This week of maximum anticipation in the world of Connecticut sports seems a fitting time to mark a Connecticut sports milestone: WFSB sports broadcaster Joe Zone’s 50 years in television.
According to Joe, “The hockey announcer for the local hockey team shopped at the men’s clothing store where I worked. We started talking about hockey and broadcasting, I told him I had some broadcast training with a correspondence school. He recommended to a local radio station to do some 30-second hockey reports. That was October, 1973. Six months later I was doing the weekend sports on the ABC station in Syracuse, and here we are.”
The intervening years included stints at KNBC in Los Angeles as the weekend sports anchor where Bryant Gumbel was the main guy and weekend sports at WCBS in New York where Warner Wolf anchored weekday sports (he of “Let’s go to the videotape!”). There was also WJAR in Providence, WNEP in Scranton, and WFLD in Chicago (two years there covering Michael Jordan’s brief minor league baseball career).
It was back to his hometown of Syracuse for 10 years and then he was recruited to Hartford/New Haven by a former Scranton TV exec, then-WFSB General Manager Elden Hale.
Eighteen years later and Joe is happily heading to Cleveland to cover the UConn women in the Final Four.
Quite a run, and still running!
