NORFOLK — It was just a couple of years ago when Ted Alexander and his wife, Laurie, were watching an SEC Network special on the league’s legendary football broadcasters.
It wasn’t the iconic status that Tennessee’s John Ward or Georgia’s Larry Munson, for example, had achieved in SEC lore that struck Laurie. It was their longevity.
Ward called Volunteers games for nearly 35 years. Munson chronicled the Bulldogs for more than 40.
“At the end, she said, ‘You know, you could do this your entire life,” Alexander recalled this week. “You could do it forever.’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ And she understood there when she saw the reaction from just the special and the fans around the voices and how plugged they were into the teams and the programs and the lifestyle and all that.”
When Alexander sits behind the microphone Saturday in Bloomington, Indiana, to call Old Dominion’s season opener against the No. 20 Hoosiers, it won’t be just another day in the booth.
The voice of ODU football since the program began in 2009, Alexander will sign on to the ESPN Radio 94.1 broadcast having already begun to heal.
He hopes Saturday’s game is a colossal step toward normal.
After an intense three-month fight, Laurie died in March after a recurrence of complications from breast cancer. The couple had been married 36 years.
How much his first football game since then might help remains to be seen.
“I’m going through it for the first time,” said Alexander, who has spent the past few weeks doing deep dives into a pair of rosters filled with new players. “I think if you can stay busy and keep living your life and doing what you want to do and being happy, that helps.”
In addition to his football duties, Alexander has also handled play-by-play for the Monarchs’ men’s basketball team since 2007.
Additionally, he serves as emcee of countless ODU events, ranging from the recent groundbreaking of its new baseball stadium to its State of the University address.
He hosts coaches’ shows for football and men’s and women’s basketball and appears in online videos across all sports, making the one-time TV broadcaster, by some accounts, the face of the university.
From left: Ted Alexander, host of the Ricky Rahne Coach’s Show with Capt. Christopher Hill, CO of the aircraft carrier Eisenhower and Ricky Rahne, head football coach at Old Dominion University during a broadcast of the show on WVSP-FM from the hangar deck of the Eisenhower at Naval Station Norfolk Monday evening, Oct. 21,2024. (Bill Tiernan/ For The Virginian-Pilot)
Monarchs football coach Ricky Rahne has gotten to know Alexander well since arriving at the school in 2020, both during the pair’s weekly in-season show and apart from it.
Rahne has witnessed Alexander’s evolution in grief since his wife died.
“I probably see it more in our off-air conversations than I do anything else,” Rahne said. “I can just see just little bits and pieces that make me smile. I try to not dive in on those things too much, but I know that you can definitely see the healing that all of us are going to need in a time like that.”
Since Laurie’s passing, Alexander has put in extra time with grown daughters Amanda and Natalie, even joining a bowling league with Amanda this summer.
Amanda, a social worker, lives in Virginia Beach. Natalie is a physical therapist in Arlington.
Alexander, who got his broadcasting feet wet again during ODU’s baseball season, said he and his daughters are “closer than we’ve ever been.”
The grief, he said, remains a work in progress for all of them.
“The waves still come on the shore,” Alexander said. “They aren’t tsunamis all the time. They aren’t surfable all the time. But they still come on the shore, and you remember. Hopefully after a while, you remember just the really good things, as opposed to the ending.”
Alexander, 65, plans to continue as ODU’s voice and face for the foreseeable future.
Watching the SEC special with Laurie, he believes, enhanced her appreciation of his profession and why he does it.
“She knew that I’d have this after she was gone, and she was very comforted by that,” Alexander said. “And so was I. I knew I had something to focus on.
“It’s a release. I love the job. I’ve always loved the job, and it’s become a bigger part of my life now that she’s gone. And it’s exactly what she wanted me to do.”
David Hall, david.hall@pilotonline.com.
