The University of New Mexico men’s basketball team is 12-0, its best start in a decade, and all I can think about is a voice that’s been silent for more than six years.
If you’ve got some time in this state, you can hear it, too.
”Hello again everybody, I’m Mike Roberts …” ushered most New Mexicans into caring about college athletics for a couple generations. I know there are thousands who are suddenly excited again about a program that’s been dormant for what seems like forever, but I promise you this: Even six feet under, the Lobos’ onetime and longtime radio announcer is the happiest man in this state.
This is nothing against Roberts’ able successor on KKOB-AM, Robert Portnoy, but Roberts is and always will be Lobos sports. Some of that is due to his longevity — his first game coincided with the opening of The Pit in 1966 — but also because everyone who ever heard his dulcet baritone knew he was wearing cherry red, even if they couldn’t see him.
His love for the Lobos was that strong.
Normally, the skeptic in me would dismiss that as homerism. You hear the breed all the time on the radio — announcers whose hearts and paychecks are tethered to their employers. But Roberts was different.
He was born in Missouri, but New Mexico and its people were his touchstone. With every broadcast, he knew there was a kid in Santa Fe or Santa Rosa who’d hang on every word escaping from his microphone; who’d live and die on his description of a New Mexico game at Arizona State, or how he’d detail the froth escaping from The Pit as the Lobos played hated BYU.
I was one of the guys who’d set my watch and radio dial to everything he said. Living in southeast Arizona as a kid, KKOB’s massive reach meandered into the Lloyd’s stereo my dad bought us in the early 1970s. My family, hopelessly surrounded by Arizona Wildcats fans, would gather around the radio like the Waltons, thrilling to Roberts’ calls and even the ads (“Van’s Midtown Volvo — today’s cars, today’s deee-ler”).
Later, after we’d moved back home and I got into newspapers, I got to know the man behind the voice. Once, late in his career, I asked Roberts about how he developed his style. He told me that as he was breaking into the business, he worked with a studio engineer who was blind, who depended upon the smallest of details to feel the game the announcer was describing.
As time went on, Roberts took that lesson and incorporated it in his adopted state. He knew a UNM men’s basketball game was a lift to people here, not merely an escape. He also understood Lobos players and coaches came and went, but he’d be at the microphone when the next crop arrived.
He called some of the greatest wins in UNM history, but perhaps more tellingly, the losses that define a basketball program that’s always been more hat than cattle. He was there in 1978 when perhaps the best Lobos team in history, Norm Ellenberger’s Western Athletic Conference champion, was stunned by Cal State-Fullerton (Cal State-Who?) in the first round of the NCAA Tournament in Tempe, Ariz.
If the spectacular, fourth-ranked Lobos win that game, they advanced to the West Regional semifinals … in The Pit, their home floor. Unlike today’s usually half-empty building, a place that has all the ambiance and excitement of a mall Dick’s Sporting Goods, University Arena and its 18,000 fans were an intimidating weapon for any opponent. It’s hard to imagine the ‘77-78 Lobos losing a game there.
Beat Cal State-Who, and the next stop was the Final Four. But the Lobos never got out of Tempe. Roberts, like a lot of Lobos fans, never forgot the disaster.
Fortunately, there were more games to call — more chances to describe Lobos wins and losses, other opportunities to bemoan officials. ”Moose Stubing just called a charge on Kelvin Scarborough,” he bellowed into the mic, with the indignant irritation and sadness of a man who’d just watched his car get boosted in a parking lot.
Roberts, who died in 2016, eight years after he was stupidly dumped as UNM’s announcer, never apologized for his cherry-red lean. He knew there were more than a million New Mexicans who felt the way he did.
In truth, his best sport may have been football, though this being the Lobos, fewer people noticed. His calls were smoother, less emotional. And his recitation of the pregame lineups — ”Starting for New Mexico at quarterback, a 6-foot-1, 196-pound junior from Raton, New Mexico, Noel Mazzone” — was just south of spine-tingling.
Privately, he’d agonize and grump about the Lobos. One afternoon, at halftime of what would be a desultory football loss to BYU, a school he could not brook, Roberts grabbed me by the shirtsleeve. “Phill,” he asked, “why are we so bad?”
Sometimes, there weren’t good answers. I think I told him basketball season was starting in a few weeks. Roberts — mollified but unsatisfied — trundled back to his radio booth.
Ah, basketball. For Roberts, maybe the most New Mexican of us all, it was the thing. He thrilled to its rhythms, its excitement, and to the prospect of giving hope to those faceless listeners in the sticks whose only tie to the team and the game was his voice.
He’d be deliriously happy with these Lobos, even if their 12-0 record is a bit soft. He’d slip on his headphones, adjust his glasses and maybe hope his voice could will the team to a win or two or 15. It’d be a crazy thought, of course, but sometimes having hope is crazy.
It’s why people love the Lobos. It’s also why they miss Mike Roberts.
