LOS ANGELES >> UCLA honored Dick Enberg Thursday night, which makes them even.
For 12 seasons Enberg honored UCLA basketball by narrating the exploits of Lew Alcindor, Bill Walton and the rest of John Wooden’s ruthless college basketball tyrants. The games were on KTLA and were televised live on the road, tape delayed at home.
Back then college basketball was only visible in newsprint. It did not exist on national television. The sheer grandiosity of Alcindor made it possible for the home telecasts and when UCLA won three national championships with him, two more with Bill Walton and two in between, the networks finally bought the idea that the NCAA Tournament was worth it.
Enberg was the Bruins’ voice from 1967 through 1978 and in one nine-year period he watched them lose only 12 games. He also narrated Wooden’s final season in 1975, which ended with an NCAA championship game victory over Kentucky, in the same San Diego building where the Ducks’ AHL team plays today.
“I always talked about the 1968 game with Houston, and then the loss at Notre Dame that broke the 88-game winning streak,” Enberg said before Thursday’s game with Oregon. “Coach Wooden would hear me talk about how important those games were and he’d say, ‘You know, Dick, we did win a few games ourselves.’”
As he spoke, North Carolina and Duke were playing on a nearby TV and the Indiana-Purdue replay was on another. On Wednesday night you could watch Stanford at Arizona, and Cal at Arizona State. It has to be a really, really obscure college game if TV avoids it altogether. Such saturation bombing is now taken for granted. The games generally have gruesomely bad ratings as the product is sliced into irrelevant slivers. With a 68-game NCAA Tournament, everybody knows the regular season is a charade.
That wasn’t true during Enberg’s time. The Bruins had to win the conference to get an invitation to the NCAAs. They usually had no problem doing that, but when they traveled to Maryland in 1976 or played North Carolina State on a neutral St. Louis court in 1974, those games were events.
By then Enberg had spun his UCLA visibility into NBC’s main chair. He was flanked by Al McGuire, the ex-Marquette coach who spoke in his own original tongue, and Billy Packer, an Xs and Os technician who helped educate the new national fan. Packer was feisty and McGuire funny and the two jabbed and sparred in an organic way, far from the staged stare downs that pollute today’s morning cable.
When Dick, Billy and Al would show up at Louisville, North Carolina or Notre Dame, they lent currency to the event. They were there when Michigan State beat Indiana State, Magic over Bird in the 1979 finals, and the game, as Enberg said, “became a rocket ship.”
“But that game really wasn’t very good,” Enberg said. ‘The most significant game happened in 1968.”
TV executive Eddie Einhorn ran TVS, which produced bowl games that some over-the-air channels picked up. He dreamed up a UCLA game at Houston in the Astrodome, which was still a legitimate Eighth Wonder of the World,, not a thimble next to a Super Bowl stadium. Wooden didn’t want the game, but athletic director J.D. Morgan did. Morgan told Einhorn that he had to use Enberg for play-by-play. Enberg was in a dugout, looking up at the game and he recalled hearing the stampede of Houston fans, right over his head, as the Cougars won by two points in front of 50,000.
Enberg, of course, went on to broadcast every sport at the highest level. At 82, he retired from San Diego Padres’ games in 2016. His significance was drowned out by the salutes to Vin Scully, but Enberg’s voice and enthusiasm and subtle humor wore well through the decades.
The wins blurred, but one moment remains as vivid as a cloudburst. There was the night Oregon decided to play stall-ball, well before the shot clock, and UCLA obliged. Enberg found himself talking about next week’s opponents, the opponents the week after that, and finally he ran out of material. So he began humming “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head,” the Burt Bacharach theme song from “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.”
He couldn’t think of the words, but some UCLA students provided them and one night he sang the song at midcourt. A music professor from UCLA then wrote him a letter congratulating him for finding notes that no one knew existed.
There are far more notes these days, but no one’s sure if it’s music.
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