BRUNSWICK, Maine — Although Dale Arnold lettered in four sports in high school, it didn’t take long for him to realize that he would never achieve his dream of playing center field for the Boston Red Sox. So he focused on what seemed to be the next best thing—becoming a play by play announcer—and at the age of 15 he was on the local radio station calling Brunswick High School football games.
"The radio station was bought a couple of years later by some guys from Minneapolis," he recalled. "They came to town, had a big staff meeting, and they said, 'Look, we’ve got a football game coming up Friday night. Who’s doing the game?'"
Arnold raised his hand a bit tentatively. By then he was 17 years old.
"They said, 'Well, can you do the game until we can hire a grownup?' I said, sure. I went and did the game Friday night. Afterwards I took all the equipment back to the radio station. They were waiting for me. They said, 'You know what? We’re not going to hire a grownup. You just keep doing the games.' And I just kept doing the games."
Over the next five decades the games kept coming. Bowdoin college hockey. The Maine Mariners in the American Hockey League. The New Jersey Devils in the National Hockey League. Then the move back to New England, where he became the only announcer ever to do play by play for all five major sports teams in Boston—the Patriots, Red Sox, Celtics, Bruins, and Revolution. Throw in hosting radio sports talk shows and TV studio hosting for the Boston Bruins and it is, by any measure, a remarkable broadcasting career.
Now retired from radio and television, Arnold and his wife have returned to Maine. He keeps busy with his writing career (he has just published his third book, "Tough Guys—Hockey’s Enforcers on Wild Brawls, High Stakes, and the Code that Binds Them") and still follows sports, although not in the obsessive way he did as a talk show host who had to know everything that was going with all of Boston's teams.
"Now I watch sports because I want to," he said. "And it’s so much more fun."