The Amazin’ Bill Mazer, a New York broadcasting legend, passed away Wednesday in Danbury, Conn., according his son, Arnie Mazer. He was 92.
Mazer had been in declining health and recently contracted pneumonia.
The host of “Sports Extra” on Ch. 5 in the 1970s and 1980s, Mazer also broadcast Knicks games in the mid-1960s. He also was a broadcaster for the Nets, Rangers, Islanders and Buffalo Bills and prided himself on his encyclopedic knowledge of New York sports dating to the days of Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig.
Mazer, whose career began in 1941, did the first-ever television broadcast of a college basketball game in 1948, and was one of the original talk-show hosts for WFAN.
“He had the ability to take sports facts and trivia and relate it to the here and now,’’ his son Arnie told The Post. “He combined the experience of seeing sports of the 1920s and related it to the present day. He could easily relate the past to the present and the present to the past and the past to the future.’’
Mazer’s last stint was as a radio host for WVOS in Westchester until he was 88. His funeral service will be held Sunday in White Plains.
“He was the pioneer of sports talk radio, and what I remember most about Bill was his passion for what he was doing,” broadcaster Marv Albert said. “He just loved being around people talking about sports all the time.”
Mazer, who also taught at St. John’s, was fascinated by the former Ron Artest, Metta World Peace, who attended the university when Mazer worked there. When a Post basketball reporter joined his Westchester show, Mazer never failed to turn the conversation to Artest. He lived to see the day when World Peace became a Knick.
“He enjoyed talking on the air,’’ Arnie Mazer said of why his father did a show into his late 80s. “He was a showbiz guy. They don’t make showbiz people like that anymore.’’
Mazer, whose wife Dora died in 1996, is survived by Arnie and two daughters, Francine and Beverly, and has two grandchildren and two great grandchildren.
— Additional reporting by Steve Serby