Dick Vitale is finally getting his NCAA Tournament game. And he’s doing it with Charles Barkley.
ESPN and TNT Sports announced Monday that Vitale and Barkley will work two games together this season. The first is Kentucky-Indiana on Dec. 13 with Dave O’Brien on the call. The second is a First Four game during March Madness on TruTV, with the play-by-play announcer still to be determined.
This is a long time coming for both guys, especially Vitale, who has never worked an NCAA Tournament game because CBS owned the rights for most of his career before partnering with Turner. Vitale twice turned down opportunities from CBS because of his loyalty to ESPN, once in 2006 and again a couple of years ago.
“Dick has meant so much to the game of basketball, and we have long felt he deserved an opportunity to call an NCAA Men’s Tournament game, and we are delighted he has finally agreed following several offers,” said CBS Sports exec. Harold Bryant in a statement. “Having him call the game with Charles will be must-see TV and a great way to tip off the First Four.”
Vitale has battled multiple forms of cancer over the past four years, including melanoma, lymphoma, and vocal cord cancer that required surgeries and kept him away from broadcasting for nearly two years. He declared himself cancer-free last December and returned to the air in a limited capacity in February. Now, he’s getting the NCAA Tournament opportunity that eluded him his entire career.
Vitale has been synonymous with college basketball at ESPN since 1979. He’s raised millions for cancer research. He’s a Hall of Famer multiple times over. The fact that he never got to call an NCAA Tournament game was always one of those weird footnotes to an otherwise legendary career. Now, at 86, after everything he’s overcome, he finally gets that chance with someone who publicly said he wanted to work with him over a decade ago.
“I told these guys one of my goals is to do a game with Dick Vitale,” Barkley told Richard Deitsch, then of Sports Illustrated, in 2013. “I would love to do a game with Dick Vitale because I think he has been great for college basketball. It’d be good for the game.”
Vitale told SI at the time that he’d love to do a Big Ten with Barkley; now he’s getting a chance to do so nearly 12 years later. And an NCAA Tournament game, too.
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.