More ThanA Game

Charlie McAlexander

Charlie McAlexander is a Mississippi native, born in Holly Springs, about thirty miles from Oxford. He first attended Ole Miss, then Northwest Mississippi Community College, before graduating from Delta State University in Cleveland, where he played baseball. By his own telling he was never a great student and was driven by fear, and he has spent a lifetime proving that a dreamer from a small Southern town can go a long way on gumption.

His broadcasting career began in the Mississippi Delta and Memphis, as sports director and sports anchor at WLBT-TV in Jackson and WREG-TV in Memphis, and as the play-by-play voice of Ole Miss for radio and the televised football coaches show. Ole Miss was the first of four SEC schools he would call, and the beginning of a run that made him one of the most decorated voices in the South.

From there he moved to Nashville, where for fourteen years he was sports director at WSMV-TV and the voice of the Vanderbilt Commodores for football and basketball, on radio and television, and hosted sports talk on WLAC Radio. He went on to the University of Kentucky through Host Communications, calling Wildcat football and basketball on radio and TV, hosting the NCAA Today show on ESPN, and handling national radio for CBS and Host that included SEC Basketball Tournament finals and NCAA Tournament games, along with a national college football show. He then became the voice of the South Carolina Gamecocks for football and basketball, with select radio and CSS baseball, and later called Blue Raider football and basketball at Middle Tennessee. Along the way he called a couple of games for Georgia while working in the university's communications and athletics department, and worked selected games for Jefferson-Pilot Sports and Fox Sports.

He is a nine-time Sportscaster of the Year, one of only a handful of broadcasters ever to win the honor in four different states, and served as president and a board member of the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association. He received the Lindsey Nelson Award in 2006, served as honorary state chairman of the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation in Mississippi and a board member in Memphis, and hosted the Charlie Mac Celebrity Golf and Sports Auction in Nashville for the American Cancer Society and Ronald McDonald House.

In a parallel universe, he will tell you, his career would have been in the music business. A member of the Country Music Association, he has fronted bands for five decades and still performs. Recently profiled in Delta Magazine, More Than a Game is his first book.