Commentary Style Quotes

I think the game of football, from a commentating standpoint, is missing something. I think it should be a celebration, and I think it should be enjoyable, and I'm trying to make it that way.

I'm not saying Michael Moore's smarter than Sean Hannity, but Michael Moore is better at running interviews than Hannity, even though Hannity's running the interview!

I always like to pretend two things: one, I'm sitting in the seat beside you watching the game together. I'll say, 'Wasn't that a great shot? Boy, it sure was.' The other thing I do is pretend I'm talking to people who are non-sighted. I try to create a word picture. I get more mail from blind people thanking me.

I've never been ashamed of being the ham or the provocateur, as it were, in my style of commentary or my style of showmanship.

I wanted to be Red Barber, Mel Allen or Howard Cosell. I loved their personalities and all of their sounds.

Any good broadcast, not just an Olympic broadcast, should have texture to it. It should have information, should have some history, should have something that's offbeat, quirky, humorous, and where called for it, should have journalism, and judiciously it should also have commentary. That's my ideal.

Nobody else was saying what he said on air, and sometimes he pushed the envelope when he said the newest Jay Z line with a Michael Jordan highlight. But Stuart Scott was an artist.

You can make an editorial comment about the play while it's going on. You don't have to be bogged down by the details because the camera is showing the groundball to short.

The first time I watched [Keith] Olbermann, his opening monologue, I completely changed the way I approached my radio show.

I occasionally got called the Rush Limbaugh of Indiana, but most people knew that my style was different.

The game is just one long conversation, and I'm anticipating that, and I will say things like 'Did you know that?' or 'You're probably wondering why.' I'm really just conversing rather than just doing play-by-play. I never thought of myself as having a style. I don't use key words. And the best thing I do? I shut up.

I'm a postmodern commentator, and so, in a cheeky parallel to James Joyce or James Kelman, I get to places, verbally, that are a little unusual - when I talk about Jocky Wilson and end up sounding like a Jackson Pollock of the commentary box.

I don't take myself as seriously as I did when I was playing, and it works, and I think people see the self-deprecation in my commentary.

I want to be the Howard Cosell of MMA.

You never know how you're going to go down as an English commentator in Australia.

I think once you start as an announcer, you have to decide what kind of approach you're going to have. I decided very early that I was going to be a reporter, that I would not cheer for the team. I don't denigrate people who do it. It's fine. I think you just have to fit whatever kind of personality you have, and I think my nature was to be more down the middle and that's the way I conducted the broadcasts.

In radio, you are the game, so to speak - you have to describe every aspect. In TV, I've always felt less is more, and it's really a question of my setting up the color analyst more than anything else.

I look at some young commentators who sit down with piles of notes, and of course, what are you going to do if you've spent hours preparing all this stuff? You're going to bloody well read it out. Boring!

I'm not naive and realise it doesn't make good commentary or sell newspapers if you only say nice things, and the time does come when you have to say someone isn't good enough and has to go. But commentators like Richie Benaud have shown that criticism can be made in a constructive or humorous way.

Game calls can't be just, 'Oh, by the way,' as part of a larger discussion.

There's broadcasters that make me enjoy what I'm seeing because of their energy and how they explain what's happening and paint that picture.

Of course I do things in my voice in my commentary, which I wrote.

Gryffindor leads by eighty points to zero, and look at that Firebolt go! Potter’s really putting it through its paces now, see it turn — Chang’s Comet is just no match for it, the Firebolt’s precision-balance is really noticeable in these long —” “JORDAN! ARE YOU BEING PAID TO ADVERTISE FIREBOLTS? GET ON WITH THE COMMENTARY!

A good commentator is someone who obviously people like listening to, who gets the blend between description, entertainment and accuracy of conveying the event right. If you can do that in an interesting way, you are a good commentator.

I don't really listen to Jacques Villeneuve anymore.