Marv Albert on Calling That ‘94 NBA Finals Game During OJ’s Slow Speed Chase

Thirty-two years to the day after O.J. Simpson's slow-speed chase, Rich asked Marv Albert to relive the most unusual broadcast of his career, because Albert was at the microphone for the Knicks-Rockets NBA Finals game that ran underneath it.

Albert didn't hesitate to call it the strangest day he's ever had as a broadcaster. The telecast kept cutting back and forth between his play-by-play and Tom Brokaw in the studio. There were monitors at courtside, mostly for the media on the far side, and Albert remembered Kenny Smith jogging over during a Houston timeout to look, then returning to the bench saying, "They're chasing O.J." Dick Ebersol, running NBC Sports, sat to Albert's left with a headset, effectively directing the broadcast from his seat in the Garden.

The challenge was turning the page on a dime. Albert would take it back from Brokaw, watch O.J. scampering down the highway on the monitor, then drop right back into calling the game. You just have to roll with it, he said, and there had never been anything like it, in part because it was O.J. Simpson, who actually worked at NBC on the NFL pregame show.

That connection produced Albert's best O.J. story. Working with Paul McGuire at the time, the two would rehearse their open for the NFL telecast, and they learned that O.J. was downstairs listening and lifting their material to use on the pregame show. So they started feeding him fake lines, things they had no intention of saying, and watched O.J. run with them.

Rich offered his own memory of the day. Fresh out of the Medill School of Journalism and hoping to become a sports broadcaster, he was in a Chicago bar that had gone deathly quiet as the chase unfolded. But he was also a die-hard Knicks fan watching a big game in the smaller box of a split screen, and at one point he blurted out, "That was a flagrant foul," to a room of confused stares. Albert agreed it was one of the unbelievable moments not just in sports, but in the history of television.