Young Doug Rice

By Mike London
mike.london@salisburypost.com

GRANITE QUARRY — Broadcasts of Atlanta Braves baseball games drifted clear as a bell on summer nights in the late 1960s and early 1970s, with low-key former pitcher Ernie Johnson providing the color and balancing the bombastic play-by-play delivery of Milo Hamilton.

Line drives were never caught by Atlanta infielders on Hamilton’s watch. They were SPEARED!

Hamilton’s home run call — There’s a drive, way back! That ball is outta here!” was a solid one. In the 1970s, he got to call Hank Aaron’s 715th homer, one of the bigger ones in baseball history.

It was either “We’ve got to hold ’em, Braves!” or we’ve got to “Go get ’em, Braves!” Those were Hamilton’s pet phrases whenever the ninth inning rolled around. The struggling Braves needed to go get ’em a lot more often than they needed to hold ’em.

One of the people listening to the Braves games in Rowan County was an impressionable young sports fan named Douglas Eugene Rice.

“The Braves were usually bad, but the broadcasts were very good,” Rice said. “Milo and Ernie, it was like you were right there with them at the ball park, with all the sounds. They told these great stories. I’d stay up all night and listen if the Braves were on the West Coast. Milo would describe the crowd in detail. He’d tell you if the wind was blowing in from the stockyards in Chicago. I started thinking that what they were doing had to be the coolest job in the world. I decided that’s what I wanted to do.”

Well, Rice did it. He fashioned a Hall of Fame career from sports broadcasting. He didn’t follow Hamilton into the baseball booth, but he became a motorsports icon. The 2024 season was his 36th working NASCAR races for the Performance Racing Network. It was his last one. When the engines start to throb at Daytona in February, Rice will be on the sidelines. It will be an adjustment, but he’s earned some down time.

Rice, 69, graduated from West Rowan High in 1973. Appalachian State was next, and the broadcasting dream officially got under way. He worked for the campus station, not only sports, but spinning the records that made him a serious and permanent fan of classic rock. In the summers, he worked part-time at WSTP, mostly dee-jay duty and handling the commercials during the ball games.

Rice remains a devoted Braves fan. He also became a diehard Atlanta Falcons supporter when they joined the NFL as an expansion team in 1966. They debuted with a 3-11 record, but Rice was on board.

“Well, their logo was very similar to the West Rowan Falcons logo,” Rice explained. “Back then, the Washington Redskins were on TV every Sunday, so everyone was a Redskins fan. I wanted a different team.”

Rice probably was more of a baseball/football guy than a racing fan until 1976 when he attended the Charlotte race that was still known in those days as the World 600. It was a classic race with David Pearson taking the checkered flag, with Richard Petty, Cale Yarbrough, Bobby Allison and Benny Parsons rounding out the top five.

“It was like, ‘Oh, wow, this is the real deal,'” Rice said. “The speed, the sounds, the smells. That’s the day I became a super fan of racing.”

Rice got his degree in speech and went to work full-time in Salisbury for WSTP. He met a girl at a pizza restaurant in Boone and got married in 1978 to Penny Mitchell. His early sports work was local football — high school and Catawba. One of his biggest sports thrills was Catawba’s 2-0 win against Carson-Newman.

Rice remembers that the first racing event he broadcast involved 28 go-karts and a dirt track in Winston-Salem, but he would move up in the world.

Rice became the lead announcer for the Performance Racing Network in 1988.

He became respected and than revered because he brought not only knowledge to the task, but a passion and emotion for the sport that he was eager to share with listeners.

Rice’s play-by-play debut at a major event was the 1993 Coca-Cola 600 at Charlotte Motor Speedway. That race stamped him right away as a voice of authority in the sport.

Rice lists Jeff Gordon’s first win in the 1994 Coca-Cola 600 as one of his most memorable calls.

“People thought Gordon might be good, but no one had an idea yet just how good he would be,” Rice said. “His first win was an upset.”

That was the first of Gordon’s 93 victories. He was a four-time Cup Series champion.

Rice also was there for Tony Stewart’s 2005 win at the Brickyard in front of 250,000 fans.

“Tony was their guy, an Indiana guy, and when the crowd began to realize their guy was going to win, you could hear the murmur from the crowd and you could feel the electricity,” Rice said.

Rice was there in 2018 for the first race on the Charlotte road course, the Roval. Seasoned competitors Jimmie Johnson and Martin Treux, both desperate for a victory, wrecked on the last turn, and Ryan Blaney was the beneficiary.

“I could see it all unfolding,” Rice said. “I remember thinking, ‘These guys are going to wreck. And then they did.'”

Rice said one of his more emotional race calls was an ARCA series race in Charlotte in 1998. Adam Petty won his debut in the series, just as his father, Kyle, had. Watching a fourth-generation Petty win was enough to choke up any announcer.

“I knew Kyle and Richard (Petty) well, so that one had some extra emotion,” Rice said. “And then it wasn’t long before Adam was gone.”

Adam Petty would die at 19 in 2000.

“There were so many great races,” Rice said. “But also some not-so-great races where one driver leads for 90 percent of the race, and there’s just not that much to say.”

After Rice announced in February that the 2024 season would be his last, there were tributes in many cities as he took his “last lap.”

The Daytona 500 was a Motor Racing Network property — not a PRN event – but they still handed the reins to Rice for a few laps.

“That was really a kick,” Rice said. “Because Daytona is our Super Bowl.”

In Atlanta, Rice gave the command to drivers to start their engines. The Atlanta Falcons, aware he was one of their biggest fans, presented him with a Falcons jersey with the No. 36 — commemorating the 36 years he devoted to NASCAR broadcasting.

Ironically, that other Rice — Hall of Fame receiver Jerry Rice — tormented the Falcons throughout his career. In 30 games against the Falcons, he had 175 catches for 2,731 yards and 29 touchdowns.

“Jerry always killed us,” Doug Rice said. “I even got to meet him once. He was very gracious.”

At the Coca-Cola 600 in Charlotte, Rice actually got to drive the pace car.

“That was about as exciting as 45 miles an hour can be,” Rice said. “What can go wrong, right? I was fine until they reminded me there were millions of people watching on TV. That’s when you get nervous.”

He capped his career making the call at South Point Speedway in Las Vegas. That was his grand finale before he headed off into the sunset.

One of Rice’s favorite tributes came after the racing season. The city of Granite Quarry saluted him and the mayor read a proclamation honoring him.

“That was about as nice and as good as it gets, because that’s home,” Rice said. “That’s the people that you see when you shop for groceries.”

Rice, the only radio broadcaster to accomplish the “Indy Double” calling both the Indianapolis 500 and Coca-Cola 600 on the same day, was elected to the Salisbury-Rowan Hall of Fame in 2017 as the Horace Billings Lifetime Achievement Award winner.

He was inspired by those Braves broadcasts long ago, and he wouldn’t change a thing. His life has played out like the perfect classic rock album.

“Those years in racing were 36 years well-spent,” Rice said. “I got to do what I loved.”