KFDM COOP Posted June 29, 2007 Report Posted June 29, 2007 Longtime Texas Relays announcer diesBy Randy Riggs | Tuesday, June 26, 2007, 11:18 AM The world of colorful sports personalities has decreased by one. J. Fred Duckett died Monday night.If the name doesn’t ring a bell, his booming base voice probably does. You longtime Houston Astro sufferers no doubt remember “Jose Cruuuuuuuuz!†when the outfielder came to bat in the Astrodome in the 1970s and ’80s.That was J. Fred, who was the public-address voice of the Astros from 1969 to 1992. He also did P.A. announcing for the NFL’s Oilers as well as his beloved Owls of Rice, his alma mater. But his first sporting love was track and field. He was a fixture at every major meet in the Southwest, including the Texas Relays, for decades.Reports say J. Fred had battled leukemia for several months before he died at age 74 in a Houston hospital. It wasn’t apparent the last time I saw him — the rain-plagued final day of the Texas Relays on April 7. Like every other track meet we’d been at over the past 30-something years, we chatted about the sport and its characters, of which he unquestionably was one. J. Fred was a walking, talking (oh, how he could talk) encyclopedia of the sport, an invaluable resource if for some reason you needed to know, say, the time of an obscure steeplechaser at the 1984 Mt. SAC Relays.
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