From calls to Sonny Hirsch to Dolphins opener, native son Myers begin 50th year

Miami Dolphins admin September 11, 2026 0 Comments

From calls to Sonny Hirsch to Dolphins opener, native son Myers begin 50th year

The precocious teenager who often called into Sonny Hirsch’s radio show using different voices, chowed down at Wolfie’s Rascal House and walked the halls of Hollywood Chaminade-Madonna High begins his 50th year in broadcasting this weekend in a way that’s particularly meaningful:

Calling his hometown team’s season opener.

As Chris Myers prepares to work Sunday’s Dolphins-Raiders game for Fox (4:25 p.m., WSVN 7), alongside broadcast partner Mark Schlereth, the memories come flooding back.

Early life in North Miami, living on 189th Terrace, before his family moved north to Hollywood…. The breakfasts at the long-shuttered delicatessen Wolfie’s… The dinners at Shooter’s in Hollywood… The lunches at Lums (“hot dogs cooked in beer; I don’t know if that’s healthy, but whatever”) and the all-you-can-eat shrimp special at Stratford’s, the bar in Hollywood that closed in 2019 after 81 years in business.

And he will fondly remember how this half century in broadcasting began — when he mustered the courage to call Hirsch’s WKAT radio show as a 13-year-old, using a John Wayne voice on one call and calling back a few minutes later using a different voice to say something else about the same topic.

“I just enjoyed talking about sports and having someone listen to me,” Myers said in a phone conversation last week from his Southern California home, where he has lived for 30 years. “My dad was working two jobs. I wondered who could I talk to about sports when I was doing homework.”

So he began speed-dialing Hirsch, the longtime radio voice of the Hurricanes, who was so impressed with the audacious kid that WKAT hired him to host weekend sports shows when he was 16, then gave him a full-time gig while he was taking classes at Miami-Dade Community College.

He hadn’t even graduated from Chaminade-Madonna when he was interviewing Muhammad Ali at the Fontainebleau Hilton on Miami Beach.

“You know,” Ali told him. “You’re not as dumb as you look.”

Suddenly, doors began opening. He landed a talk-show gig at WIOD and a part-time sportscasting job at then-WCIX, then was hired full-time at WTVJ (now NBC 6), where he anchored on weekends and was mentored by legendary longtime producer Bernie Rosen and sportscasters Tony Segreto and Hank Goldberg.

“I’m grateful for Bernie Rosen, who gave me that chance,” Myers said. “That sports department was a network operation when sports weren’t treated that way” at other local stations.

Myers, 67, loved the Dolphins but didn’t go to many games as a youngster because “we had a family of five and we didn’t have a lot of money. And I would rather watch a game on television, anyway; that’s where my roots are and that drove me into this world. This business pulled me in early, and I knew that’s what I wanted to do.”

So he studied South Florida broadcasters of yesteryear — iconic newsman Ralph Renick and sportscasters Dave Willingham, Chuck Dowdle, Bob Halloran, Lee Arthur and his eventual boss, Segreto.

“I paid attention,” he said. “Not just to sports, but also to how they delivered it and their personalities. When Ralph Renick hired me, he said, ‘You don’t need to tell people how old you are.’” Myers was 20 at the time.

As a child, he would implore his parents to allow him to stay up late to watch Johnny Carson and Tom Snyder. “I was fascinated with talk shows,” he said.

His three years at WTVJ led to a local TV job in New Orleans, where he was dispatched to cover the Kentucky Derby and other big assignments.

And then, the big break: ESPN called in 1988, offering him a job as a West Coast correspondent; two years later, he moved to Bristol, Connecticut and was anchoring “SportsCenter” and “Baseball Tonight.”

When he filled in for Chris Berman on “NFL PrimeTime” — which at the time was the NFL’s only substantive highlights show — Myers would crack that he was “one heartbeat” away from taking over. He worked his way up the ladder, succeeding Roy Firestone as host of “Up Close” in 1995.

“Working with Chris Berman and Bob Ley and [the late] Tom Mees — they were the pillars of ESPN,” he said. “I remember doing the first show with Linda Cohn and Mike Tirico. Getting a chance at ESPN when it was the golden years, when it was the only network doing sports all day, I thought I would be there forever.”

Fox beckoned in 1998, giving him opportunities he could only dream about: hosting the network’s NASCAR and more recently, IndyCar coverage, reporting from the Super Bowl and World Series and calling NFL games (he began working a regular NFL play-by-play package 12 years ago), and more unique events he never dreamed about (hosting coverage of the Westminster Kennel Club Dog show for a decade).

There was also some MLB play-by-play, an FS-1 interview show (Myers did the final public interview with legendary UCLA coach John Wooden) and boxing play-by-play.

But “the NFL is still my first passion and love,” he said. “And I enjoy the way Fox does the NFL.”

He treasures memories of calling the last Washington Redskins game and the first Washington Commanders game and Bill Belichick’s final game as Patriots coach.

The career highlights?

“Doing sideline reporting for the network broadcast of the [February 2017] Super Bowl in Houston, where the Patriots trailed 28-3 and beat Atlanta. I was rushing to get to Tom Brady as quickly as possible after the game; the camera guy got knocked over. Brady was gracious.

“The other one was the 2004 World Series, when the Red Sox finally broke through and won it. Being the field reporter with Joe Buck and Tim McCarver for that series was a highlight.”

There was a more somber memory that lingers, hosting the Daytona 500 for the first time in 2001, when Dale Earnhardt Sr. died in a collision.

In his book named after one of his signature lines, “That Deserves a Wow,” Myers writes about treating every event as a big one, even if it’s a game seen by only a small regional audience, which will be the case with Dolphins-Raiders on Sunday.

If you do not, “someone in the business will pass you by, and rightfully so,” he said.

He finds it fitting that he begins his 50th year in the industry calling a Dolphins game.

“That’s meaningful to me,” he said. “It’s my hometown. My passion growing up was the Dolphins. They were so good for that stretch. I remember people honking horns after the perfect season. I remember going to Don Shula’s house and seeing a replica of the Super Bowl trophy, when we had a Chaminade post-Super Bowl hang out party.”

(Myers — who still has several cousins in South Florida — was classmates with one of Shula’s sons, former Bengals coach Dave Shula.)

“I loved growing up in South Florida; I thank my dad for moving from Ohio to have family down here,” Myers said. “I’m frustrated like a lot of current fans who haven’t seen the glory days of winning playoff games [in 26 years]. South Florida means a lot to me, and I’ll never forget my roots there. It’s very special.”