S PU O SRATDSE R L I F E CR
Holy Cross Legends Remember Longtime Basketball, Football Broadcaster Bob Fouracre Member of the Holy Cross Varsity Club Hall of Fame, Fouracre called Crusader sports for 48 years. BY BILL DOYLE
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portscaster Bob Fouracre always took pride in calling himself the “voice and the spirit” of Holy Cross Athletics.
“Holy Cross meant everything to Bob Fouracre,” says Ron Perry ’54, a close friend of Fouracre’s who played basketball and baseball for the Crusaders before serving as Athletics director. “I met a lot of people over the 26 years I was AD, and no one that I could tell really cared about Holy Cross like Bob Fouracre.” Fouracre worked as a television and radio broadcaster for 57 years, 48 of them announcing Holy Cross football and basketball games before he retired in 2018. On April 17, 2021, he passed away at
age 83 after a period of declining health. As a child, Fouracre attended Holy Cross games with his father and he often replayed the Crusaders’ 1947 NCAA basketball championship victory in his living room. White pencils represented Holy Cross, blue pencils Kentucky. In the closing seconds, Bob Cousy ’50 would always get injured and be carried off the court by two pencils that Fouracre called “stretcher boys.” Fouracre would replace Cousy and hit the game-winning shot. He’d scream, “Yes!”, which later became one of his signature calls as a sportscaster. “The fact that he was introduced to Holy Cross as a child and then fulfilled his fantasy, maybe not as a player for Holy Cross, but being part of Holy Cross as an announcer, that was it for him,” says his daughter, Elizabeth Fouracre-Anderson.
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Fouracre grew up in nearby Northborough, Massachusetts, where he captained the football, basketball and baseball teams at Northborough High School, and served as class president for four years. He went on to graduate from Cushing Academy and the Cambridge School of Broadcasting. When he began his broadcasting career at WARE Radio in Ware, Massachusetts, in 1962, the station manager granted his request to do play-by-play for high school games as long as Fouracre sold advertising for them; he later sold ads to support his Holy Cross broadcasts. Fouracre started calling Holy Cross games on television in 1970 before switching to radio in 1986. He announced Crusader football and men’s basketball through 2015 and finished his career by calling three seasons of Holy Cross women’s basketball. He also produced and hosted coaches shows for football, men’s basketball and women’s basketball. In addition to Holy Cross, Fouracre announced regular-season games for the Boston Celtics, Bay State Bombardiers of the CBA and Worcester Counts of the WBL, and preseason games for the New England Patriots. In addition, he hosted
