Dick Enberg is a rarity, a soft breeze wafting gently in a world populated by howling windbags. He is an unassuming man in a business filled with outsized egos, and his personality is so controlled he is able to work comfortably with Merlin Olsen, Al McGuire and Bud Collins, his better-known and more flamboyant analysts. He remains without affectations though many in his field assume guises and roles, and his graceful work behind the microphone draws attention to the event he is covering and not to himself. ”I`m vanilla ice cream” is the way he often describes himself.
He is also one of the most respected sports broadcasters extant, the announcer who will do the play-by-play on NBC`s Super Bowl telecast, yet he still remembers the lessons he learned as a farm boy growing up in the tiny town of Armada, Mich. The character he maintains and the approach he employs were shaped there, by a hardscrabble existence and a tough old Finnish father who wasn`t free with praise, and a single moment from that long-ago childhood remains indelibly etched in his mind.
Dick Enberg was then one of just 33 seniors at Armada High School, and he enjoyed the status, he recalls, of being ”the big fish in a little pond.” He was the pitcher on the baseball team, the quarterback on the football team and the 5-foot-11-inch center on the basketball team that would win just two games with him playing that position. He usually fouled out, he remembers, but on the night of one of his team`s two victories, he played the whole game and ended the evening with a team-high 22 points.
He was full of himself afterward and he rushed eagerly back to the farm to see his father, who attended and critiqued every game his son played. The father was in bed by the time the son reached home, but that didn`t stop him from bursting into the bedroom to hear what he thought would be rave reviews. ”What did you think of the game?” the son asked in anxious anticipation.
”Great to win one,” the father replied laconically.
Again the son asked a general question, and again the father was noncommittal, and the pair proceeded to dance this minuet for many
uncomfortable minutes. Finally, the son could take it no longer, and he looked at his father and blurted, ”I don`t know if you noticed, but I scored 22 points.”
”Right, right,” the father replied from his bed. ”But do you know how many your man scored?”
”Uh, no,” the son said.
”He scored 24,” the father said.
With that, the son burst into tears, and, trying to control his emotions, shouted at his father, ”It would really hurt you to say something nice, wouldn`t it?”
The father got up from his bed then, walked over to his son, put his arm around him and said gently, ”Dick, the day you think you`re so good you can`t improve, then you can go only one way.”
”That wasn`t the answer I wanted to hear, but it stretches a lot of ways,” Dick Enberg says now. ”All I ever was as an athlete was a
complementary player. I tried to be a good team player, and I applied that to being a broadcaster. There are not enough role players around, but every team needs one. And if the team wins, the ring size is the same. If Merlin is acclaimed, if Bud is acclaimed, if Al is acclaimed, my name is usually mentioned in the same paragraph. That`s enough for my ego. As Will Rogers once said, and here I`m paraphrasing, we can`t all be heroes because if we were, there would be no one on the curbstone to applaud us as we went by.
”Merlin, he`s still my sports hero. Al, the same way. Bud, I wish I had his game when I go on the tennis court. There`s still that little bit of awe that comes with sharing the booth with these guys. That`s the farmboy fan in me, and that`s the attitude I`ve kinda grown into here. I go to some of the best sports events of the year, and the seat next to me is occupied by one of the experts of the game. Think of that. Who wouldn`t want to go to a De Paul game and not have Al McGuire sit next to him? Or a football game and not have Merlin Olsen sit next to him?
”I`m smart enough not to think I`m more important than I really am. Hey, I`m you the fan. I`m just lucky enough to sit next to these guys and, hopefully, I`m smart enough to ask the questions that you`d ask if you were there. My job is nuts and bolts and anecdotes–which is a tough job, as you know–but I think the most important thing for me to do is listen and appreciate what is happening next to me and follow up on that.
”And I think I listen because I`m really interested in what they have to say. I don`t have all the answers, and that goes back to my philosophy. I think your ego can get in the way of listening. I think there`s a whole new breed of announcers in sports, most of it caused by critics, who try to say something hoping to be quoted in the papers instead of saying what is right for the moment. One of the great disservices papers have done to the art of sportscasting is the quote of the day. I sense a calculated preparation of lines by some sportscasters who hope they can squeeze them in so they can be quoted the next day. They do that, and then Al McGuire comes out with something off the top of his head and beats them all by 10 points.”
