UCLA is familiar territory to CBS announcer Enberg

In 1966, Lew Alcindor, who later became Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, was a sophomore at UCLA and eligible to play on the varsity team. Bob Speck, who ran the sports division at KTLA Channel 5, wanted to televise every UCLA basketball game.

The plan was for road games to be shown live but home games tape-delayed until 11 p.m. Back then, besides freshmen not being allowed to play varsity ball, the thinking was that live telecasts of home games hurt attendance.

Dick Enberg, who the year before had been hired by Channel 5 as a sports anchor and the announcer for boxing at the Olympic Auditorium, was asked to be the lone announcer on the UCLA telecasts.

Enberg was sure tape-delaying the home games was a bad idea.

“I thought, ‘Why would anyone want to watch a 3-hour-old game at 11 o’clock at night when they already know the result?’ ” he said this week by phone from his home in La Jolla. “I couldn’t have been more wrong. Those 11 o’clock telecasts became a cult event. They were getting higher ratings than Johnny Carson.”

Even the UCLA players were watching. In an HBO documentary titled “The UCLA Dynasty,” which will air for the first time Monday at 10 p.m., Bill Walton talks about those delayed telecasts.

“We would go back to our dorm rooms after the games and watch them on replay,” Walton says.

Enberg, also interviewed for the film, says that the players would have a pool on how many of his signature “Oh mys” they would hear during a telecast. Walton recalls telling his teammates, “I bet we got seven ‘Oh mys’ out of Dick tonight.’ ”

Enberg had an eight-year run with UCLA. He was replaced in 1974 by Al Michaels, then an announcer for the San Francisco Giants whose roots were in L.A.

Enberg will be back announcing UCLA basketball tonight, this time for CBS, when the Bruins play Pittsburgh at San Jose in the NCAA tournament. His broadcast partner will be Jay Bilas. The game is expected to start about 6:40 p.m., after Kansas-Southern Illinois.

When USC plays North Carolina about 7 p.m. Friday at East Rutherford, N.J., the CBS announcers will be Jim Nantz and Billy Packer.

For Enberg, UCLA basketball will always have a special place in his heart, and not just because the Bruins won seven national championships in the eight years he was their TV voice. It’s what catapulted him to a broadcasting career he could never have imagined while growing up in Armada, Mich.

“That job was absolutely responsible for Chet Simmons hiring me at NBC,” Enberg said, referring to the then-president of NBC Sports. “The people at NBC were aware that I was an announcer for the Angels and Rams, but it was UCLA that got me the job.”

Enberg initially was paired with Packer on college basketball, and Al McGuire joined them in 1977 to make up one of the most memorable announcing teams in broadcasting.

“The table was set with a pretty good meal, but it didn’t have full flavor until Al was added,” Enberg said.

In 1976, Enberg, teamed with Merlin Olsen, became NBC’s lead NFL play-by-play announcer and has been at CBS since 2000.

“My banker can thank John Wooden,” he said. “I rode the Wooden wave, surfed it all the way to new heights.”

Complaint department

There are four NCAA tournament games tonight, and CBS has two broadcast windows. It will be the same situation Friday night.

That makes things considerably easier to deal with than last Thursday and Friday, when there were 16 games each day and four windows. Keeping everybody happy was impossible, and a number of complaints came our way about the job CBS did switching from game to game in the L.A. market.

On Friday, when Winthrop was leading Notre Dame, 67-64, with 59 seconds remaining, CBS was showing Tennessee’s 30-point blowout over Long Beach State. Also, much of the closer-than-expected Wisconsin-Texas A&M; Corpus Christi game was missed.

On Thursday, many viewers would have preferred seeing more of Virginia Commonwealth’s upset victory over Duke than UCLA’s rout of Weber State. And there were those who wanted to see more of Texas’ narrow victory over New Mexico State.

A problem with DirecTV’s Mega March Madness pay package and the free broadband March Madness on Demand package is that webcasts of games broadcast by CBS in fans’ local markets are subject to blackouts, but when CBS switches off the scheduled game, as it did Sunday with Oregon-Winthrop, it’s nowhere to be found.

End of an era

“The George Michael Sports Machine,” the nationally syndicated highlight show that has been carried by Channel 4 since 1980, ends a 27-year run Sunday night. Considering the proliferation of highlight sports shows on cable and satellite television, it’s an impressive run. Michael, the show’s host and executive producer, will be a guest on the KLAC 570 morning show with Fred Roggin and T.J. and Tracy Simers to talk about that run.

End of a streak

It almost went unnoticed that Nick Nickson, the Kings’ play-by-play radio announcer, missed his first game in 21 years Sunday when illness kept him away from the team’s game against the Ducks at the Honda Center in Anaheim. Nickson last missed a game Feb. 17, 1986, when his son was born.

On Sunday, commentator Daryl Evans moved over one seat to fill Nickson’s play-by-play role and Mike Kalinowski, the Kings’ communications manager, served as the commentator.

larry.stewart@latimes.com