When having various conversations in the AA Slack channel, I came to a strange conclusion: most of the well-known, beloved calls in recent history happened in games where our staff didn’t have a rooting interest. And when our teams did well, or won a title, or won in dramatic fashion, many of the calls fell somewhat flat.
So today, I asked our staff what their favorite calls involving their favorite teams were. Not all of these calls came in championships, and not all of them came when tension was the highest…but damn, they were good, and the fact that our teams were involved make them even better.
Joe Lucia: I’m a Manchester City fan, so the hardest part here is picking *which* 93:20 call is my favorite.
I’ll go with Peter Drury (with all due respect to Martin Tyler and Ian Darke), just to be different.
I’m also an Atlanta Braves fan, so Skip Caray’s 1992 NLCS call is getting a place (with all due respect to Sean McDonough, whose call for CBS was also great).
Finally, I’m a Baltimore Ravens fan. Weirdly, I can’t think of many memorable Ravens calls, so here’s Lamar Jackson pulling off a spin move and Kevin Harlan losing his damn mind.
Ian Casselberry: The first moment that came to my mind for this question was Gary Thorne calling Darren McCarty’s clinching goal for the Detroit Red Wings in Game 4 of the 1997 Stanley Cup Final.
Thorne calling hockey is a perfect fit with his excitement for a goal matching the exhale and joy that comes with your favorite team scoring. The jubilation for McCarty’s score was particularly strong because it was at that moment that Red Wings fans knew their team’s 41-year championship drought was going to end.
Thorne’s “McCarty SCORES! A magnificent goal!” felt even more appropriate because McCarty’s deke and stick-handling leading to that goal was so unexpected. McCarty was mostly regarded as a bruising forward, but did have some skills which he showed off there.
Another unforgettable call from my Detroit sports fandom was Dan Dickerson on Magglio Ordonez’s walk-off home run to win the 2006 ALCS and send the Tigers to their first World Series since 1984.
https://youtu.be/y0azRYW9I38
Joe Buck’s call on the Fox telecast also captured the occasion well, but Dickerson voiced the hometown joy (“OH, MAN!”) of a treasured moment in Detroit sports history.
Matt Clapp: Two calls really stick out to me as a Chicago Cubs fan, and from a very unexpected announcer.
Joe Buck was largely disliked by the Cubs’ fanbase, thanks to his St. Louis Cardinals’ roots (and I guess for reasons that some people just don’t like Joe Buck). But he won a ton of Cubs fans over during the 2016 postseason, with fantastic play-by-play work on the biggest moments in Cubs history.
My favorite call is probably of Miguel Montero’s go-ahead grand slam against the Los Angeles Dodgers in Game 1 of the NLCS. This is a classic Joe Buck call, in capturing the intensity and emotion of the moment with his call, followed by him just letting the crowd show the intensity and emotion for a full minute after the home run (and that was followed by Dexter Fowler homering on the first pitch of the next at-bat).
And then the final out of Game 7. Most Cubs fans will agree that Buck even had a better call than the longtime great Cubs radio play-by-play man, Pat Hughes, which was certainly a surprise.
Jay Rigdon: Matt taking some of the classic 2016 Cubs highlights meant I could go with maybe the most surprising ending to a game involving a team I cheer for.
In 2011, the Indiana men’s basketball season began with an unbeaten run of eight games. It certainly wasn’t the toughest start in terms of strength of schedule, but it included two true road wins (at Evansville and at N.C. State). Still, almost no one nationally was buying in, and for pretty good reason: Indiana had been very bad for the prior three seasons, the first three years of Tom Crean’s tenure in Bloomington. (Record: 28-66, with just eight conference wins.) At that point Victor Oladipo was still a mostly-unknown sophomore, and while Cody Zeller was a heralded freshman, he wasn’t seen as a likely lottery pick.
Kentucky, on the other hand, had plenty of those, especially Anthony Davis; they were also undefeated and ranked #1 coming to Bloomington. Watching with my brother, I remember feeling like Indiana could probably keep it close, which they did. And I remember thinking they would probably let it get away late, which they almost did, blowing a lead and finding themselves down two with seconds remaining. And then, this happened.
Dan Shulman and Dick Vitale nailed that call, and it’s the one I remember most, but I’ve also never forgotten longtime Indiana broadcaster Don Fischer’s radio call. You can feel how hard it must have been to call those prior three years of futility.
What a game, and what a pair of calls.
Ben Koo: I’ll share two Ohio State highlights from my college years. Oddly enough, I was at both these games, so my attachment them is purely based on YouTube playbacks.
First up is this great Gus Johnson call of Ohio State’s upset of undefeated Illinois (it was last game of the year, so Illinois was historically good). Yes, he’s loud and emphatic but he really nails the particulars in a pretty frenzied last ten seconds.
This next clip is Brent Musburger really in his prime, which is odd because he’s still behind Keith Jackson at this point in time. It’s really a flawless call. Musburger did the last three games of Ohio State’s regular season and really nailed all three games. I’ve always felt Jackson doing the National Championship 2 OT classic just felt flat and off in the wake of some really great calls by Musburger down the stretch.
Andrew Bucholtz: I’m a weird outlier who doesn’t really have many favourite teams and mostly watches sports because of interest in players or leagues. But I am unabashedly a fan of the Canadian Football League as a whole, and one of my formative sports experiences was watching the 1994 “Battle of the Border” Grey Cup between the B.C. Lions and the Baltimore CFLers (the first American team to ever play for the Grey Cup). I seem to remember the Don Wittman CBC call of Lui Passaglia’s last-second game-winning field goal as pretty good, but I can’t find it online, and amazingly, Gus Johnson was remarkably understated on the U.S. broadcast. So what we’re going with here is the CBC opening to the game, particularly Scott Oake’s intro (starting around 1:19):
“Well, none of the 81 Grey Cup games before this one has had quite the same significance. Because under the dome at B.C. Place today, an American team seeks to take the Grey Cup, a staple of the Canadian sports menu, back to the U.S. Fans streaming in here, the Can-Am battle has captured the interest of CFL fans. And here in Vancouver, the interest of these local fans rose tenfold when the Lions earned their place in the game. They’ll have a sellout, that will mean 59,000 fans.”
I remember this broadcast vividly for playing up the Canada against the U.S. stakes, something that was also felt by players and fans at the time. And there’s an argument that the U.S. expansion era worked out very well for the CFL overall, both in expansion fees that helped keep a financially-struggling league afloat and in rekindling Canadian interest in the game, and this Grey Cup was certainly a high point on that latter front. It’s one of the most memorable sports broadcasts I’ve ever watched, and this is a good excuse to look back at it.
