1991-01-31-sr-p23-dick-wright

[Sometime in the early 1970s (spring 1972?) Dick Wright was invited out to Reardan to speak at something like an atletic banquet. In his speech he referred to the Washington State B Basketball Tournament as the Reardan Invitational.]

January 31, 1991 Spokesman-Review Page 23:

Blow the whistle, you busher!

The Right Stuff

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Veteran broadcaster Dick Wright makes no apologies for seeing a game through Bulldog eyes.

Staff photos by Colin Mulvany

Broadcaster paints colorful local picture

By John Blanchette

Staff writer

The voices of the night gang up at 7:30 or 8 o'clock, doing their best to nudge golden oldies and call-in crazies off the dial for a few hours, at least.

The shots go up and the signals fade in and out at the whim of the wind and the wires overhead. The notion of basketball on the radio seems almost quaint anymore — aren't everybody’s games on TV? — and sometimes the voices are indistinguishable. Who's playing? Who’s winning?

But then a weird skip on a starry night might bring in a Chick Hearn, telling us how James Worthy’s pump fake put his defender “‘in the popcorn machine.” Turn the knob and we've landed in Utah, we know, because Hot Rod Hundley is going into oxygen debt describing John Stockton “on the dribble drive, leap-and-leaner, good.”

These are voices with a signature, a style — something sticks out from all the other drones and sucks you into even the most humdrum game. You can’t mistake these guys. Crank the dial once more and ...

“Blow the whistle, you busher!”

You can’t mistake this guy, either.

This is Dick Wright.

...Frederickson is absolutely hammered on that play and there's no call and that's the way it goes when you're in the other guy's gym...

It’s lunch hour at a downtown sandwich shop and two towering college kids are hunkered over the counter. Marty Wall and Jason Rubright, two young basketball players at Gonzaga, are talking about the Bulldogs’ game the previous night at Oregon State — travel squad limitations having forced the team to leave these two behind in Spokane.

“Did you listen to it on the radio?” Wall asks another customer.

Uh-huh.

“Let me ask you — when you listen to Dick Wright, can you understand what's going on?”

Pretty much.

“Not understand him, I mean. It’s like, well, the guy is just the most incredible homer.”

...St. Mary's comes down, Cavenesspushing a pass — and it’s a throwaway! That's the way, Caveness, we like that...play...

Well, yes he is.

But he is not a one-trick pony. He is a sporting man about Spokane, and if there is a team or a coach or a cause in these parts he hasn’t touched during the course of his 63 years, then it’s their fault and not his.

The story of Dick Wright, as they say, could fill a book — one he’s in the process of filling himself. Don’t bet against publication. Promoter, salesman, broadcaster, cajoler, entrepreneur, ad man, writer, raconteur, flack — Wright has launched some mighty balloons and seen his share deflated, too. If, as he says, “I haven't been the greatest success in the world,” then he’s survived like nobody’s business. He’s been on the air for 30 years — for one team or another, on one station or another, AM, FM, all around the town.

To raise eight children, he hustled a buck where he could, but hustled for other people’s kids, too. He’s still serving on the State B Tournament steering committee that brought the event to Spokane more than 30 years ago, and once spearheaded a drive that raised nearly $100,000 and saved Spokane city league sports one year when the money had run out.

He’s called games for Whitworth and Spokane Falls, the GSL and Border League, the Spokane Indians and B schools from Oakesdale to Ocean Shores. His voice — the clipped, mellow bass that washes up in measured waves from extreme low tide — has been heard over KZUN, KHQ, KGA, KSPO, KXLY, KRSS, KXXR and other stations long, and sometimes best, forgotten.

Dick Wright has been associated with more K’s than Nolan Ryan.

But for the last eight years, he’s been the basketball voice of Gonzaga University — again, on a variety of stations.

And so for the last eight years, his most audible — if not visible — public profile has been that of Dick Wright, homer.

Guilty as charged.

“When I do Gonzaga games,” he admits, “I do them through Bulldog eyes.”

... Danny White checks into the game ... not the Dallas quarterback ... just a guy named ... Danny White.

There is some history to this.

Dick Wright got out of the service in 1947 (“and I was on our side”) and on the advice of a boyhood influence named Skipper Kelly, passed up a job on the B. A. & P. (“the Back-up And Push”) Railroad and enrolled at Gonzaga University.

