His sister, Liz, confirmed the death of Goldberg, who continued to work until three weeks ago despite his health deteriorating rapidly over the past two years. He died after a seven-year battle with kidney disease.
For three decades (1978 to 2007), Goldberg hosted or co-hosted a popular South Florida talk radio show, first on 610 WIOD and then on 560 WQAM. In a stark, brutally honest style, he scolded, confronted and yelled at his callers. And that’s when he was in a good mood. In 1981, Sonny Hirsch, who was Goldberg’s co-host at the time, said, “He’s the bad guy, definitely the bad guy. He yells at people. I don’t. I’m very good.”
In the late 1980s, Goldberg hosted the nightly three-hour show “Goldberg at Night” for WIOD. He received calls from insiders and listened to their opinions. At times, he even agreed with them. Most of the time he didn’t.
What followed helped shape two generations of South Florida fans. In his sonorous and instantly recognizable baritone voice and keen grasp of sports and current events, Goldberg ripped into these callers and explained why their opinions were, in fact, crap.
“How can you ask me that?” he called them often. “Get lost!” Emotions be damned.
Joe Zagacki, who was hired as Goldberg’s intern in 1978 and eventually became his boss at both WIOD and WQAM, served as Goldberg’s producer at the time and oversaw thousands of calls.
“He wouldn’t just hang up on them, he’d pound his fist or throw a pen at the wall or something,” Zagacki recalled two years ago. “At one point I said, ‘You just hit him again!
Over the years, stories in the Miami Herald and Sun Sentinel have described Goldberg as, among other things, competitive, bombastic, stupid, brash, eccentric, cross-dressing, obnoxious, selfish, irascible and provocative. And if the newspapers could have printed the express, more colorful words probably would have been used.
In January 2020, when asked about the accuracy of these adjectives, Goldberg only quibbled with one. “Disgusting? I don’t think I’ve ever been disgusting.”
Hammerin’ Hank (née Henry Edward Goldberg) was born on July 4, 1940 in Newark, New Jersey and raised in Orange, the older of two children of Hai and Sandy Goldberg. Hy was a top sportswriter and columnist for the Newark Evening News for 40 years, who was named New Jersey Sportswriter of the Year five times. Like his son, Hai had a prominent forehead and broad build, but he was the anti-Hammer, a reserved man with a relaxed and calm personality.
Hy traveled to many major sporting events — including the Olympics in Rome, Tokyo, Mexico City and Munich — and often brought Hank and her daughter Liz with him.
“Most of our lives,” he said in 2020, “revolved around the next big sporting event.”
Each year the children would skip school for seven weeks — their homework sent to them — to join their father in Florida while he covered the Yankees during spring training. During one of these years Hank became friendly with the famous guard Joe DiMaggio, a relationship that continued even after Hank became an adult. He also sat in the radio booth with Mel Allen and listened intently as the Yankee voice called the action. Hank sometimes even served as the team’s bat for intrasquad games. The love for sports prevailed.
Meanwhile, Mother Sadie was a real Aunt Mame. Not only did she throw parties for baseball writers’ wives, she was the life of those parties. While Hy and the kids attended spring training games, she hung out with the other wives. And when the baseball writers association had their dinners, she would stand up and sing with the band, making her husband cringe.
In the summer of 1958, an 18-year-old Hank went with a friend to Monmouth Park, a thoroughbred racetrack in Oceanport, New Jersey, where he placed the first bet of his life. Goldberg immediately hit the day’s double, which paid $450 (about $4,580 in 2022 dollars), brought the winnings home and showed them to his dad, who disapproved of the gamble.
“I want a car,” Hank told him.
“Where did you get that?
“I went to the track.”
“This is going to be the worst day of your life.”
A 20-year-old Goldberg moved to Miami in 1966 and worked in advertising while also helping the Dolphins public relations department with busy tasks like setting up the press box, driving people to and from the airport and organizing spotters for the telecast. While with the Dolphins, he became friendly with Bob Sheridan, a local radio personality (who would eventually call some of the most famous title fights in boxing history) and asked Goldberg if he would be interested in filling in for Sheridan when he was unable to host. Dolphins Paul Warfield Radio Show. The gig was part-time, but Goldberg got his start in radio along the way.
