The Beautiful Joy of Dick Vitale

It's astounding how bad almost every sportscaster is. This doesn't apply only to small-time local chuckleheads; it goes all the way to the top. Who enjoys listening to Reggie Miller superciliously deflate any moment that threatens to make us forget his presence? Why is Phil Simms's grammatically inventive chatter the soundtrack to every other big football game? What did we do to deserve Eric Wynalda? Commentators are so consistently ineloquent, misinformed, and—this is the most important thing—fun-killing that we treat the few great ones like heaven-sent horseshoers and learn to appreciate those who are merely kind of annoying.

Dick Vitale won't be enthusing over an ESPN-broadcast Duke-Carolina game for the first time since the company hired him in 1979. On Wednesday evening, it will be just Dan Shulman and Jay Bilas narrating the Tobacco Road rivalry from Cameron Indoor's elevated announcing booths. This is sensible enough. Vitale is 75, and if his zeal hasn't ebbed, his verbal dexterity has. Shulman and Bilas will do an excellent job, as is their wont. Without having to navigate Vitale's catchphrase-heavy ejaculations, Bilas will have more room to analyze the game in his articulate, good-humored way.

But the spectacle will suffer. If Bill Raftery is college basketball's delightfully boozy uncle, and Billy Packer was its eminently knowledgeable curmudgeon, then Vitale has been its simple cheerleader. No one loves the college game quite as effortfully and sometimes buffoonishly as Dickie V. (And no one loves Duke-Carolina as much, full stop.) His overflowing passion means he can be grating and schtick-reliant and uninsightful, but all of this is in service of attempting to have a terrific time. He invites us to join in his revelry.

That last part is no small thing. It is a skill, to be able to imbue a game with an appropriate sense of occasion. The Super Bowl was a couple weeks ago, and it arrives each year more pompous, brand-plastered, and solemn than ever. The NFL and its media partners filter the game through so many football-irrelevant prisms that it comes out resembling a cross between a blood sacrifice and a feature-length propaganda film. If the football itself is good, it's not a wholly unpleasant viewing experience, but everything that doesn't involve bodies in motion churns the stomach. Vitale operates with a radically against-the-grain reading of what people like about sports. He has always treated college basketball games, no matter the stakes or the richness of the history involved, as games—as opportunities to watch a gaggle of impressive athletes run up and down a court for two hours, and to enjoy oneself.

College rivalries are characterized by the uniquely goofy and infectious verve of the 20-year-olds in the stands and on the court. Duke-Carolina is characterized by that plus one old man, who is crowd-surfing the Cameron Crazies, hype-manning Roy Williams as he chucks his sport coat to the bench, loquaciously losing his shit over the brilliance and bone-headery of young Hurleys and Jamisons and Feltons, both embracing and ratcheting up the pageantry of it all. Dick Vitale's singular talent is utterly giving himself to the thrall of a basketball game. It is no wonder he sometimes seems to be speaking in tongues.

Vitale's demotion effectively ends his career. He will do other games and offer not-terribly-enlightening studio analysis from time-to-time, but in the same way Brent Musburger isn't really Brent Musburger slumming it on the SEC Network, Dickie V isn't himself if he's not stanning for Coach K in the middle of an 11-0 Blue Devils run. That was Vitale's "Stairway to Heaven," and we're probably never going to hear it again.

Here is something to celebrate about college basketball's foremost celebrator: in a vast sea of self-regarding bloviators and sourpusses, Vitale stood out for believing what fans wanted most was to feel a contest's excitement. He did his best to convey that, and to be part of it. As professional aspirations go, that's a beautifully simple one. It's why the game he likes most will miss him.