Sports Rolf Kalb
Snooker’s German voice switches off its microphone
As of: 9:13 p.m. | Reading time: 3 minutes
The snooker voice Rolf Kalb
Source: dpa/Guido Hermann
Rolf Kalb is a reporting legend. The voice is familiar to anyone who has ever watched billiards or snooker on TV. He has commented on Eurosport for over three decades, but the next World Cup in May will be his last. He explains the reasons for his departure.
How many times has he said these sentences in the past decades? “The next red one is the frame ball,” or “Now Neil Robertson needs snooker.” Also a standard: “This split was a hard piece of work:”
Anyone who knows what to do with such statements will automatically hear Rolf Kalb’s voice in their ears. In Germany, the commentator is the voice of his sport and is therefore just as much a snooker legend as Ronnie O’Sullivan, Jimmy White, Steve Davis or Mark Selby, the players themselves.
The 64-year-old brought the Germans the precision game into their living rooms on the 3.55 meter long, 1.77 meter wide table that weighs up to one and a half tons. With calm, passion and his very own humor, he explained the complex routes and angles, anticipated the players’ tactical considerations and combined textbook competence with entertainment. “He knows the game,” referee icon Jan Verhaas once said about Kalb.
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Now he is ending his career, the upcoming World Championships at the Crucible Theater in Sheffield, his 22nd in a row, will be his last. “I will be sitting at the microphone for the last time at the World Cup final on May 5th and 6th. On the evening of May 6th I will take off my headphones for the last time,” Kalb wrote on the website of his broadcaster Eurosport.
Kalb was never sick and has commented on every World Cup since 2003
“I always wanted to stop at a time when I would still be fondly remembered. That should be the case now,” said Kalb. “That’s why it’s the right time for me.”
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The former press spokesman for the then German Billiards Association worked for Eurosport for almost 35 years. His commentating career at the station began with a rugby game between France and Australia on November 11, 1989. As a snooker commentator, he achieved cult status among his fans.
“Everyone knows that I love this sport,” he wrote in his blog for Eurosport: “Over all these decades I have been able to look over the shoulders of the best players in the world, talk about it and even get paid for it. The best job I could imagine.”
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He commented on his first World Cup in 2000 and has been there without exception since 2003, never missing due to illness. There were years when he was live on the station for more than 150 hours. “Apart from Christmas and New Year, there was hardly a day of the year when I didn’t work on the subject of snooker,” he wrote in farewell: “Can I play a quieter ball? Not without loss of quality. And I’m not ready for that. Wherever it says Rolf Kalb on it, it should also have 100 percent Rolf Kalb on it. The snooker calendar has dominated my entire life in recent years. Family celebrations, meeting friends, going to a concert or something similar? ‘Rolf has snooker’ was the motto all too often. It almost sounded like a contagious disease.”