BURKE

Last Wednesday, she was one of several local women honored by the R.I. Women’s Center at a luncheon at the Marriott.

Her award was for being a trailblazer.

It was extremely fitting.

It’s easy to take Doris Burke for granted around here, even if she seems to be on television these days almost as often as Friends reruns, now doing roughly 90 basketball games a year for ESPN, from being the sideline reporter for men’s college basketball, to doing color on WNBA games. She’s being doing all this for so long and so well now, one of the few women doing men’s games in the country, that it’s easy to think she was somehow born into the job.

We shouldn’t.

Burke’s story is an amazing one, a testimony to many things, not the least has been her ability to climb to the top in a male world where the broken dreams all but lie scattered by the side of the road.

And the irony in all this?

Doris Burke never set out to be on television. Never set out to go on college campuses and have young women say they want to be her some day. And never set out to be a trailblazer, a word that to this day almost makes her cringe. Even now, she has little interest in her growing celebrity, finds it uncomfortable, as if that all belongs to someone else, some alter ego that has little to do with her.

No, all she wanted to do back in 1990 when she gave up college coaching was to find some way to stay around the game. For basketball always had been the safe harbor, the place where she went and hid from an unhappy childhood, the place that always had been her sanctuary.

“I was a very shy kid,” she says. “I had bad clothes, bad hair, bad skin. I was socially inept. The only place I felt comfortable was inside the lines of a basketball court.”

This was all taking place in the Jersey shore town of Manasquan, where she says she was the poor kid in a rich town, the youngest of eight kids. From an early age, basketball was her identity. So she would take her ball and go across the street to a park where it didn’t matter that her life wasn’t like a teen magazine.

Basketball became her passport to Providence College, a basketball scholarship the only way she was going to get to college. She was Doris Sable then, and she became an All-Big East player. And then it ended, and then what was she supposed to do? What do you do when the game is your sanctuary and now there’s no more game?

She taught for a year in New Jersey, then was an assistant coach at PC for two years. Then she married Gregg Burke, now the interim athletic director at URI, and didn’t think that college coaching and having a family could coexist very well.

“I figured I’d teach and coach at the high school level,” she says.

Then everything changed.

Not that she knew it at the time.

She started doing color on PC women’s games on local radio, even though she knew nothing about radio. One day an agent heard her, and said she should think about doing TV. A year later, she did a Division II women’s final in North Dakota.

“I had zero knowledge about television,” she says.

Nor did she even want to be on television. She just wanted to talk about games.

Then she got two huge breaks, the two things that, in retrospect, were launching pads to where she is today. The first was the time one of the broadcasters couldn’t make a Big East men’s game at the last minute in Hartford in the mid 1990s and she was called. The second? She was hired by the Atlantic 10 to be their lead analyst for their TV games.

Suddenly, Doris Burke had a television career.

And you know what?

When she talked about basketball, you realized she knew what she was talking about. Knew that she wasn’t just some sideline reporter there as eye candy, someone who wouldn’t know a pick and roll from a tuna roll, that all those hours she spent in the park across the street from her childhood home, a lifetime of playing and watching games, was all there in her voice.

And if she knows she’s been extremely fortunate in the sense her career was aided by both the exploding interest in the women’s game and the birth of the WNBA, she’s also had to show she could be accepted by men. One symbolic moment happened about a decade ago when UConn coach Jim Calhoun, about as old school as you can get, said to Gregg Burke, “Your wife is excellent on TV.”

Yes, she is.

She is 41 now, and there’s no question she’s become one of the recognizable names in sports television, juggling a career that had her all around the country and her family in North Providence. For four years, now she’s worked with Dick Vitale and Dan Shulman, ESPN’s main college basketball broadcasters. She was one of a handful of original broadcasters hired by the WNBA. She was one of the first females to do New York Knicks games.

And if she says that being a working mother is never easy, that there are times when she’s in some gym somewhere and wonders what she’s doing there, she knows how improbable her story is, how far it is from doing those PC women’s games on local radio.

She also knows that if she never went on television again that would be all right too, that it never was about that.

Most of all, she knows that none of this was ever planned, that she simply wanted to be around the game. The one that had gotten her through a difficult childhood, the one she had hid in for so long, the one that has now taken her to places that once would have seemed as far away as the moon back when she was a little kid and the only place she felt comfortable was within the lines of a basketball court.

“I couldn’t even have dreamed this,” says Doris Burke.

breynold@projo.com