Clark

PROVIDENCE — When the headset hit the press table at Bud Walton Arena, John Rooke knew he had a problem on his hands.

Rooke was watching the Providence Friars get manhandled by the Arkansas Razorbacks back in January 1999 and as the game spun out of control, the PC radio play-by-play man could see his color partner, Joe Hassett, growing more and more frustrated with every Razorback hoop.

“Finally Joe slams his headset down and stands up and starts yelling at Mike Kitts, one of the officials,” Rooke says. “He says ‘Mike you’re horrible. You’re a Big East ref and letting this happen!’ You can hear Joe in the background as I continued calling the game. I swear to God I thought he had done it. I thought he was going to get tossed.”

Kitts would later laugh at Hassett’s explosion when the group flew out of Fayetteville on the same plane. The memories of that game, and those of countless others, endure for a radio team that’s enjoying its 20th season together, but that’s not the biggest anniversary the school is noting. This is also the 50th season of PC basketball on the radio in Rhode Island. That lifeline to the fans created the program’s bond with Rhode Islanders and while college basketball has morphed into a TV-centric world, PC fans still enjoy listening to their Friars on the radio.

“I play in a golf tournament in New Bedford every year and there are a lot of season ticket holders over there,” said Hassett, who began calling PC games with Eric Reid when Rick Pitino came to town in 1986. “They come up to me every year and tell me what I said about this player or coach in a particular game. They clearly follow the team on the radio.”

The father of PC basketball on the radio was the legendary Chris Clark. A New Yorker who grew to love sports growing up in the West Village, Clark came to the area in the early 1950s to work at small radio stations in Newport and New Bedford. In 1955, he got a job at Providence’s WPRO, which then owned a radio and TV station.

“One thing happened in that first year. Providence played Notre Dame in Alumni Hall and the Friars won it,” Clark said in an interview in 2003. “I was there with a photographer and we got the last shot [a halfcourt runner by Gordie Holmes]. I think we were the only ones who had it.”

Clark, who died in 2004, became close with PC athletic director Vin Cuddy and also with a fellow New Yorker, coach Joe Mullaney. With the urging of those two men, Clark went in to his bosses before the start of the 1958-59 season with a proposal to put 20 games on the radio.

“One of the salesman says, ‘Who listens to basketball on the radio?’ ” Clark recalled. “But we sold a package of 10 PC, five URI and five Brown games. Right away, we could see the response was from the Providence fans.”

Clark’s timing was impeccable. That Friar team was led by junior guard Lenny Wilkens and flashy sophomore Johnny Egan. After losing at Brown and Boston College to fall to 10-3, Clark said he received “the break of a lifetime,” on Jan. 24, 1959.

“I convinced the guys to invest in some road games and we go to Villanova, at the Palestra. Four overtimes and PC wins. I think Johnny had 39 points,” Clark said. “I always said that was the game that put the team on the map.”

When Clark returned to Rhode Island, “the sponsors were lining up. I told the guys we had to pick the rest of the games up and they went along with me.”

The Friars kept rolling and ended up heading to Madison Square Garden and the National Invitation Tournament for the first time. For a New Yorker, Clark could hardly believe his luck.

“I grew up going to the Garden, sitting up in the third balcony and here I am sitting in the broadcast booth on the mezzanine level,” said Clark. “PC won its first game [against Manhattan] by two and then upset St. Louis in double overtime and became the darling of the tournament. Everything just seemed to get better as it went along.”

Before a Garden crowd of 18,000, the Friars lost to St. John’s in the semifinals but the love affair with PC and the radio was born. In 1960 they returned to the NIT and lost in the finals to Bradley in Wilkens’ final game. In ’61, Clark began pushing for more. His boss, a former Saint Joe’s player named Joe Dougherty, bit on a proposal to give TV a try. “I said ‘Joe, it’s about time to put them on the tube.’ He agreed,” said Clark.

The first TV game was PC at Holy Cross in March 1961 and the Crusaders edged the Friars, 77-72, in the regular season finale. “It was a big hit. It got to a point where everybody expected you to televise every game,” he said. “When I went somewhere, little old ladies in the store would stop me and say, ‘Wow, that was a great game. Who do the Friars have next?’ ”

PC returned to the NIT in ’61 and this time won it all, beating DePaul, Niagara, Holy Cross (in double overtime) and St. Louis in the finals.

PC basketball became the state’s obsession and while the 3,300 seats at Alumni Hall were routinely filled, fans still drove to campus and listened to Clark from their cars. “Even sitting in the parking lot people felt they were a part of the scene. People as far away as Long Island and Connecticut told me they listened in their cars at night,” he said.

Clark had a fondness for many Friars but the one who challenged him the most as a broadcaster was Jimmy Walker. As ‘The Walk’ rolled up one huge scoring night after another, Clark’s skills were tested. “I used to say to myself, ‘How can I say something that describes what he is doing?’ You can only say super, great, unbelievable so many times.”

Clark never sat alongside a color man but did enjoy the company of a stat person. His first was Jeremy Kapstein, now the senior baseball adviser with the Boston Red Sox. He began with Clark as a 15-year-old junior at Hope High. “Chris was going to use a math major from Brown as a stat man but I told him I’d give him statistics that have never been done in real time before for a basketball game,” said Kapstein.

When Clark was ill for a game, Kapstein helped his replacement on-air. From then on, Kapstein read his statistical rundown at halftime and on the post-game show. When Kapstein entered the Navy in 1966, he was succeeded by Mark Weiner, now a well-known politico in the state. In the ’70’s, Ray Perry joined Clark and today, John Zannini runs the numbers for Rooke and Hassett.

Rooke says that his 20-year highlights are clearly PC’s 1994 Big East Tournament championship and the run to the Elite Eight in 1997 that ended in an overtime loss to Arizona. But the behind-the-scenes memories are what will stick in his mind the most.

“Before the Arizona game, I did our pre-game with [coach] Pete Gillen back in his hotel room,” he said. “He was already sweating profusely. I asked him, ‘Are you having any fun with this?’ He said, ‘Nope.’ I thought that was kind of sad in a way but that was Pete and that was that team. The most talented PC team I’ve worked with. I’m convinced if they had gotten past Arizona, they could have won it all.”

kmcnamar@projo.com