, he had to be seen for a violent recurrence of hiccups that made breathing a difficult chore. That’s when doctors found a Stage 3 esophageal cancer in Gold that was approaching Stage 4. As bad as the news was, there was still relief in finally identifying the problem.
“Until that point,” Gold said. “We never knew what the hell we were treating.”
Two days later, he began the first of 18 weeks of chemotherapy, but it was almost too late to save him. More than once, doctors told Claudette Gold they weren’t certain whether her husband would survive the night. He lost 140 pounds, roughly half the body weight he described as “a biscuit shy of 300” and had to be fed through a tube. Gold said his speech regressed to “total gibberish” at times, a frightful experience for anyone, but even more so for a broadcaster.
“If I was in that circumstance, I wouldn’t be coming back,” Gold said. “Because the fans deserve a first-class broadcast.”
At the completion of chemotherapy in April, Gold rang the hospital's commemorative bell for the achievement so hard, its clapper broke off in his hand. A little more than a month later, a PET scan revealed no sign of cancer, but to reclaim what Gold loves most — to be Alabama Nation’s audio bridge into Bryant-Denny Stadium — there would still be much work ahead. Through physical therapy, his leg function progressed as he’s moved from walkers to a cane he now needs less and less. As for the lung capacity and memorization skills needed to call play-by-play, Gold is working on both from home, as well as from Bryant-Denny Stadium with the two mock broadcasts of scrimmages.
“Even with a color man and a sideline guy, much of the non-stop discussion has to come from your own diaphragm,” Gold said. “So I’ve been working on my air. As far as memorization, it’s whether I can still look at this roster, not so much Alabama’s, but Middle Tennessee’s or Texas’, and memorize those enough without having to double and triple clutch?”
Making up for lost time
He’s confident he can.
Gold can practice with video from home, and has the Phil Steele college football annual in close reach at a makeshift office desk he's using temporarily. Still maintaining a three-days-a-week physical therapy schedule, Gold recently recorded 92 station promos for Crimson Tide Sports Network radio affiliates. He had to edit more of them than he used to, but it was part of a routine he’s thankful to be rebuilding.
Yes, much of it is old hat for a guy who’s been calling Alabama games since Bill Curry was coach, but he’s also 20 months removed from the booth. Gold said he wants to prove to himself he can still do the job, making next Saturday’s scrimmage something of a final exam. And when he returns, he’ll be taking an interest in a new subset of his audience: cancer patients, cancer survivors, and their families. In some of the darkest days of his recovery, Gold would stare at his IV drip and think about what it might mean to broadcast Alabama games as a teammate of those affected by the disease.
“I’m watching this poison drip into me, and suddenly realized I can have a pulpit to let these people know they’ve got someone who’s been there, has been in their corner, is still in their corner,” Gold said. “I’ll be broadcasting for those people. I’m always speaking to Bama fans, but now there’s more to it. I’ll be speaking to and on behalf of all these people who’ve been dealing with cancer and have made it, or haven’t made it. I have a new calling.”
His first public event will be the “Hey Coach” radio show this Thursday, although there’s a practice run of sorts with that, too — Saban won’t begin joining the show until Aug. 31.
For Gold, that’s when the scrimmaging ends.
And the bright lights come on.
Tuscaloosa News columnist Chase Goodbread is also the weekly co-host of Crimson Cover TV on WVUA-23 and the Talkin' Tide podcast. Reach him at cgoodbread@gannett.com. Follow on Twitter @chasegoodbread.
This article originally appeared on The Tuscaloosa News: Goodbread: While Alabama scrimmaged, Eli Gold held practice of his own
