Jack Arute Biography
Jack Arute ( Born Jack Arute III ) is a former sportscaster for the NFL and college sports for Sirius XM Radio. He is the president of the Stafford
Motor Speedway in Connecticut. He used to be an auto racing pit reporter and college football sideline reporter for ESPN and ABC and covered the Izod IndyCar Series and the NASCAR Whelen Modified Tour on Versus.
Jack Arute Age
Jack Arute III a former sportscaster for the NFL and college sports for Sirius XM Radio was born on September 28, 1950.
Jack Arute Height
Information concerning his height is still under research and will soon be updated immediately we come across details about his height.
Jack Arute Family
Arute was born in New Britain, Connecticut, the son of Jack Arute Jr. and grandson of Jack Arute Sr., owners of a prominent construction company in the state. (Arute Field, a football stadium in New Britain, is named for the family.) Arute is a graduate of the University of Vermont.
Jack Arute Career
He began his work with ABC Sports and ESPN in 1984, after serving as a radio commentator for the Motor Racing Network from 1972 to 1980, where he was known as “Jackie Arute” as to distinguish him from his father. He then served as Vice President of Charlotte Motor Speedway in 1980. In recent years, he has served as president of the family-owned Stafford Motor Speedway, a regional NASCAR track in Stafford Springs, Connecticut, a track that the family has owned since 1970. His brothers Mark and Rob are CEO and Vice President, respectively, at the track.
Jack Arute Photo
Arute was one of the track announcers during the 1970s, establishing the circuit as a top race track in the Northeast, establishing a strong link of announcers which also included Mike Joy. He worked as a pit reporter on CART, Indy Racing League (IRL), and NASCAR telecasts on ESPN and ABC from 1984 to 1998 and 2000 to 2009. In 1999, he covered the IRL for Fox Sports Net and Speedvision. In some instances, namely in 2004, Arute served as a booth announcer. During the same time period at ESPN and ABC, during the off-season of auto racing, Arute served as a sideline reporter for college football and during at least one NFL playoff game.
In 2009, Arute joined the Versus on-air crew for the 2009 IndyCar season, serving on both the Versus and ABC telecasts. In August 2009, Indianapolis Star reporter Curt Cavin said that Arute will be leaving ESPN at the end of 2009 in favor of Versus full-time. He was fired from Versus due to cost-cutting moves after the merger with NBCUniversal. He was replaced by Kevin Lee, who is also a pit reporter for the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Network.
Currently, Arute does radio work with SiriusXM’s Channel 90 with Trading Paint with Chocolate Myers on Thursdays and Fridays. Arute lives in Hampden, Massachusetts.
Jack Arute ARUTE SR.: A FRIEND, A LEGEND
Slowly, the golf cart would pull alongside me in the paddock at Stafford Motor Speedway, and Jack Arute Sr. would pat his hand on the empty passenger seat. He didn’t have to say a word. The first time I saw a reporter riding with Arute, someone in the press box joked that the track owner had the reporter in his pocket because that was only way Arute would let someone from the media ride with him. In later years, when I was riding shotgun with Arute, I wondered if other reporters were saying that about me. But I didn’t care. Arute, who seemed to know more about racing than anyone I had ever met, cared about what I wrote. He didn’t pander. He just talked.
Almost every week he would stop me to talk about what I had written in my Friday column. It didn’t matter if the topic was short track racing or the Nextel Cup Series or sports car racing. He always had an opinion. Good, bad or indifferent, he paid attention and told me what he thought. He told me if I was wrong, he told me if I was right. It mattered. On Monday, Stafford Motor Speedway lost its patriarch with the passing of Jack Arute Sr. I lost my ride. Lost the treasure chest of racing stories that came with the rides on that golf cart. Lost a friend.
At the close of the 1998 racing season, I wrote a column about some problems between tracks in Connecticut. I mentioned promoters at the tracks back-stabbing each other. It was a bad choice of words, and Jack let me know that. A typed letter from Jack arrived at The Courant explaining in detail his disappointment with my column. In it he took some personal shots at me that hurt. He mentioned that I spent an internship for media and public relations training at his track while I was in college and now he had to wonder if the program was working if it was turning out reporters such as me.
I had just started covering racing and we didn’t have a relationship. Over the winter, I stewed over that letter and we never spoke. When the 1999 season began, I worried about how things would go. When that golf cart pulled up next to me in the paddock that first weekend, nerves took over and I was frozen. The scowl on his face told me I was about to get it. With a booming voice, he said, “I’m mad at you.” There was a pause before he continued. “You didn’t call me and tell me off for what I wrote. I wrote that letter so you would call me and tell me off. I waited all winter for you to call me and yell at me.”
And then he laughed the laugh that would become so familiar. “I know he was hard on you sometimes, but he wasn’t any harder on you than he was on his own kids,” Jack Arute Jr. said Monday as we shared stories of special times with his father. “That was his way. If he didn’t care about you, he wouldn’t give you the time of day. He only gave that attention to people that he cared for.”The day before the first race of the 2005 season, I had a disagreement with Mark Arute, Stafford’s general manager and Jack’s son, which led to us having a closed-door meeting to vent our frustrations.
The next day, when the golf cart pulled up, Jack had a sly smile on his face and burst out laughing before I could say a word.”You and Mark kiss and make up yet?” he asked me. “You two are like an old married couple. But it keeps me entertained.”Arute was so proud of what he and his family built in Stafford and it didn’t bother him one bit that people in racing at times ridiculed the ego behind it all.”That’s human nature,” he said to me two years ago. “Nobody likes General Motors, nobody likes NASCAR. I think we’re the most successful and the best of the three tracks in Connecticut and it’s natural for people in the sport to dislike us. … You know what the mystique is at Stafford? It’s playing the palace. They all know it, they all see it. The guys that can’t do it go somewhere else and take shots at us.”
Two years ago, I spent the better part of a March day with Jack at his home in Bedford, N.H., for a profile story. As we moved along the timeline of his life, he went down so many roads, most having nothing to do with the piece I was writing. He knew it, but I wasn’t about to stop him. It was a history lesson I’ll never forget. At the end of the day, I told him that I would be contacting his sons David and Wayne, with whom he had strained relationships. He asked me not to call them. I had to and did. As expected, neither had very nice things to say about their dad. The day the story came out, the golf cart pulled up and he tapped the seat. I got on, ready to feel his wrath. He put his arm around me, leaned over and said, “You did good with that story.”
I asked him if he was upset that I talked to David and Wayne. He laughed. “You just did your job. Keep doing what you’re doing no matter what anybody says.” I told him I still had the letter he sent to me in 1998. I asked him if he was still worried about what his internship program was turning out. He laughed and told me he was still waiting for me to call him and yell at him.
I wish I could still make that call.
Jack Arute Net Worth
The British sportscaster/anchor Jack Arute III has an estimated net worth of $200,000.
Jack Arute Twitter
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