When Stacey King hung up his sneakers in the late 1990s after a solid if unremarkable professional basketball career, including as a member of the Bulls’ first three championship teams, there was no way to predict what he would become on Chicago’s sports scene.
But he found his calling as the voice of the Bulls for 18 years and attained a status bestowed on only a few in this town: the likes of Harry Caray, Ron Santo and Mike Ditka.
We were among the Bulls fans shocked and deeply saddened to learn of the death on Sunday of King at the age of 59. As the team finally had turned the page from a desultory era and hired a young new general manager and improbably landed the fourth pick in the upcoming NBA draft, we looked forward to hearing Stacey King soundtrack the upcoming era in the style only he possessed.
King was probably best known for his large assortment of catchphrases. “Give me the hot sauce” became the title of his podcast. “You can drive home safely, Chicago, beep beep” after Bulls wins was silly but somehow endearing. When Jimmy Butler was playing for the Bulls, King dubbed him, “Jimmy G. Buckets, the G stands for gets.” There are countless others.
His exuberant personality made even the disappointing Bulls teams of recent vintage worth watching. There are a ridiculous 82 games in an NBA regular season. That means plenty of clunkers, even when teams are decent.
Coupled initially with longtime Bulls play-by-play man Neil Funk and then with the excellent Adam Amin, King was the rare sports analyst who could make a subpar affair entertaining viewing.
“I guess nobody’s irreplaceable, but he was pretty close,” Funk said Monday morning in a moving remembrance of King on WSCR-AM 104.3 The Score. Funk recalled how he truly understood he was just “a passenger on the Stacey King bus” after King’s call of one of Derrick Rose’s most impressive dunks that countless accounts on X reproduced following news of King’s death.
But his on-air presence wasn’t the only reason King was loved. He habitually would stay for an hour or longer after Bulls home games to meet and talk with any fans who wanted time with him. Check out King’s X account. Many of his posts (and there were many) were positive responses to people who wanted to meet him after the game, often with their children.
Few celebrities offer so much of themselves to the public.
There was so much more to this great man, beginning with his primary qualification for his job — a wealth of knowledge about the game. King took a backseat to no one in the broadcast business on that score, clearly describing defensive lapses (and there were many, unfortunately, in recent years for the Bulls) as well as offensive sets.
Of all the catchphrases he had, our favorite was maybe his most basic: “It’s a simple game.”
King, a post player in his playing days, celebrated big men in basketball. And when a center on the Bulls (in recent years, it was Nicola Vučević) would get in a mismatch and pin a smaller defender on his back, King would plead for guards to get him the ball so he could score easily. Oftentimes, to King’s chagrin, Bulls guards would fail to do so, hoisting up three-point shots instead. But, when they fed Vooch the ball, we would exult along with King.
“It’s a simple game.”
Joni Mitchell sang it back in the day: “Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone.”
Unlike Caray and Santo, whom we knew we would lose soon before we actually did, we just assumed we would have many more years of Stacey King.
His loss stings.
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