Basketball And The Transistor Radio

Before home game blackout rules were lifted and cable packages eventually gave unlimited access to every game, basketball junkies were at the mercy of their local television station’s schedule of broadcast games (or their television’s ability to get a decent reception) to see their favorite team play or, if they were lucky, they occasionally got to see their team lose in Boston on the Sunday afternoon nationally-televised contest. Otherwise, all they had was the transistor radio, their imagination, and, hopefully, a play-by-play announcer polished enough to describe game action in detail.

Marv Albert Before We Had to Share

In New York, we were blessed to have a distinct, colorful radio voice like the one belonging to a youthful Marv Albert – the ink on his degree from Syracuse University was likely still wet when he landed the Knicks’ and Rangers’ radio play-by-play gigs in the late 1960’s on WHN radio.  At the time, there was no color commentary on those Knicks broadcasts. Marv was the show, one of the voices of New York City winter sports.

Marv would set the scene prior to the jump ball to start the game – you could almost close your eyes and pretend you were there. He would tell you the uniform colors, and for home games he’d say, “The Knicks are going from left to right, shooting at the basket to our right…at the 7th Avenue end of Madison Square Garden.” Seemed a little redundant but no one cared. He would use words like “forecourt” (over the half-court line), “scoop shot” (an underhand flip), “getting involved” (a fight), “psyched out” (in a slump), “hearing it from the crowd” (getting booed) and “facial” (posterization).

Then, of course, there was the signature “Yes” call when the hometown heroes scored a field goal, and the “Yes, and it counts!” when there was a basket and a foul (today we hear the player scream “And One!!”).

Talk About A Deep Bench

On the American Basketball Association side (yes they were legit enough to have radio broadcasts), the Nets had the legendary play-by-play voice of Marty Glickman (who also called Knicks’ games in the 40’s and 50’s and New York Giants’ football games on the radio), and had the baseball Hall-of-Fame pitcher Bob Gibson as commentator. Marv’s younger brother Al handled the radio duties another brother, Steve was calling television games) and then a few years later an excitable young man named John Sterling (yes – THAT John Sterling, who now does Yankee games on the radio) was there as the team transitioned to the NBA and would yell “Bullseye!” on made baskets by the hometown Nets .

Even back in the mid-1970’s, Sterling had a penchant for giving players nicknames: Bernard King was “Sky” or “B.B.”, Wilson Washington was “W.W”, shot-blocker George Johnson was “Swat”. When the Nets lost – which was quite often after the NBA-ABA merger – his voice couldn’t mask his frustration (“The Nets have no shooters!”). A true homer.

On those nights in the early 1970’s that Marv couldn’t clone himself while handling multiple duties, the classy Bob Wolff, then the TV voice of the Knicks, would fill in on the radio. Wolff, who passed away this past July at age 96 and called Don Larsen’s perfect game in the 1956 World Series, was rock-steady and never tried to make himself bigger than the game. He just described the action.

Imagine Bob Wolff as a substitute. In team sports we’d call that a deep bench.

No Local Games? No Problem. I Got Steam Heat.

Then there were those clear, cold winter nights when no local games were scheduled. I’d put my radio near the window or the radiator pipes in our apartment and would pull in some nearby out-of-town stations.

The easiest station to pull in was 1210 WCAU in Philadelphia which at the time was broadcasting  76ers basketball, Flyers’ hockey and Phillies’ baseball in the early 1970’s. The 76ers weren’t very good back then – actually, they were horrible – and it was actually painful to listen to Bill Campbell call their home games during their record-setting 9-win, 73-loss season back in 1973. Fortunately, on some nights the very powerful station out of Fort Wayne, Indiana, 1190 WOWO would obliterate almost everything on that end of the AM dial, including some local stations. They carried the games of the Fort Wayne Komets, a minor-league hockey team and some college basketball games.

On very clear nights, the radio would pick up 1110 WWWE in Cleveland, where the expansion Cavaliers were going through the NBA hazing process. The signal would fade in and out but was still audible enough to hear Joe Tait tell you the Cavs were losing most nights. Names like Austin Carr and Bingo Smith come to mind.

Then the Knicks traded Walt Frazier to the Cavs in 1977. Too painful to listen after that.

And on those crystal-clear nights, you could pick up a very faint signal from WSB Radio in Atlanta, where former Atlanta Braves TBS basketball announcer Skip Caray was working the radio mic. The station’s frequency – 750AM – was right next to the powerful 770 WABC Radio in New York City, so the chances of getting a clear signal were remote. It must have been very difficult to accurately describe the antics of someone as unpredictable as Pistol Pete Maravich.

Tuning in to those Hawks games and the ones in Cleveland were particularly galling at times because the signal would just die out after a certain time, usually before the game ended.

Not Quite The 8-Track Player, But...

I’m sure the radio voices of today are every bit as detailed as the ones from 40-50 years ago; we simply aren’t as dependent upon their game calls as we were decades ago. On most nights, those old-time voices were as close as we could get to real-time updates without actually being at the game.

And on most nights, they made us feel like we were in the building.