Staying For One Last Shot At A Banner

Jared Weiss @JaredWeissNBA
about 2 hours ago
“If I had to pin myself down, I would say, ‘Yeah, next year will probably be my last year.’” Mike Gorman will be back for one last season as the voice of the Celtics.


Bob
MY NOTE: We didn't get it done for Tommy, let's finish the job for Mike.

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https://theathletic.com/4704413/2023/07/26/with-health-scare-behind-him-mike-gorman-is-ready-for-one-last-season-as-celtics-voice/?source=user_shared_article



23-24 = One last go around on the Mic for Mike. One of the best to ever crack it open…


Jared Weiss

BOSTON — Mike Gorman has spent his life adjacent to the spotlight. For over 40 years, his voice has been the soundtrack to nearly every moment of Celtics history.
You see Larry Bird, Paul Pierce or Jayson Tatum, but you hear Mike Gorman. You just rarely see him and he’s fine with that.
For someone who talks to millions of people for a living, Gorman often hides in plain sight. He says he’s not one for long conversations: “Even my wife tells me I should talk more.”


He typically likes to sit back, watch and listen. But one day in February, there was a moment when he needed to speak up and ask for help.
“I was having lunch with my brother and sister and I remember distinctly looking down at my plate, putting something on my fork and then looking up,” Gorman recalled. “All of a sudden, my sister was gone from my field of vision.”
He looked to his left, and everything seemed “a little squiggly.” Then he veered to his right and was met with darkness. There was no pain, no injury. Just sudden, perplexing blindness.
The 75-year-old Gorman could have panicked, but he’s been stoic his whole life. Even in the biggest moments of a Celtics game, his calls are clean, consistent and concise. He never looks to dominate the moment, but rather to do his part and let the scene do the talking.
Surrounded by two of the most important people in his life, he could have leaned on them for support. But he simply stood up, said, “I gotta go, I’ll talk to you later,” and walked out the front door as they sat baffled.
“You look down and one second later, everything’s gone. It’s frightening because I thought for sure I was having a stroke, to be honest with you,” Gorman said. “As I was walking up Atlantic Avenue, I couldn’t walk in a straight line and it was like one of those expressions where you’re blind in one eye and can’t see out of the other. People were looking at me like I was drunk or whatever.”
He didn’t want to call an ambulance and make a scene. He could have at least ordered an Uber or flagged down a cab, but there was something about solving this problem himself that just seemed right in the moment.
“I guess (calling an Uber) would have made sense, but I wanted to get back control,” Gorman said. “It felt like control of my life was slipping away and so it seemed much easier for me to put my head down and take off rather than try to get a lift and explain to them where I’m going and why I’m going there.”

Gorman and his wife walked to the ER at Mass Eye and Ear, where doctors eventually told him he had a detached retina and should rest at home while they scheduled his surgery. He would be fine, but doctors warned if he had waited a week, it could have been life-threatening.
“I ended up a little more than one day from sitting there at lunch to laying on an operating table with someone going into my eye. I had no choice it turned out. I called my doctor and he said, ‘Sit right where you are and say yes to everything they ask you.’”
The retina detached on a Saturday and he was on the operating table by Monday morning. Then a few days later, he arrived at Madison Square Garden with a mysterious eye patch. Then he went on 98.5’s “Toucher and Rich” show two days later to explain the situation, joking he had to dispel rumors he was dressing like Johnny Depp in “Pirates of the Caribbean.”
But calling the game was a struggle. When the ball would head up the court to his right, it would often disappear from view. He could barely see the numbers on players’ jerseys to know exactly who had the ball. He remembered it being the first time he was getting consistently hammered on Twitter.
Though he pushed back on fans calling him too old to keep doing the job, they were right that he could barely see what was going on out there.
“I still thought I could do the games and it wouldn’t be an all-out disaster,” said Gorman. “But I was going to have to look at not doing any more basketball games this year just because (the doctors) want to be conservative and I wasn’t gonna do that. I wasn’t physically sick or in any pain and just couldn’t see. But that’s kind of the bottom line of your job. I tried to fake it.”
When longtime Celtics PR director Jeff Twiss asked Gorman how he was doing later that week, he had a simple response.

