Berman

He remembers when his world changed.

It was one night in the early ’80s, back before cable television was as omnipresent as a driveway in front of your house, back when the biggest question of this new upstart ESPN was “who is going to watch sports 24 hours a day?”

He was out at a restaurant one night and the waiter came over to him and said, “And what does the Swami want tonight?”

Chris Berman knew then that his world had changed.

For everyone knows Berman now, of course. He’s been one of the signature faces of ESPN from the beginning, one of the most recognizable faces in American sports, complete with his omnipresent nicknames and a booming voice that could scare a cat out of a tree. As the players come and go in the revolving door of change, he endures.

Or as he likes to say, using one of his signature cultural references, “what a long, strange, trip it’s been.”

Has it ever.

And making it all better was that none of it was planned back when he was a freshman at Brown in the fall of 1973. How could it have been? ESPN didn’t even exist back then: People were going to watch sports 24 hours a day?

Yeah, right.

He was just a kid who had grown up playing sports back then, a kid who came to Brown thinking he might like to be a goalie on the hockey team. Until the day he walked into Meehan Auditorium, took a look at the guys playing, and knew his playing days were over.

But he had spent some time on the radio station at The Hackley School in Tarrytown, N.Y., and gravitated to WBRU, the campus station. That first year he read the scores at halftime of the football broadcasts. The next year he was the number-two guy on the broadcasts, and by his junior year he was the voice of both the football and basketball games.

That year Brown won its first Ivy League football championship. To this day, Berman says he remembers that, and that he covered the game. To this day, he remembers those games clearer than all the Super Bowls he’s covered.

More important, by then he knew he wanted to be a sports broadcaster when he got out of Brown.

“I thought I could be pretty good at it,” he says, “but I didn’t know what that meant. What did I know? I figured if I could one day get on TV, that would be a great way to make a living.”

He graduated in the spring of ’77 with a degree in history and a job at a small radio station in Westerly.

“I was the disc jockey, read the news, did the “swap shop” show, and did an open mike on weekends,” he says. “And I did it six days a week, Tuesdays off.”

All this for about $125 a week.

But the most important thing?

He was on the air.

A year later he was at a station in Waterbury, Conn., complete with doing the traffic reports out of his car. This came with a plum, though. He could do a sports talk show at night, all this at a time when there were very few sports talk shows.

He was 24 years old.

And about to stumble into something that would change sports in this country, although no one knew it at the time.

It was ESPN, of course, and it came at the perfect time and the perfect place for him. An all-sports TV station. In Connecticut, no less. The only problem? No one knew if it could make it. There was only one building. The parking lot was unpaved. And in the beginning there was a lot of calf-roping from Mesquite on late at night, sports in search of an audience.

He was hired a month after ESPN first went on the air back in 1979, and was given the late-night gig.

“I had no expectations,” he says. “But I was young, I wasn’t married, and I wasn’t walking away from anything I couldn’t afford to give up.”

Three or four years later he was doing two SportsCenter shows a night, and from the beginning he had his own unique, idiosyncratic style, complete with his own nicknames. As if he would look at Wade Boggs and out would come Wade “Cranberry” Boggs. Or Kevin Bass became Kevin “Smallmouth” Bass. On and on it went, a new style for a new age.

He says it was never planned. There was time to fill, the bosses were loose, and as long as you didn’t say anything offensive, the unofficial rule was anything goes. And in age of traditional broadcasters doing things the way they had been seemingly done from the beginning of time, it was like a strong wind blowing down a dusty corridor. He did a routine wearing a swami’s turban. He was called “Boomer,” courtesy of his pipes. In short, he became a personality.

“We all just kind of did it our own way. I was just being me,” he says, “and it worked.”

Did it ever.

By 1987, just eight years after it started, ESPN got Sunday Night Football and it’s never looked back. And by the early ’90’s he wasn’t Chris Berman anymore, he was CHRIS BERMAN, recognizable virtually everywhere, a career no one could have envisioned back there in the ’70s doing Brown football, just a few years away from entering a world that didn’t even exist at the time, a world no one could have seen.

A long, strange, trip it’s been?

Yes, it has.

One no one could have made up.

Chris Berman will speak tomorrow afternoon at Brown’s Salomon Center on the campus green at 4 p.m. The public is invited.

breynold@projo.com