Heywood Hale Broun; 83; Colorful Sports Commentator, Actor

Heywood Hale Broun, the sports commentator known for his handlebar mustache and prose as colorful as his sport coats, has died at 83.

Broun died Wednesday at Kingston Hospital. The cause of death was not released.

The son of newspaper columnist Heywood Broun, he had lived in nearby Woodstock since 1948.

His television work included essays on top sports events, with his mustache bobbing and the garish plaid of his coat filling the screen.

“I think we’ve taken the fun out of sports by insisting that everybody must be a champion or a failure,” he once said. “Sports do not build character. They reveal it.”

Known as Woody, Broun was a CBS correspondent for 19 years.

“He had a way with words, something modern Americans don’t know much about,” said Bud Lamoreaux, his friend and former producer at CBS. “He was a master of the metaphor, and he read more books than most people know the titles of.”

Broun’s career also extended into acting. He was in TV soap operas, 14 Broadway plays and some movies, including a bit part in 1954’s “It Should Happen to You” and the role of Judge Hiller in 1977’s “For Pete’s Sake.”

“If I had a good part, it was a bad show,” Broun quipped. “If it was a good show, I had a bad part.”

He also wrote three books: “A Studied Madness,” “Tumultuous Merriment” and “Whose Little Boy Are You?: A Memoir of the Broun Family.”

Broun had surgery this spring after he fell and broke a hip while visiting Keeneland Race Course in Lexington, Ky., forcing him to watch the Kentucky Derby on TV from his hospital bed. Broun had covered more than a dozen Kentucky Derby races for CBS, beginning in 1966.

Throughout the 1990s, while working “just enough to say I’m not retired,” Broun was a frequent guest and speaker at church dinners, literacy fund-raisers, libraries and local schools, where he never failed to keep his audiences enthralled.

Woodstock Times reporter Rene Houtrides said she spent time with Broun at his home about a month ago.

She said Broun faced complications after hip surgery, including a bout with pneumonia, but never lost his vigor for life.

“He was still full of curiosity and alertness and interested and thinking about things and anecdotes,” she said. “None of his sort of ‘Woody-ness’ left him. All of that was still there.”

Broun’s father, a columnist in the 1920s and ‘30s, founded the Newspaper Guild and was a regular at the Algonquin Round Table in Manhattan. His mother, Ruth Hale, was an early feminist.

Born in New York City, Broun graduated in 1940 from Swarthmore College near Philadelphia and became a newspaper baseball writer after returning from service in World War II.

Broun was married to actress Jane Lloyd-Jones, who died in 1991. His son, writer Hob Broun, died in 1987, four years after a spinal operation left him paralyzed from the neck down.