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Dick Enberg graduated from Armada High School and carried his father`s teachings with him to Central Michigan University. He was a junior there when he traveled to WCEN, Mt. Pleasant`s only radio station, and applied for the dollar-an-hour custodial job it had open. ”Hey, you got a nice voice,” said the person taking his application. ”We`re looking for a weekend disc jockey. Want that job instead?”
”I got the job,” recalls Enberg, and then he laughs. ”It paid a dollar an hour. And I know somewhere, someplace, there`s a wonderful sweeping job still waiting for me.”
He progressed from weekend disc jockey to become the station`s sports director and the voice of Central Michigan, and then he moved on to Indiana University at the same time that the Indiana Sports Network was getting started. He auditioned for and got a job with that network, and from 1957 to 1961 he broadcast Big 10 basketball games while earning both a master`s and a doctorate in health science from Indiana. (His first broadcast partner was Phil Jones, now the CBS White House correspondent.) Then he was off again, this time to California State-Northridge, where he took a job as associate professor and assistant baseball coach. (One of the players he coached was the late Paul Edmondson, who pitched for the White Sox in 1969 and was killed in an auto accident the following off-season.)
Then in 1965, Angels` owner Gene Autry started his radio and TV network, and he offered Enberg a job at three times his princely associate professor`s salary of $6,000. ”How could I say no?” asks Enberg, with a laugh. He didn`t. ”I felt a little bit like a traitor to teaching, but within two years, I was doing the Angels, UCLA basketball, Rams football. That`s like leaving De Paul and becoming the announcer for the Bears, the White Sox and De Paul University. You`ve got to be lucky.”
You have also got to be good, which Enberg was, and he eventually progressed from Autry`s network into NBC`s top voice on tennis and horse racing, on college basketball and professional football. He won two Emmys and a plethora of other national awards along the way, but even now, as he approaches his fourth Super Bowl telecast, he reflects the teachings of his childhood.
He is preparing assiduously, poring over his own voluminous files, and he is searching, he says, ”for that one piece of information or that one anecdote that you know is a gem you can share. The one that will make the fan go, `Wow, I`ll talk to the boys about that over breakfast tomorrow morning.`
” He is concentrating especially on the Bear team he hasn`t seen all year, reading the reams of words written about it, and he is studying, he says,
”like I`m preparing for a physics test. I was given two weeks to pour it on and I am.” And when he heads into the booth on Sunday, he says, ”I know there will be two or three feelings.
”First, no question I`ll be more nervous coming on the air for this game than for any other game of the year. I know over 100 million people will be watching, and among them will be people like yourself. Every comment I make will be analyzed and criticized by every major paper in the United States, plus you get caught up in the whirlwind of the Super Bowl itself. As crazy as it seems, it has an impact on American society, and you get caught up in its importance. Two, I`ll tell myself to remember it`s only a game. Despite having three times as many cameras, twice as much replay equipment, whatever, we`re still doing a game that has 22 men on the field and will go 60 minutes unless there`s an overtime. I have to stay within that, and there`s always the temptation to go outside it. Third, there will be a lot of people watching on Super Bowl Sunday who haven`t watched a football game all year. So where do you draw the line so you don`t alienate your hard-core football audience but still interest those who don`t watch all year? You have to relate to the casual fan without taking away from or being condescending to the
connoisseurs.”
Will you sleep well Saturday night, I ask him.
”I don`t sleep well the night before any game,” says Dick Enberg, ever the father`s son. ”I wake up three, four times thinking of things. My mind is really spinning at such a high pace. If you could tell me which 10 percent of the material I`ve collected I`ll use, I`d sleep much better. But I know I have more in my mental computer bank than I`ll use, and I worry about what I call the law of meaningfulness. I have all this information, and I hope it comes out at the right time. It`s kinda like studying for a test, and I guess that is the art or skill of the job. It`s something, if I`m doing a good broadcast, that just erupts at the right time. I don`t know why. Then there are other times when I leave and think: `The moment was right. I had the information. Why didn`t I fit it in?`
”I`m very critical. I`m my own worst critic. I`ve never done the perfect broadcast. People always ask what was my best one. I haven`t done it yet. You see, my dad`s philosophy is still living inside me. I`m afraid that if I have done my best broadcast, I`ve only got one way to go.”