“I told him, ‘You’ll have to tell me which of the two of you I should answer,’” Gorman said with a chuckle.
Gorman always wanted to retire on his terms, and yet was having fun with a scary condition that threatened those plans. He pushed through and was able to adjust as the season carried on.
It’s why those who know him well were hardly surprised to hear that when he thought he was having a stroke, he just tried to walk it off. When he was stationed in Spain in 1972, Navy Lieutenant Junior Gorman was called off a flight mission just before takeoff to sort out some paperwork, only for the plane to crash into a mountain in Northern Morocco.
He’s had some near misses. Whether it’s a buzzer-beater or a true emergency, nothing seems to rattle Gorman.
“You have to understand what he’s been through to understand that makes all the sense in the world to me. That’s Mike,” said Brian Scalabrine, Gorman’s broadcast partner. “If he told you the story of when he’s up on a telephone pole calling a football game or the world-class fight he called that was one of the worst fights ever, but he made it world-class, that’s Mike for you. He’s a do-anything type of guy. So of course he believes that he should just go to the hospital and make it out himself.”
Gorman spent the rest of the season back in Boston, only cleared to make the drive to New York and Philadelphia for games. But much to everyone’s surprise, he was cleared for air travel just in time for Game 6 of the Celtics’ first-round series in Atlanta.
The Celtics won convincingly in the end, a satisfying conclusion to what he expects to be the last game he’ll fly to in his career.
“If I had to pin myself down, I would say, ‘Yeah, next year will probably be my last year,’” Gorman said ahead of his 42nd season as the voice of the Celtics. “If we were looking at the roster from the ’90s right now, I’d be saying, ‘I’m done.’ But this team has a chance to win a championship and I’d just like to be around for that.”

Looking back on the day he tried to walk to the hospital on his own, Gorman is reminded of a time when he didn’t want to go it alone. Tommy Heinsohn, a basketball icon who had left a Hall of Fame playing and coaching career behind to be Gorman’s color commentator for nearly four decades, passed away in November 2020. Gorman wasn’t losing his partner, but one of his close friends. Suddenly, he didn’t know what to do with his own career.

“The main time I was thinking about leaving was when it was obvious that Tommy was not going to be able to work much longer and then he passed,” said Gorman. “A big part of me said, ‘Maybe I should pass with him and leave Mike and Tommy in the past.’”
With Scalabrine slated to officially replace Heinsohn, Gorman considered letting someone new join him to usher in the new era of Celtics basketball. The team was handing the keys of the franchise to a pair of young stars in Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown, so it made sense to do the same in the broadcast booth.
“But then I thought about the time when Tommy was sick and I asked (him), ‘What do you think I should do?’” Gorman recalled. “And he said, ‘Don’t go anywhere. Keep doing this. You and (Brian) Scalabrine will be OK.’ If Tommy thinks I should stay, I’ll stay and see how it plays out.”
Scalabrine already looked to Gorman as a mentor dating to his playing days, when the play-by-play guy would give him classic films to watch on team flights and a new book to read on a regular basis. Now that they were working together, they would get dinner on the road many a night so Scalabrine could sit back and learn from Gorman’s vast experience in all things outside of basketball.
“Mike was like my life sensei, you guys gotta understand that,” said Scalabrine. “I thought it was really cool when he would ask me questions about the Celtics, because I felt like it was the only thing he didn’t have the answers for.”
When he first retired from the NBA, Scalabrine joined Mark Jackson’s coaching staff in Golden State. But they had a falling out in their first season together and Scalabrine returned to Boston to contribute to the Celtics broadcast. He arrived as the unmistakable White Mamba who Celtics fans knew and loved, boisterous as he was incisive in breaking down the game.