If GU had a golden age, athletically, this might have been it. Though football had died in 1941, Gonzaga revved up its basketball program in the late '40s behind a shooter named Rich Evans and won 79 games in four years. As the clock turned 1950, the Zags won their lone national championship — an NCAA boxing title shared with Idaho — led by a wily coach named Joey August and a rugged light-heavyweight named Carl Maxey.

And Wright was GU’s sports publicist during those years, though he was a good deal more.

“Frank Walters was the big post man,” Wright remembered, “and a student, he wasn’t. I was a pretty good student. We had a class up in room 412 with chairs, and I’d always turn mine so he could see what I was writing.

“One day we had a test and I was late. I come in and he is just in a sweat, because without me, he has no chance. And he whispers, "Where the hell have you been? If you put all I knew about this in a peanut shell it would rattle like a BB in a boxcar."

Obviously, looking out for Gonzaga’s teams isn’t something Dick Wright just took up in the last eight years.

... Mr. Referee, get them off Johnny Stockton!

OK, for the defense — Dick Wright.

“When the person tunes into a broadcast, that’s their ticket,” Wright reasons. “And they should be able to enjoy the same experience — as much as a word picture can give it to them — as the person at the game. The people who hear the Gonzaga broadcasts are 99.4 percent for Gonzaga.

“Now, when I did LC vs. North Central, I wasn’t for LC or North Central, although I’m proud to say that over the years I’ve been accused of being partial to every high school team.”

Actually, in his days doing high school games, Wright probably eased off the referees because he had his eyes, mind and mouth full just keeping track of all the different players. Back then, the GSL radio package wasn’t just one game of three — it was the entire tripleheader. When the Northeast B tournament set up shop at the Falls, Wright would do four games in a day. He’d do at least that many in a single day of the State B — then handle the P.A. announcing when he wasn’t on the radio.

No wonder you sometimes heard him scrambling, “And it’s a swisher by No. 12 ... that fine young man ... from Reardan.. . and it’s a steal!”

Wright claims he’s done more football and basketball games than any announcer alive. If so, it’s a wonder he still is.

A favorite — and scary — memory goes back to 1975, when he called the first game of a GSL football tripleheader on Friday night, then dashed out to the dedication of Reardan’s then-new football field. The next morning, he flew to Portland and caught a city bus out to Forest Grove for the Whitworth-Pacific game. Afterward, it was back on the bus route to Gresham where Spokane Falls played Mt. Hood that night.

On Sunday morning, Wright was back on the plane — not to Spokane, but to Kalispell, where his uncle Art — who raised Wright after both parents had died before his 12th birthday — had died.

When he finally returned to Spokane, he felt as if he was having a heart attack. He wound up in the Acute Coronary Unit at Sacred Heart and eventually had his gall bladder removed.

...and making the call is the referee, Stupin. We call him Stupid.

That one got Dick Wright in trouble and he gets his share of glares from other referees when he’s moved to holler from the press table. He gets no style points for that.

He does get them for relating the score and the time on a regular basis, which television play-by-play has rendered a forgotten art.

As for whether he sees the games as they truly are, well, take your radio to the gym. But let’s not kid each other. Dick Wright is not the first sportscaster whose word picture occasionally parts with reality.

Wright himself remembers a boyhood listening to the legendary Bill Stern, who once called a University of Washington football game from “‘Husky Stadium overlooking the Pacific Ocean.”

And if Boston Celtics announcer Johnny Most ever makes it to the Hall of Fame, anything goes.

It was in Missoula just before Thanksgiving that Harry Larrabee, the head basketball coach at Southwest Texas State University, collapsed outside Adams Field House with what was termed a mild stroke. The Bobcats were playing in the KYLT Classic, but Larrabee never made it inside the gym — and on the second night of the tournament, officials hit upon the idea of piping Wright's broadcast of the Gonzaga-Southwest Texas game into Larrabee’s hospital room.

“Let me talk to him first,” Wright insisted.

So the necessary introductions were made.

“Harry, you've got to understand — I’m the Gonzaga broadcaster,” Wright told him. “I don’t want to give you another attack. You'll know what the score is and what you guys are doing — but I’m the Gonzaga broadcaster.”

Gonzaga won 77-65 despite the garden variety hacking and thugging Bulldog opponents are invariably guilty of, and not long afterward Wright received a note in the mail.

“I enjoyed it — you painted a good picture,” Harry Larrabee wrote.

“And you are the Gonzaga broadcaster.”