 |
||||||||
 |
||||||||
|
||||||||
|
Sports shrink
By JOEL POILEY TAMPA PALMS -- When Jim Karvellas lounges by the pool at his Bristol Place apartment, he's as apt to strike up a conversation with a group of Swedish college students attending South Florida as with the doctor at Moffitt Cancer Center who lives upstairs. "I love people. People have things to teach me," said Karvellas, whose people skills and inquisitive nature have served him through a 40-year career as a sports broadcaster. "If you're a Russian, I'm going to ask you all sorts of questions about living in Russia and why you're living here. Same thing with the kids from Sweden." Same thing growing up in Chicago, in cities up and down the East Coast, and now in St. Petersburg, where he broadcasts an interview show called Beyond the Game. Heard Sunday mornings on WDAE-620 AM, Karvellas provides insights from his varied career and asks salient questions to unearth snippets of people's lives and backgrounds not usually heard on the air. "Beyond the Game was a perfect show for me to do because it's a show that gets into people's heads," said Karvellas, who moved to Tampa in 1997 to be near his daughter, Jamie, who helps produce the show. "It's almost like I'm operating on those people and I'm laying them open on the table and I can see inside of them. And I wanted to know what made those people succeed, and to draw parallels about their personalities as related to their successes on the athletic field. What was it about his relationship with a mother, a father, a mentor, a teacher in school, as is the case with Dick Vitale. It's fascinating to me." Karvellas' rich baritone was best known as the NBA voice of the Baltimore/Washington Bullets and the New York Knicks. Next to Chick Hearn, who died this summer at 85 after a 41-year run with the Lakers, Karvellas had the second longest on-air tenure of any NBA announcer, from 1962-93. But Karvellas became a familiar name to sports fans around the country because of his willingness to diversify. In addition to owning soccer teams in Baltimore and Washington, he was the voice of the Pele-led Cosmos in New York in the '70s and '80s. He was heard nationally doing tennis, golf and NASCAR. He also broadcast for the Orioles and Colts in Baltimore, calling the 1969 Super Bowl and World Series on national radio. "As a sports announcer you may be better at one or the other depending on your style. But doing all those sports made me more professional," Karvellas said. "You learn how to open and close events, fill time during delays in auto races, so those were all really important in helping mold me as an announcer." Karvellas poured his entrepreneurial spirit into the Celebrity Golf Association Tour in the early '90s. The tour was Karvellas' longtime dream come to life, mixing celebrities and scratch-quality golf. His involvement ended his NBA run. But as commissioner of the CGA, Karvellas displayed his knack for combining sports entertainment and marketing, some of which he gleaned from his friendship with sports owner and promoter Bill Veeck. Karvellas stayed with the venture through 1997. Now 67, Karvellas likes to reinvent himself every 10 years. He likens these shifts to a dip in the legendary Fountain of Youth. "I get out of the pool and I'm young again," he said, laughing. "I'm excited and ready to have something else to take on, like syndicating Beyond the Game. What interests me now more than anything is that I've started to take all the things I've learned, and all the reading I've done, and the things that interest me, like history and philosophy and sports, and I'm starting to put all those things together in one basket." Over the years he has worked with top broadcasters such as Bob Costas, John Sterling and James Brown, serving as a role model to some. Now the host of Fox NFL Sunday, Brown started as a color commentator working with Karvellas in the late '70s for the Bullets in Washington. "Jim was my first mentor in the business, and I'll never forget how gracious he was imparting his knowledge and friendship," Brown said. "He taught me about pace, timing and phrasing. More than that, he helped bring out my personality on the air and develop my own style." About the only thing that disturbs the affable Karvellas is the suggestion that he is too old to have opinions that might stir radio listeners. "When people get older, they're perceived as fossils. They're perceived as 'You've had your day,' " Karvellas said evenly. "I look at age being a big advantage to me, because I've had, through a lot of good fortune, a chance to experience a lot of things in sports and in life. And it's at this point in my life I really feel that I can be even more productive because I've learned all these things, and continue to learn." Karvellas hosted one of the first sports talk shows in the '60s in Baltimore, and he co-hosted The Play by Play Guys in Tampa several years ago with former Lightning announcer Larry Hirsch. His experiences lend perspective on the Tampa sports scene and a different view of talk radio. Unlike some marketers, he doesn't see Tampa Bay as too small or too unstable economically to support three professional teams. He also expects the Devil Rays' fortunes to improve with the hiring of his good friend Lou Piniella as manager. "Fans live vicariously through their teams," he said. "Especially towns that have an inferiority complex. I always felt the success of one team bled over to the other, and that's what's happening here now, like in Baltimore in the '60s with the Orioles, Colts and Bullets. This town is so attached to the Buccaneers that if they lose on Sunday they might as well declare Monday a holiday. Nobody is going to work anyway. "Conversely, when they win, I'm sure the work rate in this town is sky high because everybody is in a great mood. If you expand that, people are talking about the Lightning already, and before Lou Piniella makes one deal people are thinking in terms of what he might bring to the city and town. In Lou's case, it's respectability because he's got such a great name and he's a proud member of this community." Sports talk to Karvellas is about more than fans prattling on about the Bucs. It's about making people think. "I'm not so sure that we've got it right," he said. "I think the host of these shows should stimulate some really good discussion, rather than just sit back and get a cabdriver's opinion from Pinellas or a shoemaker's opinion from Brandon. "It's okay to listen to their opinion. Use it as a jumping off point to get into a really good discussion. But I think the host should do more homework and attack the subject and talk to the newsmakers about those subjects. Talk to the players, talk to the commissioner of baseball if we can get him, maybe (NBA commissioner) David Stern. "There should be more work done on sports radio than to just get on the air and use foul language or try to incite the people because you're going to get ratings. Otherwise, I think you're wasting everyone's time."
 © 2006 • All Rights Reserved • Tampa Bay Times
490 First Avenue South • St. Petersburg, FL 33701 • 727-893-8111 
|
From the Times |