But while his expertise was a shock to the system after years of Heinsohn grumbling about officials and cheering for the team, Gorman and Heinsohn helped him learn how to shape his broadcast to be accessible to the masses.
“I don’t think I become the broadcaster that I am today without Mike and Tommy,” Scalabrine said. “Those guys were so up-front and honest with me. They had to teach me what people want, not necessarily what I know, and there’s a big difference between that. There’s the entertainment side of it and the basketball side of it. I was really heavy on the basketball side and I listened to it one day and said, ‘Tommy’s right, Mike’s right.’ I gotta explain to the people what’s going on in a way that everyone can understand it. Not in the coaching talk that we all use together.”
Gorman always preaches the concept of the invisible third person, the buffer in their broadcast that gives the game room to breathe. He’s a naturally quiet and humble guy. Giving time to that third person feels like he is sharing the experience with the viewer and the game itself, giving the natural sounds of the arena a chance to speak.
He recalled Heinsohn once pointing to the court and saying, “We’re going to just talk about what happens right there.”
Gorman looks to announcers like Kevin Harlan, whose infectious energy dominates the game right from the tip, and feels more comfortable going the opposite direction. He doesn’t want to insult the viewer by continuously describing what’s on the screen.
“I tell Scal all the time, pretend there’s a third guy in the booth and you gotta leave him some space to talk,” Gorman said. “If you do that, you’ll have a nice balance of you talking, me talking and some silence.”
“We talk about that third (person) during breaks now,” Scalabrine said. “I thought I had to say something on every play, but it’s not like that. It’s far from that, to be honest with you. That’s why I shifted a lot to the excitement of the game. It’s more, ‘Oh man, look at that move!’ As opposed to, ‘Well on this play, Grant Williams sealed the guy so that Jaylen Brown can make this ferocious dunk.’ That’s just not important at the time.”
Gorman took pride in helping Scalabrine grow as a broadcaster and as a person. He has always seen himself as a facilitator to help others shine. So when he saw first-year Celtics coach Joe Mazzulla try to handle the spotlight after he was suddenly thrust into the head coaching job last season, he wanted to help.
“I volunteered to work with Joe a little bit because the few times I’ve been around him outside of a game or practice, he’s a nice guy,” Gorman said. “He’s nowhere near the person that comes on in these interviews who is stoic with quick one-word answers. He’s not that guy at all, so I’d like to see somebody get a hold of him and do some media training to get him to loosen up and just be more like himself. He does know the game, so it’s just a matter of whether or not he will be able to translate it.”
Just like Scalabrine, Mazzulla may be around for the long haul as Gorman steps aside a year from now. All Gorman can do is what he does best, tee them up and leave them room to do their thing.

Why has Gorman stuck around for so long?
He was already inducted into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame when he received the Curt Gowdy Award in 2021. He’s already called four Celtics championships and seen just about everything you could imagine in the NBA.


There’s hardly anything new to accomplish at this point, so he cherishes enjoying the game he loves in a way nobody else quite can.
“To walk into the arena and know that your broadcast position is right there at the half-court line, nobody in front of you but the 10 players, that’s really a cake,” said Gorman. “You look around and there’s 19,000 people in the TD Garden; well it’s 19,001 because I have the best seats in the house. So I don’t know if I want to give that up in a hurry.”
Scalabrine said he has been begging Gorman to stick around, but also is adamant he takes time to enjoy his life. There’s a difference in Gorman’s energy between a Monday night game against a lottery team and a Friday night showcase against the Sixers.
Even Gorman acknowledges not every game is a treat. Those long weeks with multiple games against mediocre squads hardly inspire excitement.
“There are times when I say it’s time to leave and then there’s times when we play a really good game and I say I’m not going anywhere,” said Gorman. “The hardest thing to do, and maybe this is the direct answer to what you’ve been asking me all along, is that “… Bad teams, I don’t really want to be there,” said Gorman. “Some of these teams, like the Orlando Magic, are pretty fun because they’ve got some young players. Indiana Pacers, if I never saw the Indiana Pacers again, I’d be fine. Detroit Pistons, if I never saw them again, it would be OK with me.”
Gorman started to feel that malaise in recent years as he noticed his seats in road arenas being moved further away from the court. In Boston, he and Scalabrine sit front and center with a table right at half court. But when he made that final road call in Atlanta in April, he was sitting at the rear of the lower bowl.
“I think the league is making a tremendous mistake by taking the announcers off the floor and putting them 30-40 rows back and selling those seats on the floor,” said Gorman. “I think it’s a short-term solution and it’s a bad solution for them. As a play-by-play guy, there’s an access you’re giving the viewers they can’t ordinarily get. As you’re hearing what the coaches are saying and guys talking to each other as they come off the floor, you can give the viewer the most accurate picture.
“If you’re sitting 120 rows back and you’re doing the game off the monitor and everyone looks about three feet tall because you’re so far back. What’s gonna happen is that the broadcast is not very good and that’s because you can’t get what you need for it to be special. For the Board of Governors to approve selling those tickets is really short-term (thinking).”
A group of broadcasters sent a letter to the NBA outlining these concerns and the league has sent a response as it works to address these issues, according to a league source who was granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the record.
With the proliferation of official and unofficial alternate broadcasts across the league, who knows where the classic play-by-play model is heading as the NBA product evolves? Gorman likes the idea of viewers being able to choose their own broadcast team on any given night based on what kind of call they want to hear.
But when he plans to walk away after this upcoming season, his replacement will have to step into the void he leaves behind right away.
“I don’t want to sound phony here, but I’d like to see somebody else have this job,” said Gorman. “I can’t be selfish about this. I’ve been doing this for like 41 years now. There’s a part of me that’s like, ‘Michael, let somebody else do this.’”
They might do the job differently, but that’s fine with him. He just wants a chance to pass the torch, give them some advice, and see what Celtics Nation looks like without him front and center.
“Once I decide that I’m gone, I’m going to be fascinated to watch the process to replace me. I don’t think it’s going to be a hard job to replace me, but I think it’ll be interesting to see what they choose and how they choose it,” he said. “Will the feeling around town be like, ‘Jesus, Gorman is finally gone. I thought he would never leave?’ Or will it be, ‘Jeez, I wish we had Mike back?’”
Sean Grande, the Celtics’ radio play-by-play announcer for the past 22 seasons who usually fills in for Gorman, is a logical candidate to be the heir apparent. Even Scalabrine has stepped in for Gorman when needed. But this will be one of the biggest gigs to open up in the NBA in quite some time and there will be plenty of options from which NBC Sports Boston can choose.
Whoever that eventual replacement may be, Gorman is confident it will work out because they’ll be doing it with Scalabrine.
“Scal has no ego. He has an ego in a lot of his life, but in terms of broadcasting, he doesn’t have any ego at all,” Gorman said. “He wants someone to give him constructive criticism. I think that’s going to be a big help to whoever ultimately steps into my shoes.”
Though Gorman might pop in for the occasional guest spot, he’s ready to embrace retirement. He’s spent decades traveling everywhere with the Celtics, missing all sorts of personal events to be a staple of everyone else’s life. Now it’s time to travel on his own terms.
“I just want to see the world. My wife will tell you that’s what we’re going to do and I think she might be right,” said Gorman. “Go rent a small apartment on a side street in Paris and live there for a month. I definitely want to do that in Madrid. Spain is a great country. When I was in the military, I was stationed there for two years. It’s really just the good life, so I would like to try that.”
Gorman is excited for one last hurrah, hoping a retooled Celtics team can finally deliver one last parade as he walks off into the sunset. He’ll still be glued to the games, but the best part of retirement will be sitting down with a new audience.
“Opening night two years from now, I’ll probably be in Phoenix sitting there with my granddaughter and I’ll be able to talk to her about games,” Gorman said. “That will be pretty cool.”

