“Jack Whitaker, an Emmy-winning sports broadcaster for more than three decades whose specialty was elegant, graceful commentaries, first for CBS and later for ABC, died on Sunday at his home in Devon, Pa.,” Richard Goldstein reports in The New York Times. Whitaker was 95.

Goldstein continues, “Whitaker was a thoughtful white-haired figure who covered just about every niche in the sports world — from the first Super Bowl to Secretariat’s victory in the Belmont Stakes, as well as baseball, golf and the Olympics. In 1961, he became the host of the anthology series ‘CBS Sports Spectacular,’ and he began covering the P.G.A. Championship and the Masters in the early 1960s.

“But he was perhaps best known for his essays about sports, inspired by writers he admired like Alistair Cooke and Heywood Hale Broun. He received an Emmy in 1979 as ‘outstanding sports personality’ and a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Sports Emmy Awards in 2012.”

Typical of his wonderful work, here’s a report he did about the jockey Bill Shoemaker back in 1987. We found it on YouTube and its about five minutes long: