Bob Licht says he found a love for baseball while growing up
in Greensboro, N.C. Born in Detroit, he says the Tigers were his hometown
sports team.
He said he played baseball through high school and loved but knew playing the game wasn’t in his destiny. “Broadcast was the route
that I thought could keep me in sports,” Licht said during a phone interview
from his home in New Orleans.
That’s why Licht, at the age of 15, said began writing
broadcasters to find out how they got into the business. The first letter he
wrote was to the Tigers’ play-by-play broadcaster at the time, Ernie Harwell.
Licht says Harwell’s kindness inspired him to interact the same way.
“When anyone ever called me or wrote me, I always
responded,” Licht said. “Because I remember when I was 20 years old, and I
reached out, how angry I got
when people thought it was okay not to answer.”
In his 35 years in broadcasting, he has covered Syracuse
University basketball as a student for WAER, called numerous Triple-A baseball
teams, and served 16 years as the play-by-play announcer for the Charlotte/New
Orleans Hornets.
During his time in the Hornets organization, he served as manager
of the Hornets Radio Network and wrote a weekly column on the team website according
to his NBA.com biography page.
Licht enjoyed having multiple roles during his time with the
Hornets—which made his release from the organization in August 2012 that much
harder.
He says that was the first time in his career that he went
jobless for an extended period of time—a rarity in sports broadcasting.
“I made a million phone calls,” Licht said about job
hunting. “My rule of thumb from about the middle of August until the FOX gig
happened was to apply for a job a day and to call everybody in my address
book.”
Currently, Licht is a freelance broadcaster for FOX Sports,
which means he covers events for FOX when he is needed.
Licht has enjoyed his career thus far, but he still wants the
chance to call MLB.
“When I was 15, that was my dream,” Licht said. “I’ve got
all the way to Triple-A with several teams. I would say if somebody told me
“you can name your last job in broadcasting,” that would probably be it.”
Transcript
Bob Licht Interview Transcript
Q: You have a background in both baseball and basketball
mostly. Which sport would you say is your favorite to cover and why?
A: Well, in the depths of my heart it is baseball just
because I played it. And because it’s a sport that if your not a baseball fan,
you likely say things like “it’s a boring sport; nothing happens; I don’t
really truly understand it,” and all of those things are true. But the last
part of it is the most important: if you don’t truly understand baseball, then
you don’t realize that there is more going on when the ball is not in play than
any other sport. And that is one of the things that have always attracted me to
doing baseball. A very large skill is creating the picture of what’s happening when
that ball is not in play; not just when a guy hits a ball in the gap and you
have to track the base runners and the outfielder and the throw and everything
else. There are signals going on, there’s positioning of infielders, there’s a
catcher trying to kill time for the relief pitcher, and there’s a bullpen
going; there is just a variety of things going on. To me, that keeps your mind
very active and makes it a very interesting broadcast. Totally opposite of
basketball, which has the clock that baseball doesn’t have, which has the speed
up and down the floor, but also the pace can change at a blink of an eye. So
maybe that’s probably why I focused on those two sports. I thought they were my
two favorite sports; I thought they were my two strongest sports as far as my
on-air ability, but they also kind of covered both ends of the spectrum: one
being very high-paced, fast-paced, and the other having a totally different pace
everyday.
Q: What was your first experience as a professional when you
finally realized that you had made it?
A: Probably when I got the call to begin my NBA career. I
think every broadcaster, certainly play-by-play, dreams of being a big-league
announcer in some way. But I always thought that it would be baseball; I was
doing minor-league baseball and had had an association when the radio job
opened up, so they knew of me. And that is when I got my big break that
included both the NBA and the Triple-A team in Charlotte, the Knights, because
they were the same ownership. So that was an epiphany of sorts because I was
going to the big leagues, but I was also able to continue fulfilling my dream
of doing a lot of baseball. They were both professional jobs: one was minor
leagues and one was major leagues. That would have been 1996.
Q: You were with the Hornets for 16 years, so obviously you
were with them when they moved to New Orleans. Was it a hard decision to stay
with the team and move to New Orleans?
A: Family-wise it definitely was. Professionally, it was a
little bit easier to make that call to stay at that level. But, to me, anytime
you have to uproot your family, it’s a difficult decision to make, but it’s
worked out well; the family, I think we all call New Orleans home. And my three
kids all essentially grew up here. But at the time, I don’t think you could ask
that question and get a clear-cut answer other than “it’s always difficult to
leave a place that you feel is your home at the time.” So, it was.
Q: When Tom Benson bought the team a couple of years ago, it
obviously brought a lot of changes to the organization. Was it hard to have to
go away from the Hornets?
A: Yes. It was not of my choosing. But that is life in the
broadcast business in general, and particularly at the level that I have
achieved. The shock to me is that I had been in the broadcast business—if you
count the summer of my between freshman and sophomore years at Syracuse as the
start of my professional broadcast career because that was my first commercial
radio job, I would have been 19—in 35 years of professional broadcasting, that
was the first time I had ever had someone call me into his office and fire me.
Some people would say I was overdue because that’s not the norm in
broadcasting. You can get fired because of format change, you can get fired
because of ownership change, you can get fired—even though they won’t tell
you—you can get fired because they are going younger like a professional
franchise. You can get fired for no reason at all. You can get fired because
they are “going in a different direction.” For me to have survived that long
without having heard those words even once, you know I kind of felt lucky. But
it didn’t soften the blow any.
No comments:
Post a Comment