Marv Albert: From Street Games to the Pros

Back in the 1950s, when he wasn’t pretending to broadcast sporting events from his self-appointed second-floor broadcast studio at his family’s home in Manhattan Beach, Marv Albert was just like any other kid in Brooklyn. He played stoopball, stickball, punchball, slapball, Wiffle ball, and other street games of the time. But in that era, before “play dates” were organized by micromanaging parents for their offspring, the children in neighborhoods throughout the five boroughs in New York City just came out into the streets and improvised their own games.

Later on, Albert acquired more formal education (Syracuse University) and experience (MSG, NBC, YES, Westwood One). One of the legends of sports broadcasting, Albert is well known in New York for his past play-by-play for the New York Knicks and Rangers and nationally for his coverage of boxing and baseball as well as for the NBA, NFL, NHL, and NCAA basketball. He now covers the NFL for CBS, the NBA for TNT, and college basketball for CBS and TNT.

During the course of research and a subsequent interview with him, I uncovered a few less-well-known facts about Marv, which he confirmed:

1. He is an honorary member of the Stoop Ball Society.
Albert: Right. That was a big game. Huge in Manhattan Beach in Brooklyn. It was full of stoops. They sent me a certificate. I get their mailings on a regular basis, so I am up on all the stoopball activities around the country.

2. Years later, he had a stoop built onto his suburban home.
Albert: I did. Very popular item. But there’s a skill to that because you have to work on it. You have to hit [the ball on the point] just right. It takes hours of preparation. And it’s worthwhile.

3. First on-air job was at a classical music station.
Albert: Yes. WONO-FM in Syracuse. Part of my philosophy of taking anything just to get on.

4. Fired on the first day for giving the listening audience more baseball box score information than they bargained for.
Albert: I was a little overly animated when it came to sports. It was not exactly what they had in mind. It was a little too much, yeah. I don’t think it adhered to what their listeners wanted. That was not the demographic group we were hitting.

5. Later worked for a rock station under the name Lance Scott.
Albert: They didn’t like Marv Albert as a name. What a thrill that was to get on the air. It was a regular station. That was a great thing about going to Syracuse, the fact that it had a very good broadcast journalism curriculum. You had opportunities in the city. Few of us were able to get on the air, either doing news or rock-type stuff. I started as Lance Scott and then I went on to one of the bigger stations. That was a great experience being able to do that, in terms of being able to ad lib and kid around and experiment on the air.

6. Tom Brokaw wanted to trade jobs with Marv at certain times of the year.
Albert: Tom is an enormous sports fan. As great as he is at what he does, maybe he’s a frustrated sportscaster, I don’t know. But Tom would be at games all the time and would always come by and chat. I get a kick out of that. When you do games in New York or L.A., people I have admired will come by at halftime and just talk basketball, from Jack Nicholson to Steven Spielberg to David Kelley.