Vitale Has Made Himself the Talk of College Basketball

You’re in another dimension, a dimension of sight, of sound, of mind. A dimension where the only limits are the limits of your imagination. A dimension where a 49-year-old, balding man screams into microphones in packed auditoriums, saying unintelligible things. ...

” ... This guy’s a PTP, and he’ll take the Reggie whenever he can, don’t look for any Pete Roses here. He doesn’t make the all-Rip Van Winkle team, but he’s an all-Avis, no doubt about it. He gets QT, and when he makes the J, you need a TO, before it’s Blowout City.”

You’ve crossed the line to ...

The Vitale Zone.

The time was last March, during the basketball-a-thon known as the NCAA basketball tournament, and Dick Vitale, college basketball’s pre-eminent (and ubiquitous) analyst, was in his element. This was the first day of the first round, with ESPN -- one of Dick Vitale’s employers -- broadcasting 11 1/2 hours of hoops.

And Dick Vitale was rolling. Dick Vitale knew everyone in the studio by name. Dick Vitale was eating dinner. Dick Vitale was on the phone. Dick Vitale was back in the studio talking about high school phenoms.

Louisiana State Coach Dale Brown came in for an interview, and Dick Vitale begged him to mention a roast the following week in Dick Vitale’s honor. Brown obliged. Then, Dick Vitale got upset about West Coast coaches who accuse the Eastern press of belittling their teams. He accused colleague Tim Brando of buttering up someone.

“Dick’s like plutonium,” said his ESPN studio partner, Bob Ley. “A little goes a long way.”

It’s the nature of the Cult of Dick Vitale. People talk about being Rolls Roycers; kids wear skinhead wigs and “Dick Vitale Fan Club” T-shirts; and athletes dream of being called PTPs. All this the creation of an ex-coach, whose new autobiography is drawing raves, who now commands a salary well into six figures and no longer can answer requests for speaking engagements personally.

He’s a DPG -- a Daisy Petal Guy. You either love him or you love him not.

“It just blows my mind,” Dick Vitale says of his popularity. “I think it’s something I’m flattered by. I certainly appreciate that atttention. I’m a hot-dog. I love it all. It’s part of my personality.”

That was, and is, Dick Vitale’s element, being able to watch a dozen hours of college hoops. The week before the NCAA tournament, he had done eight games in seven days, working for ESPN and ABC along the way. He doesn’t like missing his daughter’s communion, but what choice does he have?

“The college basketball tournament is, to me, the greatest sporting event of all,” he said during a break, stuffing salad into his mouth. “Naturally, I’m prejudiced, because I’m a basketball junkie. But I think that the factor of the one-game elimination makes it so special. You can win an NHL championship or the World Series, and lose three times, and still be a champ. What makes this so amazing ... one slip, one bad night, and it’s all over.”

He spoke from experience, based on his coaching stints at the University of Detroit and with the Detroit Pistons. Fired by the Pistons in 1978, he went to work for ESPN, then a fledging outsider cable outfit. Now it reaches more than 50 million homes. Combined with his weekly broadcasts on ABC, he now has a huge audience and following.

“He’s built his own cult,” NBC-TV analyst Al McGuire said, “and in my opinion it couldn’t happen to a nicer guy. I envy his level of excitement. You’ve gotta have a good head. You can’t go into those games blind-sided.”

He screams into microphones, talking about “basketball madness,” and he has his shtick. But it hides both his knowledge of the game and his network of coaches, scouts and other “overdosers,” as McGuire calls them. It’s a formidable collection, one that has given Dick Vitale more than one inside scoop.

“I have a lot of sources out there, people who I’ve developed relationships with,” he said. “I always tease (CBS-TV analyst Billy) Packer. I was in the gym. I coached. I said I’ve got to get Billy Packer a coaching job to find out if he could coach or not. I hear him on the air and he’s undefeated. But never was on the sideline to call a timeout. At least I did.”

In the studio, he is constrained by time limitations -- mere seconds as the studio hosts switch from game to game. When he does color commentary, he has time for his Vitale-isms. A Rolls Roycer is the best there is. A Marconi Special is a telegraphed pass. And on and on, sometimes past the point of being tiresome.

