Hubie Brown had just taken her first university coaching work in 1968 and did not expect him to be asked to teach.
Then, for his year as an assistant at William & Mary, he taught two elective basketball courses.
Brown, now 91 years old and ready to work his final game as a radio station, never stopped teaching the sport in more than 55 years since then. But his audience grew from university students to players, coaches and viewers around the world.
“It is the most notable and is not a hyperbole: it has probably taught more people about the basketball game than anyone who has lived,” said Transmission Partner Mike Breen.
Brown and Breen will work on the ABC broadcast of the Sunday game between Philadelphia and Milwaukee, where Brown obtained his first NBA opportunity as an assistant coach with the Bucks teams with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Oscar Robertson in 1972.
During the next five decades, he moved from the coach’s box to the television table and back, winning induction to Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2005 for his contributions to basketball.
Brown has called 18 NBA finals between television and radio during his 35 years as a national television and radio analyst. However, he says that he will be nervous on Sunday as he was before doing all games, despite his extraordinary preparation that included seeing both teams play at least twice in the week before.
“You’re always nervous,” Brown said. “That is me. I don’t worry about anyone else. Because you want to paint the image, you want to be able to educate the fan for another level of specialization, and you realize that it is a team that does it, not yourself”
The team, for Brown, is his partner along with the director and producer. The time they spend together preparing, becoming a family, reminds you of training.
It is not surprising that their players recognize aspects of their training in their transmission.
“I loved listening to it, because it was quite different from any other station in the air,” said the member of the Bernard King Fame, who directed the NBA in annotations while playing for Brown with the New York Knicks in 1984 – 85.
“And I think that fans who love basketball, the complexities of the game, he would help the viewer to understand exactly what happened and why it happened. And therefore, the spectators are being educated while they see the game, not only being being entertaining, and that was a great mark of what he did as a broadcast. “
Those who heard over the years recognized some of Brown’s registered trademarks, such as calling the “the painted area” and offering strategy advice for a team saying “what it owes.”
“My favorite is when I was very happy with a play, as I always said: ‘That’s all! That’s it! That’s all!'” Breen said. “And then, when he got angry, it shows when he got angry, when you weren’t playing well, only in the tone of his voice.”
Brown was so detailed in his own training that King said that the Knicks even had a specific game for when an opponent lost a free kick, called Power Right, in which the striker would run on the left side, crossed the lane and publish the block right.
Then, when Brown was impressed with what other coaches ran, he wanted to highlight it.
“That is always a tribute to the coaching staff to prepare their teams, and you will never want to not be able to emphasize that to fans when you see it,” he said.
Brown had no experience or television plans when he approached him for the first time to work in the USA Network in 1981. He would train the Knicks again, and then transmitted again from the moment he left in 1986 -87 -87 Season until returning to training in 2002 with Memphis, where he would win his second prize to the NBA year coach.
Even when Brown ended there, he had not finished being a coach. Breen was calling the NBA finals in ABC for the first time in 2006 and was nervous, trying too much to follow the instructions to adapt their vocabulary to the spectators for the first time that the event would draw.
In the first time of waiting, while Miami and Dallas received their instructions, Brown gave some of his.
“He grabbed me by the arm, and grabbed him strong, and looked me in the eye and he says: ‘He only calls the game the way you always call him and we will be fine,'” Breen said. “And it relaxed me.”
On Sunday, it will be Bree’s turn to help Brown after a difficult last year in which both his wife and his son died.
“He is not interested in the fact that people bathe him of love and taxes,” Breen said. “But the goal is to let it analyze the game as always does, teach the game to the spectators, but at the same time pay the tribute that it deserves, because it has given its life to the game.”
