When the roll is called up yonder, a great baritone will be reading the names.

Frank Fallon, who served as the Voice of the Final Four from 1978 to 1998, died April 30. He was 73.

Six years after he called his final game in his hometown of San Antonio, it still seems unlikely that someone could have achieved a measure of national fame as a public-address announcer. But Frank did. When he spoke, everyone knew the event was all about quality.

Frank had a remarkable broadcast career that went well beyond his role at the Final Four, and he learned his craft from the best. A generation of Texans grew up in an era when we could listen to the likes of Kern Tips, Jack Dale and Frank, who was the voice of the Baylor Bears. They all made you feel as though you owned a piece of the big-time. One grown man told me he cried when Tips, the anchor of the old Humble Radio Network, died in 1967.

I felt the same way May 1 when I heard about Frank. In the mid-1970s, I was a reporter for the Waco newspaper. Every Saturday morning, the media from the area got together to play softball. Frank usually pitched, and his son Steve most often starred on offense. One breezy day, with Steve struggling at the plate, the TV anchor from the rival station said in his high-pitched voice: "Hey, Frank, your kid can't get it out of the infield."

Frank turned with a smile and said gently, "I'm sorry, Chris. I couldn't hear what you said. Your voice didn't carry in the wind."

Nobody ever said that about Frank. He could whisper and be heard 50 feet away, wind or no wind. If he spoke it, you heard it. It was the perfect voice.

But there was much more to Frank than the voice. He had the talent to go on to the big markets, but he knew who he was and cast his lot with Baylor and Waco.

Thank goodness for that. As a Baylor graduate, I'll always have my memories of Frank's call of Ray Penn's pivotal punt block in the 1974 Baylor-Texas game. And I'll remember how the consummate professional let his guard down in his broadcast of an unlikely 50-7 Baylor victory over Texas in 1989 -- a game that broke a 38-year Baylor winless streak in Austin. Late in the game, it was time for a station break and a jubilant Frank exclaimed: "We'll be back in a moment. This is the Baylor 50-7 Football Network!"

That was Frank. Sports were supposed to be fun. If you couldn't hear that in a Frank Fallon broadcast, you weren't listening.

Like any good story-teller, Frank finished with a point. Though he had been seriously ill for years with Parkinson's Disease, he had been feeling a bit better lately. On Friday evening, he was well enough to play a little soccer with a kid from the neighborhood.

He then went home and passed away in his sleep, his perfect voice silenced forever but a sportsman to the end.

David Pickle is editor-in-chief of The NCAA News.