By the time the Super Bowl finishes, most of us will be exhausted. Ann Arbor resident Mike Tirico should be exhausted before it starts.
By the time the Super Bowl finishes, most of us will be exhausted.
Mike Tirico should be exhausted before it starts.
Two weeks ago, he announced the NFC championship game in Seattle. Then he flew cross-country overnight to do the New York Knicks-Dallas Mavericks game in New York on Jan. 19. Then he flew from New York to Milan, to spend two days scoping out the sites for the Winter Olympics, which he is hosting, then back to the U.S. – all the way to San Francisco – for Super Bowl week.
Tired yet? That’s nothing. Tirico will do the main broadcast of Super Bowl 60 on Sunday, Feb. 8, wrap it up, then minutes later scurry down to host NBC's Winter Olympics prime-time broadcast from a set, he says, on or near the football field.
That is historic. No American announcer has ever hosted a Super Bowl and an Olympics in the same day. Once finished, Tirico will then race to another plane to fly overnight to Milan to continue hosting the next 13 nights of competition.
“I have learned,” the 59-year-old jack-of-all-games says, “that sleep is something you do when you can.”
Hurry up and talk. Is there a more omnipresent personality in American sports than Tirico? You see and hear him on NFL football, college football, NBA basketball, NCAA basketball, golf, hockey, tennis, soccer. He’s done Summer Olympics, Winter Olympics, World Cups, Kentucky Derbys and Indianapolis 500s. He sits beside Cris Collingsorth, then Grant Hill, then Brad Faxon, then Johnny Weir. He talks to anybody. He talks to everybody.
“The idols I had as a kid were generalists,” explains Tirico, who grew up wanting to be like Jim McKay or Marv Albert. “They did everything.”
So does he. In fact, that could be Mike Tirico’s tombstone epitaph. “He did everything.” After 25 years at ESPN and now 10 more at NBC, he remains so unflappable that you want to search for his battery pack. Surely, he’s a cyborg.
Somehow, with a schedule so packed he should be changing clothes in airport bathrooms, Tirico never seems stressed on the air. He never appears tired, bored, confused, uneven; his looks never seem to change. No one performance seems lesser than the next.
So I ask him, has there ever been broadcast where, when you finished, you said to yourself, “I sucked?"
“Every one,” he says.
Looking for perfection in every broadcast
That doesn’t make Tirico paranoic. More like a perfectionist. He says he views a gaffe-free performance the way a baseball pitcher views a perfect game. It’s out there, he just has to find it.
“But even if I do,” he admits, “you're going to listen back to it and go, ‘Why did I say that?’ It's the constant bar you're reaching for.”
The bar started low and early. Here is a kid who heard himself broadcasting long before any of us did, as an only child of a single mom living in the lower level of a two-story row house in Whitestone, Queens. Young Mike Tirico used to walk around the rooms announcing imaginary games. Baseball was his passion. His grandfather, who lived upstairs, worked as a security guard at Shea Stadium and would sometimes bring home the best present from the Mets.
Not a used baseball.
A media guide.
“I was like a kid in a candy store,” Tirico delights in remembering, sounding like one. The stats! The bios! The year-by-year histories!
A sports nerd was born.
Tirico came to this on his own. There were no father-son ball tosses or patriarchal tackling sessions. Tirico’s father “was never part of my life.” He prefers not to speak about him, in part “out of respect to my mother, for what she sacrificed and did. She raised me from the beginning.”
Maria, his mother, now lives in Long Island, New York. Tirico says she is his biggest fan and will be carefully watching his performance during the Super Bowl, the first time he has ever called the big game.
“She rose from an entry-level bank teller to a branch manager for some of the bigger branches of a bank in New York,” Tirico says. “My work ethic, my attention to details, it’s all thanks to her.
“She is my hero.”
Maria could not, however, make her son taller or better at sports. By the time a teenaged Tirico hit high school – where he says his only athletic options were “pinch runner or defensive replacement” on the baseball team – he realized sticking around the world he loved came down to two things: sports medicine or sports journalism.
He chose the latter, enrolling in Syracuse University, which is pretty much the Mecca of wanna-be sports announcers, the alma mater of luminaries such as Albert, Bob Costas and Sean McDonough.
Tirico took the school like a hurricane. First, he hit the student newspaper, and as a freshman, earned a beat assignment: field hockey. Then came a gig at the radio station. Then an internship at the local CBS TV affiliate. That turned into a full-time job that Tirico managed concurrent with his studies, determined to stay in school and be the first in his family to graduate college.
He did weekend sportscasts and weekday reporting, sandwiched between a full load of classes. His graduation day, he recalls, was “ceremony in the morning, brunch with family in the afternoon, and on the air that night for the 6 and 11 o’clock news.”
