Over a three-decade career as a prominent ESPN play-by-play announcer, Dave Pasch says he’s been on the microphone during two college basketball games that ended in a courtroom assault. One occurred earlier this month when unranked LSU defeated Kentucky as time expired at the Pete Maravich Assembly Center in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Pasch recalled this week a conversation he and analyst Jay Williams had with a member of the LSU athletic department staff before the game.
“We asked, if they beat Kentucky, will they storm the court?” Pasch said. “He told me: ‘No, we are not breaking into the field here. We’ve beaten Kentucky before. Well, they won with this crazy last-second shot and, of course, they stormed the court.”
In the final sequence of the game, Williams can clearly be heard saying, “Didn’t we talk today about whether LSU has the proper protocol for a judicial storm?” as ESPN cameras broadcast a wide shot of LSU fans invading the field.
The court storming issue went national this week after Wake Forest fans ran to the floor of the Lawrence Joel Veterans Memorial Coliseum following a win over Duke on Saturday. Cameras caught video of several fans making contact with Duke star Kyle Filipowski, who ended up limping off the court, prompting Duke coach Jon Scheyer, furious at a postgame news conference, to ask : “When are we going to prohibit the assault on the field? “Last month, Iowa star Caitlin Clark clashed with an Ohio State fan after the Buckeyes’ loss over the Hawkeyes in Columbus, Ohio.
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ESPN producer Eric Mosley and director Mike Roig estimated they have worked 16 to 18 college games in which a team’s fans stormed a court. Several of those on-court storms occurred when a team defeated perennial heavyweights Duke, Kansas or Kentucky at home. Roig coached Arkansas’ 80-75 win over Duke on Nov. 29, and you can watch the Deflected shot cut by Roig as fans flooded the Bud Walton Arena floor.
Mosley said production planning for the courthouse assault occurs well before the time of the complaint. ESPN production teams pre-scout where they can find a safe place for their reporters and camera operators to interview a winning coach and player. Directors like Roig meet hours before the games with the cameramen to review the protocol and various scenarios, including the assault on a field. The camera setup is such that viewers can have access to many entry points. For a regular-season college basketball game, there are typically five unmanned hard and robotic cameras. These are located in safe positions from the crowd. Then there are three portable cameras directed by operators located on the baselines and in the center court. (Wake Forest-Duke’s overhead camera got the best shot of what happened to Filipowski.)
“One of the first questions we ask when we’re on site with the (sports information director) for certain games is if there’s an urge to storm the court or if security allows it,” Mosley said. “We found out where the student section is and what the security situation is there. We’re wondering where we can get our cameras and our reporter to meet a coach and a star player for that post-game interview. We try to get ahead of those things as early as possible because we don’t want to get caught in a position where our people like Holly Rowe, Jess Sims, Kris Budden and our cameramen aren’t safe. We don’t want them trapped and trampled. “Overall, we’ve been pretty successful.”
The play-by-play announcer for the Duke-Arkansas game was Dan Shulman, who estimated that he has called 20 to 25 games that have involved court assaults during his career as an ESPN broadcaster. (Shulman is also the television voice of the Toronto Blue Jays.)
“As much fun as it is to watch on TV, I’ve always worried about what might happen,” Shulman said. “I remember a court assault at a Louisville-Charlotte game I was doing, and Doris Burke, who was the game reporter, was trying to get an interview with the Charlotte coach, and I was worried about her safety. It was total chaos on the field.
“Whenever there is a short storm, it is difficult for us at our table to see much of what is going on. The only thing we can really see are the people closest to our table. Sometimes the student section can be behind our broadcast location, so knowing that they are heading towards the court can obviously be a little disconcerting when trying to navigate a broadcast. I think, for the most part, people on TV hope that when this happens, everything will be very funny and no one will get hurt. There is no doubt that it is a good image on television, which many viewers enjoy. But for me, the risk outweighs the reward.”
Wake Forest fans took over their home court after Saturday’s win. An injury to Duke’s Kyle Filipowski has reignited the debate over storming the courts. (Photos by Grant Halverson/NCAA via Getty Images)
Bob Fishman agrees with Shulman. Fishman retired from CBS Sports last year after 50 years of employment between CBS News and CBS Sports and coached 39 NCAA Men’s Final Fours, including Michael Jordan’s title-winning shot in the 1982 title game and the North Carolina State’s victory over Houston the following year. Fishman said he’s been thinking a lot about court assault lately and that he would never tell a camera operator to run onto the court during one, making sure he maintained a position under the basket and shot whatever he could. .
“I’m pretty firm on what I think needs to be done; it can’t be ignored,” Fishman said. “It’s not like a player running down the field in a football game, which is not shown. I think we have to show it because it is part of history and especially now that the players have been injured. What I would do is take a wide shot of something, maybe from a rear camera or a high beauty camera as we call it. Then I made sure my cameras on the court were recording everything and that all of that was fed into a tape machine. I would never put that on the air. But I do think you have to show something, which in my opinion would be a high shot.”
Announcers and production crews, especially at a 24/7 news outlet like ESPN, have to follow the story to its conclusion whether they are live or not.
“We have to keep in mind that documentation continues even when we are off the air,” Mosley said. “We have to treat it as news. For example, some of Filipowski’s things happened after the computer had already gone offline and the network had been transferred to another game. We are taught and told repeatedly that we should stay there and document ourselves for as long as we can. “That’s because someone will be looking for those things.”
Mosley and Roig say they often think about how to navigate documenting a court assault without glorifying the action.
“It’s a difficult question to answer,” Roig said. “You’re documenting it and glamorizing it at the same time. As a director, you are following that line. As directors we are always taught that when that person enters the court or field, you don’t show it to them. Because more people will do it if you show them. He is expanding and moving away. But this is a bit of a different animal, right? We are talking about hundreds and hundreds of people entering the field. …You blur the line of documentation or glorify it. You have to have the mindset that you are documenting it, but at the same time, you have to be careful how you document it.”
During a segment on ESPN’s “First Take” on Monday, longtime ESPN college basketball commentator Jay Bilas criticized sports announcers for glorifying court storming.
“Years ago, when fans ran onto the field or court during a game, it was network policy not to show it because we didn’t want to encourage it,” Bilas said. “So what does that say about the way we in the media use these images now? We cannot deny that we encourage it. Or at least tacitly approve it. Everyone has to accept some responsibility for this. “I don’t think it’s right to allow this, but I know it’s going to continue.”
Roig said: “It’s really a touching point because, as directors, it’s a great scene, right? You want to show that. But I never made it a priority to watch last week (with Wake Forest-Duke) where it got to that point where it wasn’t fun anymore.”
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(Top photo from the scene after Saturday’s Duke-Wake Forest game: Cory Knowlton/USA Today)
