A friend of mine called one day and asked if I’d ever considered doing a column on the specialized language of sportscasters. He was referring especially to terms like “athleticism” and “physicality.”
I agreed with him that such words seem to exist only in the vocabularies of the guys behind the mikes, but his call immediately made me think of the Milwaukee Bucks’ first radio play-by-play guy, Eddie Doucette.
Remember Eddie? He made it his mission in life, I think, to create a colorful new lexicon to describe the game of basketball. His play-by-play was peppered with lots of terms for parts of the game and nicknames for the players. One of his “legacies” to the game as it’s played in Milwaukee is “Bango.” When Jonny Mac (Eddie’s nickname for Jon McGlocklin) hit the “rainbow jumper” (another Doucette invention), Eddie would yell, “Bango!”
Bucks fans picked that up, and when Doucette left Milwaukee to move to the West Coast, the Bucks had a mascot-naming contest, and Bango won. The club’s mascot is still called Bango.
In addition to Jonny Mac, Doucette had favorite names for some of the other players, too. Bob Dandridge was “The Greyhound,” Greg Smith was “Captain Marvel,” Lucius Allen was “The Rabbit.” Paul Mokeski was “Speedbump.” Doucette said Mokeski couldn’t stop players, but he could sure slow them down. In his autobiography, Doucette said Mokeski’s wife hated him for the nickname. “He wasn’t the most handsome guy, but I wasn’t talking about the way he looked, but the way he played.” He called Dick Cunningham the “Cement Mixer.” The “KO Combination” was Kareem and Oscar (Robertson). The combination led Milwaukee to a league title in the third year of the franchise.
Doucette invented a bunch of terms that sort of made their way into the specialized language of the game. “The Toaster” was the area in front of the basket where the players pop up and down. “The Boulevard of Broken Dreams” was Eddie’s description of when a player drives to the basket and has it rejected.
“Broadway” was his term to describe the lane. “The Equator” was the midcourt mark. “Cyclops” was the center jump circle. He also used “The Bullseyes” for the free throw area and the center jump circle. And “Downtown” or a “parking lot jumper” or a “Downtown J” was the three-pointer. He also used “home-run ball” for long shots.
Kareem Abdul Jabbar (Lew Alcindor when he first came to Milwaukee) was famous for his patented unblockable hook shot. Doucette called it a “Skyhook” because he said it looked like it was coming from high in the sky. Jabbar was 7 feet tall, and he shot the ball from the apex of his jump, so it probably was coming down from an arc of about 15 feet—a skyhook.
Before he became the Bucks’ radio voice, Doucette had been a DJ on a local station. There was no professional basketball team in Milwaukee before that. Doucette tells about meeting former college All-American Ray Patterson, the president of Wayland Academy, who was also the first president of the Bucks: “When it was announced that I was the broadcaster, they pulled me aside and told me I had to meet with the president of the team, who happened to be a guy named Ray Patterson (who later went on to run the Houston Rockets, and his son more recently was running the Trail Blazers). I can vividly recall going into his office and him saying, ‘Hey, you weren’t my choice. I didn’t know you were a broadcaster. But I’ll tell you what. In the state of Wisconsin we know high school and college basketball and nothing about the pros. I am going to give you one year to figure out how to sell these people on the game. At the end of one year if you don’t have it, you’re gone.’”
Doucette spent 16 years as the voice of the Bucks, the last several years working side-by-side with Jon McGlocklin as his analyst. Together they founded the MACC Fund, originally the Milwaukee Athletes Against Childhood Cancer (as a tribute to “Jonny Mac”). It was started because Doucette’s son was stricken with the catastrophic disease. Today, the organization is Midwest Athletes Against Childhood Cancer, but Doucette considers it his legacy to Milwaukee.
Doucette’s style was one of genuine enthusiasm, boundless energy and creativity. There’s no question that he helped shape the language and metaphors that define the NBA.
Categories