If you want Mike Tirico summed up in a day, that’s the one.
'Downriver by marriage'
But Tirico is more than the sum of his innumerable broadcasts. He is curious, compassionate, eminently polite, intelligent and opinionated – when the red light is off. His recall is amazing. Sometimes when you sit with him you can see the wheels turning behind his eyes, processing what you’re saying and connecting it with one of a million sports memories he then shares.
He is also a father (of two), a husband (of 34 years, to his wife Debbie), and a proud Michigander (“I’m Downriver by marriage,” he jokes, referencing Debbie’s upbringing).
The Tiricos moved full-time to Michigan in the late 1990s and have been here ever since. Despite his New York roots, he considers himself a Midwesterner now, and admits he quietly pulls for Michigan-born athletes in all the sports he broadcasts.
Tirico resides in the Ann Arbor area, where, he says, he likes to peruse the salad bar at Plum Market, wearing his Syracuse hat and going completely unnoticed.
Which is funny for a guy in the TV business. But you get the feeling if announcers were to be forever heard but never seen, Tirico would yank on that Syracuse hat and be just fine.
“Nobody cares who the announcer is,” he insists. “You may enjoy watching a game because [someone you like] is announcing the game, but you're going to watch because it's a great game. It's good opponents. If people watched for the announcers, they’d put the best announcers on the worst games to improve the ratings.
“People don't come for us. They come to watch. And hopefully what we do is we enhance your experience. I had a boss at ESPN who had a good feel for this, and [he said] we have to ‘document, inform and entertain.’ You have to know which lever to pull at which time.”
Hosting the Super Bowl will be another bucket-list item for Tirico. (There aren’t many left, except perhaps a World Series.) And he knows his voice may be stitched like Peter Pan’s shadow to some unforgettable play come Monday morning. So he studies the teams and players all week from a thick binder, goes to practices, does interviews. But he doesn’t rehearse catchphrases.
“I'm not going to go in with a sheet [that reads] ‘Oh, here's a Sam Darnold touchdown! This is Darnold's delightful moment!”
Reminded that Neil Armstrong’s famous “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind” supposedly was thought up by Armstrong on the way down the staircase, Tirico quickly agrees. The moment – and the image – must avoid prepackaging.
“We are writing captions,” he says. “We're writing captions to great pictures. It ain't about my caption. It's about the caption matching the great picture that makes it memorable.”
One-of-one in broadcasting history
One thing you will rarely hear Tirico talk about is race. He is most certainly the highest-profile Black announcer in sports today. Only one other Black play-by-play announcer has done the main Super Bowl broadcast (Greg Gumbel) and only one other has ever been the main host for an Olympics (Bryant Gumbel, Greg’s brother.)
Tirico’s career, which now includes hosting five Olympic Games, is so significant, The Athletic recently ran a piece suggesting that his departure from ESPN to NBC in 2016 knocked dominoes in motion that changed the face of American sports broadcasting forever.
But the play-by-play seat is not, to Tirico, a bully pulpit. He doesn’t make it one over Black and white issues “in part because my mom's white and I'm mixed race. I think my body of work has been my body of work, by which I’ve earned all of these assignments (Super Bowl, Olympics, etc.) by hard work. …
“After 35 years now being on network TV, I hope that I'm judged for what I do, and I hope our society is understanding of that. Hopefully I'm seen as a good announcer, not another word in there to describe what I do.
“But I've never really gotten deep into that because my mom is white, I'm mixed race, and that's the world I grew up in. So there's no faking it. It's real.”
Sunday will be historic for other reasons. One man, hosting America’s biggest sporting event, followed by his hosting one of the world’s biggest sporting events – all in the same night.
Such pressure might crush a lesser announcer. But expect Tirico to be the same genial, smiling, well-informed presence he somehow manages to be, sport after sport, week after week, year after year. It would seem by now that deadlines, technical issues, new sports, weird names, commercial breaks, nervous producers and hundreds of millions of viewers would have figured this much out: Mike Tirico does not rattle easily.
“That's what I love about this job…There's no backspace. There's no Wite-Out. There's no cut and delete. You got one shot to do it. That's the adrenaline rush.
“I absolutely love that part of our job.”
Santa Clara. Milan. Super Bowl. Olympics. Broadcast booth. Prime-time set. The Beatles didn’t write that song for him, but Mike Tirico could wake up every day humming “Here, There and Everywhere.”
Still, it’s not the grueling race he runs that’s most impressive, it’s his seeming lack of sweat.
Hurry up and talk.
Few men do it better.
Contact Mitch Albom: [email protected]. Check out the latest updates on his charities, books and events at MitchAlbom.com. Follow @mitchalbom on x.com.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Mike Tirico of Ann Arbor is TV sports' busiest man, and he loves it
Category: General Sports
