Sportscaster Marv Albert Observes 50-Years

Younger Marv Albert

Fifty years ago this Sunday, in a media world hardly imaginable today, a play-by-play icon got his break. Marv Albert broadcast his first New York Knicks game.

David Halberstam for the Bleacher Report writes, Radio still filled many voids in 1963. Ground-breaking play-by-play announcers—Mel Allen and Red Barber on baseball and Marty Glickman on football and basketball—delivered graphic word-pictures that mesmerized New York audiences.

Glickman authored basketball’s nomenclature on radio, and his pioneering broadcasts after World War II fostered interest in the game.

Albert chased his dream. He became a ball boy for the Knicks in the 1950s and got to know Glickman, who helped him steer his early career. Glickman critiqued the teenager’s practice tapes, gave him an opportunity to assist on game and studio broadcasts and even let the budding announcer read high school scores on the air.

The National Basketball Association was in its 17th season when WCBS Radio picked up the Knicks package in 1962-63. Timing was awful. The club languished through a feeble 21-59 season, the worst record in a fledgling league of only nine teams.

As fate would have it, when announcer Glickman was delayed returning from Europe on January 27, 1963, he convinced his bosses to have Albert, his 21-year-old protégé, fill in for him in Boston, where the Knicks were playing on that Sunday night against the Celtics.

The game was hardly the highlight of WCBS Radio’s Sunday schedule. In fact, the station chose to run the Texaco Metropolitan Opera live and the Knicks-Celtics game on tape.

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