BLOOMINGTON — Joe Smith called it his Hep Ring.
It was thick and gleaming. In the right light, it sparkled, yellow gold wrapped around a crimson stone centerpiece. Everyone associated with Indiana’s 2007 Insight Bowl team received one, Smith among that number as a member of IU’s radio broadcast crew.
Joe’s Hep Ring was easy to spot, often outlined against the McDonald’s coffee cup that sometimes seemed attached to his hand like a limb unto itself. He wore it proudly, and practically all the time, happy to tell stories about the man — Terry Hoeppner — it commemorated and kept close.
Because at his core, Joe was that: a storyteller. On any range of subjects, he could fill pages with memories, singling out small details that enriched big stories.
About some of the best teams Indiana University ever saw, in any number of sports. About growing up at the ballfields and in the batting cages around Indianapolis, remembering local legends like Clyde Peach and Larry Highbaugh. About his decades spent chronicling the life and times of Bloomington’s high school athletes.
Parents and children shared Joe Smith stories. Athletes across generations. He kept his own history of this place, and he did so proudly.
We lost Joe on Monday, and now it feels like there’s a hole here that can’t be filled. There aren’t words adequate to do justice to someone so gifted with them himself.
For so many fans, Joe was synonymous with IU sports. He worked alongside Don Fischer, both of them hall-of-famers, for four decades, Joe handling pregame, halftime and postgame duties for both football and men’s basketball. His voice told the stories of so many remarkable moments, moments crystallized intro memories.
Mine aren’t altogether different. Across nearly 20 years on this beat, Joe helped fill in so many gaps with his sharp memory and penchant for recall. Sometimes, that was in an official capacity, reflecting for some project or historical record. Sometimes it was over a beer at old Yogi’s, the one that stood for years at the corner of 10th Street and Indiana Avenue, like a staging post between Indiana’s campus and its stadiums and arenas seven blocks further north.
Joe was for all of us as much a part of the IU experience as any of the times and places he helped describe to listeners across 50-plus years in broadcasting.
He was just as tightly tethered to local high school sports. Working as sports director at WGCL-AM 1370, now 98.7 The Zone, he called games all over Monroe County. Seemingly anyone who played high school sports in Bloomington had at least one Joe Smith story. Most had more. He was proud of that, too.
Joe retired from IU’s radio broadcast in 2022 but never left the microphone. He remained part of his longtime station’s conversation around IU sports through these two historic seasons under Curt Cignetti, with a small squad of us taking care to mule back game programs to share with him from the Hoosiers’ stops along the way.
In a tribute posted to Twitter on Monday night, former IU men’s basketball coach Tom Crean said in part, “Joe Smith epitomized kindness and just pure, genuine love” for IU sports, IU basketball and the Bloomington area. That all that is true is why there’s a hole in those communities tonight, one that can’t be filled even by the outpouring of love, in return, for Joe’s family.
That might have been his greatest source of pride. He kept his children and grandchildren close. He loved to trade stories about his for stories about yours. No one could disarm you into becoming a friend faster than Joe Smith.
And none of us can quite imagine, now, a world without him. This place, and its people, will miss him terribly.
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This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Osterman: Joe Smith’s death leaves many memories, and a hole that can’t be closed
Reporting by Zach Osterman, Indianapolis Star / Indianapolis Star
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By Zach Osterman, Indianapolis Star | USA TODAY Network
