The Ball Is in His Court : Mavr Albert Expands His Calls to the NBA on NBC

Marv Albert has been lauded as the “hard est-working man in sports television.” Since joining NBC in 1975, he has broadcast football, boxing, hockey and hosted baseball’s pregame show.

But this winter and spring, in what he has described as “a dream come true,” Albert is announcing his favorite sport, basketball, for the network.

“I grew up with basketball,” said Albert, who will call the 41st NBA All-Star Game Sunday at Charlotte.

“Being from Brooklyn, that’s all we did. All you need is a hoop and a ball. You could play one-on-one or just shoot around if nobody else was around.”

Although Albert was NBC’s initial selection, for a time it looked as if he wouldn’t be broadcasting the All-Star game. When NBC shuffled its NBA announcers days before the Nov. 3 season opener, the assignment fell to Dick Enberg.

Last month, Enberg, who debuted as an NBA announcer with the Lakers-Chicago Bulls game Feb. 3, deferred to Albert, believing that Albert’s long association with the NBA made him better-suited for NBC’s first NBA All-Star telecast.

Albert’s first ties to the league came as a teen-age ball boy for the New York Knicks in the 1950s. By 1963, he was assisting Marty Glickman on the team’s broadcasts.

In an era when relatively few NBA games were telecast, Albert first gained prominence as Knicks radio announcer during their first championship season, 1969-70. His call of “Yes!!” when a Knick would hit a key shot would be imitated by many New York youngsters.

Albert remains with the Knicks as its announcer on the Madison Square Garden Network. He bristles at the suggestion that his connection to the Knicks could harm his credibility on NBC telecasts.

“I think the situation has changed in network television,” Albert said. “In recent years you had situations where Vin Scully, the voice of the Dodgers, was one of the key voices of major league baseball. You certainly have that with Tim McCarver, the voice of the Mets, who is the guy for baseball at CBS.

“So I think that perception has changed, but I’ve always tried to be very, very objective and sometimes maybe opinionated, particularly on the New York level. So I don’t think if anybody has heard those broadcasts, there would ever be an accusation.”

Sunday’s game from the Charlotte Coliseum marks the second time in as many months that Albert has broadcast an all-star game for NBC. Last month, Albert handled the NHL All-Star Game. Albert believes the NBA’s All-Star Game is superior to the NHL and NFL’s versions because the physical contact is toned down in the latter games.

“The NBA game is somewhat of a schoolyard variety, but you see the guys ad-libbing and having a good time,” Albert said. “Baseball is not usually a contact sport and you don’t have to take that aspect away from it’s all-star game. In hockey, you’re not seeing the same game that you see during the regular season because you take away the contact. People are out there not looking to get hurt and that takes the intensity away from it.

“In football, you can’t touch the quarterback and there are all kinds of rules. It’s almost like playing touch football when you watch the Pro Bowl. It’s just not the real game of football.”

To many viewers, Albert is most remembered as the host of NBC’s baseball pregame show, a role he misses now that CBS owns the rights to telecast major league baseball.

“That was a real ball for me to do, because I find baseball players, more so than any other athletes, really don’t like to be hit with direct questions,” Albert said. “I never had a situation where there were so many guys annoyed at what I thought were direct, simple questions. It was like, ‘Hey, you have the audacity to ask this.’ ”

In August, 1988, Albert interviewed then-Boston Red Sox slugger Jim Rice. Albert asked Rice about his love/hate relationship with Boston fans and media, his scuffle with Manager Joe Morgan and Rice’s not making a curtain call after ending a home-run drought. The atmosphere grew so tense that Bob Costas feared Rice would kill Albert.

“That was a possibility,” Albert said with a smile. “That particular episode with Jim Rice I was only dealing with questions that were to me, obvious.

“He just felt he was being embarrassed by being asked, to me, what were the simplest of questions. What do you want to ask Jim Rice--’Would you rather face the slider or the curve ball’--the usual pregame stuff that you get? It was fun to be able to do that, to annoy people from time to time.”

Albert puts boxing, basketball and football on the top of the list when it comes to sports producing the best players to interview. Baseball is on the bottom.

“I find baseball to be the most difficult,” Albert said. “There are a lot of good talkers in baseball. But I find for the most part, there are more guys in that sport who are very protective. They don’t want to deal with certain things if they’re not going well or they feel that someone has really done them wrong.”

The 41st NBA All-Star Game airs Sunday at 10:30 a.m. on NBC.