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“His cadence, personality, sense of humor, description: Marv was the whole package. “Marv Albert was the one who inspired all of us New York guys - Michael Kay, Ian Eagle, Howie Rose - to become sports broadcasters,” Cohen says. Cohen was crazy for basketball, and Albert was a revelation. That was also the year Marv Albert became the voice of the New York Knicks. Night after night, he drifted through the mists and warbles of the AM dial until he came to a clearing at WJRZ 970, and was carried off by the artful evocations of Bob Murphy, the voice of the Mets. Cohen listened to every sports broadcast he could find. Cohen fell in love with them - not for their Keystone Kops blundering but because the kid-oriented, family-picnic feeling of Shea was more appealing than the seriousness and grandiosity of Yankee Stadium.įor his ninth birthday, Cohen received a life-changing gift: a desk-model AM radio, the kind with tubes. Even after they moved to Shea they were the sorriest bunch of butterfingers the game had ever seen. The Mets were born in 1962, and for their first two years they played - badly - at the Polo Grounds in Upper Manhattan. In a lot of booths, it doesn’t always work that way.”Ĭohen was born in 1958 and grew up in Kew Gardens, Queens, a few miles down the Grand Central Parkway from Shea Stadium. None of us needs to be the alpha dog or the guy who makes the point: we’re just as happy to be the guy who leads the other guy into making the point. “None of us needs to be the guy who talks the most. “It’s a remarkably low-ego environment,” Cohen says. They don’t step on each other’s lines, and they know when to use the power of silence. Like the best jazz trios, Cohen and company work as an intuitive unit. I think that’s really the best way to describe it.” “Something happens in a game that calls to mind something else, which leads to a conversation on another topic, and that leads to a full-blown discussion of an issue we never had any intention of talking about. “Most of what happens up here in the booth,” says Cohen, “depends on what happens out there.” He gestures again to the field. Each broadcast is its own extended improvisation, its own performance, unfolding with the rhythm of the action. Ronnie’s professorial, Keith’s a little more quirky” - any incidental echo of the Rolling Stones is not off-base, given the wattage of the ’86 Mets - “so sometimes it’s my job to rein in the silly stuff when it’s time to focus down there” - Cohen nods to the field - “or to instigate the silly stuff when the game stinks.”Ĭohen, who is widely known as the smartest, best-prepared play-by-play announcer in baseball, does about 150 games a year out of 162 for SportsNet New York (SNY). “I’m kind of like the traffic cop” is how Cohen puts it.
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On the air with Darling and Hernandez, it’s a voice of unassuming command - deliberate, quick-witted, diagnostic, inflected with the subtle wryness of a consummate straight man. “I spend most waking hours during baseball season just trying to be ready.”Ĭohen has a clear, strong, middle-lower-register voice that can rise as fast and high as a smacked fly ball. “It could be about a player in today’s game or something that happened yesterday or last week or two years ago or fifty years ago.” Cohen types some notes. “On the air, I have to be ready to address whatever comes up, and you never know what that will be,” says Cohen, checking the latest stats and storylines for the opposing Miami Marlins. It’s three hours before game time, and Cohen is doing his homework. Cohen’s broadcast partners of twelve seasons, Ron Darling and Keith Hernandez, who both played on the fabled 1986 Mets championship team, have yet to arrive. The mezzanine-level view takes in the groomed dirt of the diamond, the crosscut outfield grass, the empty dark-green stands, the center-field video board, and the cotton-candy-blue sky over Flushing, Queens. Gary Cohen ’81CC sits at his laptop in the booth behind home plate at Citi Field.