The Upper Midwest had a similar color man awhile back. To protect his name, I call him Lars. Like Kellogg, Lars was a master of the obvious. With the home team behind by a point late in the game, he told the broadcast audience the local boys needed a basket. That was the tactical insight for viewers. Ugh.
“Oh my!” Dick Enberg, 75, has made this his last year calling NCAA tournament games. Back in the 1980s he offered play-by-play with color guys Billy Packer and Al McGuire. There’s never been a better broadcast trio on college basketball, with Packer’s smarts and McGuire’s charm carrying the team. Their arguments are long remembered.
Our basketball intelligence was insulted a few years ago during the collapse of the Dan Monson coaching era. The Gophers were playing in a place called the Milk House on the Disney campus in Florida. Public complaints about Monson had been fast and furious for a long while but Monson was still employed by the Gophers. It was at the Milk House that ESPN’s Jimmy Dykes, a southern lad who might not even be able to find Williams Arena on a map, pronounced that perhaps Gophers fans should have less than high expectations because he deemed Minnesota to have limited basketball resources.
Kevin Harlan got his start here as the Timberwolves first radio play-by-play man. I loved him then and still do. Guys who are exuberant can cause me to switch channels but Harlan knows how far to push the enthusiasm. The result is he can make the most ordinary games and individual plays sound interesting.
Harlan, with his color guy Dan Bonner, could even do a play-by-play on me in the kitchen making breakfast that might hold the attention of a national audience. “Dan, there’s something special about the way Shama pulls back on that refrigerator door and reaches inside! He does it in a way that sets him apart from others. Your thoughts?”
Mention the Big Ten Conference and the first play-by-play guy to write about is Brent Musburger. He’s 70 now and been doing Big Ten football and basketball on ABC and ESPN for many years. His voice is still filled with genuine enthusiasm.
Musburger offers up a mix of comfy dialogue like that found in a Wyoming cowboy with the intellectualism that represents his Northwestern University journalism degree. He is passionate about the Big Ten without being biased toward individual teams. He’ll refer to something that’s going on “up in Madison or over in Columbus” and it makes a listener want to jump in the car and head in those directions.