“That’s my personality,” he said. “My bottom line is we’re in the entertainment business as well as the educational. If I wanted to bore that viewer, just X and O to death, I could do that. But I think that one of the problems in television now, whether it is basketball, football or baseball, we are making the game so technical that half of the people are in Z-ville, Sleepyland, and they’re bored.”

That doesn’t mean he doesn’t ruffle some feathers. A couple of years ago, Dick Vitale was disgusted with the University of Oklahoma’s lack of defense, and said on the air that he would send Sooners Coach Billy Tubbs a book explaining defense. Tubbs replied, “If Dick Vitale is so smart, how come he’s not coaching instead of making an ass of himself?”

Dick Vitale said he and Tubbs are good friends, that Tubbs understands he was just trying to be honest.

“He really bleeds for the coaches,” Ley said. “It really does bother him, I think on a personal level, when guys get on him when he doesn’t perceive any good reason.”

He has critics. A Sports Illustrated article last season accused Dick Vitale of self-promotion, saying “the ego of college basketball’s frog prince is out of control” and that “his self-importance is starting to get in the way of his often perceptive commentary.”

The article described what Dick Vitale said on the air during two games: Dick Vitale having dinner with Ohio State’s Gary Williams, lunch with Michigan’s Bill Frieder, talking with Ohio State guard Curtis Wilson (with Wilson begging Dick Vitale to call him “Colonel” on the air), getting the scoop on whether North Carolina’s J.R. Reid will go hardship in the NBA draft. Lots of Dick Vitale, little analysis.

“I thought that was a total unfair thing,” Dick Vitale said. “John Chaney told me things (during the NCAA tournament). I was up with him until 1:30 in the morning, just John and I. ... Now he tells me a lot of things. Why shouldn’t I share that with the people?”

When Dick Vitale’s father finished his day shift pressing coats in the factory, where he would get paid by the coat, he would put on a cop’s uniform and be a security guard until midnight. Seven in the morning until midnight. Every day. And Dick Vitale doesn’t think what he does, as a result, is really work at all.

He was a good young athlete -- a guard, a quarterback, a pitcher. But a childhood accident left his left eye virtually useless. It meant he couldn’t pursue an athletic career when he matriculated at Seton Hall. It took him away from the games. In fact, Dick Vitale was as far away from big-time arenas as one can get in 1971, when he was teaching sixth grade.

But he loved basketball, and stayed connected. He still talked the game, was in locker rooms when kids grumbled about not getting any playing time -- shortened to PT. He heard kids talking about other kids -- “he thinks he’s a Rolls Royce player.” And he remembered.

He became a successful high school coach in his native New Jersey. He went to Rutgers, took a pay cut and was an assistant for two seasons. He wanted the head job. When it passed him by, he was off to the University of Detroit -- a basketball program going nowhere fast.

There, he compiled a 78-30 record in four seasons, including a 25-4 season in 1976-77. A stomach disorder helped force him out of coaching, but as the school’s athletic director, he helped set records for attendance and ticket sales. Then followed a year-plus-12-games run with the Pistons, during which he went 34-60 before being fired. The job at ESPN soon followed, but he was still just famous to those who were plugged in. Two years ago, Dick Vitale teamed up with Keith Jackson when ABC renewed its college basketball coverage. What was merely big became unwieldy.

“He’s the hot, and I can be the cool,” Ley said. “I also know that there’s a large constituency out there reaching for the channel switcher, so I have to speak for them sometimes. I have to zing him sometimes.”

“I have the greatest job in the world,” Dick Vitale said. “I am on a fantasy trip. I don’t know when it’s going to end. I know it all comes to an end when they put the blond, blue-eyed guy here. But in the meantime, I’m using the ball. I’m wheeling it, dealing it, and I’m not letting the ball use me, because I am putting away some pesos for later on in my life.”

But there is despair, genuine despair, in his voice when he speaks of missing his two girls win the Florida state tennis championship, asking his wife from an airport telephone booth if they hit winners and then waiting to fly to the next game, the next crowd.

“It was such a thrill,” he said. “And I wasn’t there to be a part of it. And all those things I can’t get back.”

The game remains. It always will.

“I was with him in a golf tournament in Florida,” McGuire said. “In August. He’s talking about the Great Alaska Shootout. I said, ‘That’s four months away.’ C’mon, Dick, please. Nanook of the North, I call him.”

He is off, now, waiting for another tipoff. Where he is king. Where kids love him. Where he is needed ... .

The Vitale Zone.