Courtesy New Britain Herald

(October 19, 2009) Just because you didn’t see Jack Arute at the Texas-Oklahoma game this weekend doesn’t mean he didn’t see you. Normally, the top sideline sportscaster in the business would be wherever the biggest game, race or event happened to be taking place.

This past Saturday he chose to attend a smaller gathering, the annual New Britain Sports Hall of Fame Member Breakfast, and he had a ball.

Arute has done it all in his 26 years as one of the nation’s best sports journalists.

He covered the Iditarod, a thousand-mile sled dog dash across Alaska’s frozen wilderness in bone-chilling, mind-numbing temperatures of 40 and 50 below zero, the Pan-American Games in Havana, including a virtually unprecedented "chat" with Cuban Premier Fidel Castro; Super Bowls, auto racing and of course college football where he was seemingly always ABC’s "go to guy" down on the field.

He talked lovingly of the opportunities he had during an award-filled career that literally, to quote the opening lines of "Wide World of Sports," spanned the globe. But he told his fellow New Britain Sports Hall of Fame members something the world does not yet know.

This is his last year with ABC/ESPN. "My contract is up in January and I’m not going to renew it," he told a room full of old and new friends at Angelico’s Restaurant over eggs and home fries.

Describing himself as "a classically trained reporter," who really doesn’t care for the new style of broadcast journalism he sees these days, Arute confided, "I recently turned 60 and I thought this would be a good time to walk away, spend more time with my with family and friends (and less time living out of a suitcase.) "Last year," he said, "I was on the road 46 weeks. That’s pretty typical and it wears you out after a while. (Now) I think it’s time I get to really know my grandchildren." He has three and they live in Virginia with his daughter Jennifer and her husband Ben.

Stepping back doesn’t mean stepping away altogether though. Even after he wraps up his work at ABC and ESPN he’s going to anchor a weekly NFL highlights show on satellite radio and cover events for Stamford-based Versus, a relatively new sports programming company that just bought half of NBC.

"They do Mountain West football, Pac-10 football, Big 12 football. They do World Extreme Cage Fighting, professional bull riding, Indy Car racing. I latched on with them last year and hope to do more with them this year, but my aim is to cut down to just 20 weeks a year on the road. I think that’s realistic.

"At this point I want to kick back and enjoy a little bit. I get to see my grandkids but I don’t get to see them as often as I’d like and that’s really what this switch is all about."

Calling himself, "a kid from South Main Street who got to live out his dream," Arute recalled a discussion with Keith Jackson, the iconic college football play-by-ply announcer he worked with for many years. "This was very early on in my career and Keith told me, the way you knew you had really done a good job on a particular game was when you heard people discussing it in a restaurant, an airport, whatever and all they talked about was the game. And if you did a really exceptional job that day, you might even get to hear them say something like, ‘gee, I wonder who the announcers were.’ That’s really the way Keith was and he was right. It’s supposed to be about the game and the people involved, not about you."

Another equally famous sportscaster, Jim McKay, told him, "Jack don’t ever let them (the network brass) change who you are."

He believes he’s been true to that piece of advice too and credits the lessons he learned from his father and family as well as on the local sandlots for a body of work that truly stands out.

Jack Arute felt right at home Saturday morning, not in his usual place in front of a network camera, but being seen through the lens of his fellow New Britainites.

Alluding to the city’s rich ethnic diversity and can do attitude, he said there was no place he’d rather be. And that clearly included that big game in Texas.

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