I really thought he might have been done this past season. He had a rough time of it. It will be strange when he goes, as it was when Johnny Most left us That voice, calm, reassuring, but still a fan. Losing Tommy took alot out of him, Life will go on, but it sure will be different. Go Mike, travel while you can, make the most of it all We will surely miss you when you finally leave, but we will never forget you. So let's make this a year to remember

https://www.nbcsportsboston.com/nba/boston-celtics/mike-gorman-larry-bird-game-winner-marriage-33-years/545025/?partner=yahoo&cid=yahoo


How a Larry Bird game-winner led to Mike Gorman's marriage of 33 years


Gorman is entering his final season as the voice of the Boston Celtics.


By Justin Leger • Published July 27, 2023 • Updated on July 28, 2023 at 8:04 am
 


How can you not be romantic about basketball?

Mike Gorman has had no shortage of memorable moments over his 40+ years as the voice of the Boston Celtics. Larry Bird's clutch steal and assist to Dennis Johnson to win Game 5 of the 1987 Eastern Conference Finals vs. the Detroit Pistons stands out as his favorite highlight, but another Bird play proved to be life-changing for the legendary broadcaster.

Gorman shared the story of how he may not have married his wife Teri had it not been for a Bird buzzer-beater.

"She was flying back from a year in France. We had a relationship on and off and we weren't sure whether she was going to go back to Pittsburgh or stay around Boston and see if we could get a serious relationship going," Gorman recalled to NBC Sports Boston's Amina Smith.

"Larry Bird hit a jump shot at the buzzer and I jumped out and skipped the (postgame) show, ran in my car, and saw her just as she was coming through the gate. If Bird hadn't hit that jumper and we went to overtime, I know she would have gone through the gate, I wouldn't have been there. She would have taken that as the answer and jumped on a plane to Pittsburgh and maybe I never saw her again. Instead, 33 years later, we're still together. So, that was my first big moment I would say."

Add that to the long list of reasons why Bird is one of the most clutch players in NBA history.

Gorman, 77, is entering his final season as the Celtics' play-by-play voice. The Hall-of-Fame broadcaster currently is the longest-tenured play-by-play broadcaster for a Boston professional sports franchise. He and the late great Tommy Heinsohn made up television's longest-running telecast duo (39 years) until Heinsohn's passing in 2020.


Bob


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Great story about Bird ending the game in time for Mike to save his relationship.