Perhaps Goldberg’s luckiest break came in the mid-1970s, when famed Las Vegas gambler and adventurer Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder asked Goldberg to ghostwrite his national newspaper column, the which appeared in more than 150 newspapers three times a week. Goldberg agreed. So every Friday night during football season, Goldberg, Snyder and Walt Michaels, who was the New York Jets’ defensive coordinator in 1976 before becoming head coach in ’77, dined at Dewey Wong’s Chinese restaurant on East 58th Street in Manhattan where Michaels would provide Goldberg and The Greek with valuable information on each of that week’s NFL games.
Armed with this new football knowledge, Goldberg, who worked for Snyder for four years, became the color commentator for the Dolphins radio show and was given his own late-night sports radio show in 1978, replacing a Larry King, who left and both seats to start “Larry King Live”.
Despite being kicked out of WIOD multiple times for his controversial positions (in 1981 he was timed out after berating Miami Hurricanes fans for a poor turnout at a game against No. 1 Penn State), Goldberg rose to the top of sports ratings in South Florida and stayed there for nearly three decades, knocking off would-be local columnists and earning six figures in the process.
At one point in 1992, Goldberg was holding down four jobs at once: senior vice president at advertising agency Beber Silverstein (he worked there from 1977-92), color commentator for the Dolphins, host of “Goldberg at Night” and sportscaster for WTVJ. -TV. That year, while his show dominated the No. 1 spot on WIOD, he was fired for openly defying the orders of his program director. Goldberg immediately joined rival WQAM and beat his former employer in the ratings. Hammerin’ Hank was radio that needed to be heard and fans needed to be a part of it.
“He was the king down here,” said Zagacki, who is now the voice of University of Miami athletics. “What made Hank the best to ever do it was, like Howard Cosell, he had this great command of language. He had this great, huge vocabulary. He could talk about anything. He could talk about sports. He could talk politics Broadcast and Hank was broad.’
Goldberg went from local legend to national figure in 1993 when he joined ESPN Radio and ESPN2 (and later ESPN) in their infancy. For ESPN Radio, he teamed up with Tony Bruno and Keith Olbermann on a three-night-a-week radio show. Meanwhile, producers at ESPN2, who were trying to attract a younger audience in the network’s early days, took advantage of the Hammerin’ Hank persona by giving Goldberg a hammer that he brought down when he disagreed with a colleague’s point of view. Emotions be damned.
“He was always very comfortable on camera,” said Mark Gross, who was a producer at ESPN2 at the time and is now senior vice president of production and remote events for ESPN. “He never tried to be someone he wasn’t: “I’ve got to get my voice on the radio now. I’ve got to put my TV person on now.’ He was the same guy whether it was TV, radio or writing an article. It was always Hank.”
Goldberg also served as ESPN2’s NFL Insider and provided information from sources he cultivated while working for Snyder and doing his radio show in Miami. One of his key contacts was then-Raiders owner Al Davis, with whom Goldberg spoke every Friday during the football season. “I got more stories than the network guys because Al was telling me everything that was going on in the league,” he said.
Davis was one of hundreds of contacts Goldberg collected over the decades in an otherwise limitless black book. Wrapped in black alligator leather, the book’s pages have yellowed over time, but they tell a story of a man who touched every corner of sports and pop culture. Joe Namath. Chris Webber. Mike Eruzione. Al Michael. Only Section “E” starts this way: Dale Earnhardt Sr., Kenny Easley and Clint Eastwood.
Goldberg used his NFL contacts to inform the picks he made Sunday. Even in his final season in 2021, he had a process: 1) Study stats and track point spread. 2) After the injury reports come out, call the PR contacts of the teams he’s known for years to get the real scoop and 3) Reach out to current and former coaches to get their thoughts on the games.
“I have connections in Dallas, Baltimore, Chicago, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh…,” he said. “I’m not making this up.”
Between 1993 and 2019, Goldberg said he only had three losses in matches on national television, though that number may not be independent…
