Marty Glickman

Marty Glickman
Glickman in the booth above the old Giants Stadium in New Jersey
Born	Martin Irving Glickman (1917-08-14)August 14, 1917 New York City
Died	January 3, 2001(2001-01-03) (aged 83) New York City
Alma mater	Syracuse University
Occupation	Radio sportscaster
Known for	1936 Berlin Olympics
Spouse(s)	Marjorie Glickman
Children	4

Martin Irving "Marty" Glickman (August 14, 1917 – January 3, 2001) was a pioneering American radio announcer who was famous for his broadcasts of the New York Knicks basketball games and the football games of the New York Giants and the New York Jets.

Glickman had previously been a noted collegiate track and field athlete who was a football star at Syracuse University and who was a member of the US team at the 1936 Summer Olympic Games held in Berlin, Germany. The unexplained, last-minute decision to remove Glickman and Sam Stoller (a fellow Jewish American athlete) from competition the 1936 Olympics, where they were replaced by gold medalist Jesse Owens and Ralph Metcalfe, has been widely viewed as an American effort to avoid embarrassing or offending Adolf Hitler, then the Chancellor of Germany, who had been directing anti-Jewish discriminatory policies since 1933. Glickman would later talk and write extensively about the controversial decision. James L. Freedman has produced a documentary film, Glickman, that was broadcast nationally in the United States on HBO in 2013.

Glickman was born in The Bronx, New York, to a Romanian Jewish family. His parents, Harry and Molly Glickmann, had migrated to the United States from Iaşi in Romania. He was a track star and football standout at James Madison High School in Brooklyn and at Syracuse University.

Glickman was an 18-year-old member of the U.S. team in the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, Germany, as a sprinter. Glickman traveled to Germany and spent two weeks practicing as part of the 400-meter relay team. However, the day before they were scheduled to compete, Glickman and Sam Stoller, also Jewish and a senior at the University of Michigan, were replaced on the 4 × 100 m relay team by Ralph Metcalfe and Jesse Owens. Foy Draper and Frank Wykoff, the two other runners with whom they'd been practicing, remained on the team. The US team won the event by a large margin, and it is generally thought that the relay team would have won fairly easily without the replacement of Glickman and Stoller. Glickman and Stoller were the only two members of the US team for the Olympics who did not compete after arriving in Berlin; over the entire history of US participation in the Olympic Games, it is extremely rare that uninjured team members don't compete in any event at all, and indeed after practice trials Glickman and Stoller had been assured that they would be running in the relay event.