A Celtics jersey with the number 1,000 embroidered on it hangs to the left of Mike Gorman’s family room desk in his Boston apartment. This monumental gift currently represents less than half of the games the broadcaster has called teams to in its 43 years. tenure.
Drew Carter, his future full-time replacement, entered the veteran broadcaster’s residence on Feb. 8 as the two were taking a break from filming a segment preparing viewers for their replacement. , stared at the fabric in awe. Individuality.
“He’s been doing this job longer than I’ve been alive,” Carter told the Post.
Starting next season, Carter, a 26-year-old Minnesota native, will replace Gorman as the legendary broadcaster. announced his retirement It is scheduled to take place at the end of Boston’s current basketball campaign.
Carter knows he’s not Gorman, and he’s not trying to be.
The broadcast heir, who currently serves as the Celtics’ play-by-play announcer for away games, has already built a reputation for his energy on the air.
“I was really nervous to take over this job. I put a lot of pressure on myself because I know how important broadcast television is to people,” Carter said. “I didn’t want to look like Mike Gorman, but I also didn’t want to be too different from him. I was trying to balance all of that at once while staying true to myself.”
Boston color commentator Brian Scalabrine told the Post that Gorman is “out of date” because he has dealt with “sleazy behavior in the broadcast industry” throughout his career.
Gorman joined the Navy in the early 1970s, but he didn’t know where to get a job. But he wanted to stay in basketball, while also considering becoming a coach.
“We ended up talking about it,” Gorman told the Post.
He got his first media job at a radio station in New Bedford, Massachusetts, where he learned that “if it sells, you can do it.”
That eventually led to him becoming a play-by-play commentator at Providence College, where he met Tommy Heinsohn, a Hall of Fame NBA player who won a total of 10 championships with the Celtics over 30 years as a coach and player. is what happened.
After the duo called several college games together, Heinsohn eventually recommended Gorman to be the Celtics’ play-by-play announcer.
During his first game in 1981 at what was then the Boston Garden, Gorman recalled bringing a color-coded notebook listing various facts about the players.
Brother. His favorite hobby. Shooting success rate last season.
Mr. Heinsohn waltzes into the booth, finds a meticulous note, and asks what it is.
He picked them up, rolled them into a ball and threw them off the balcony.
“We’re only going to talk about what we see in front of us,” Gorman recalled Heinsohn saying.
“That’s how we approached every game,” Gorman added. “I just called the game.”
The two covered the ups and downs of Celtics basketball, from Larry Bird’s dominance in the ’80s to the team’s forgotten ’90s.
After Boston won in 2008, Gorman and one of his favorite Celtics players, Paul Pierce, smiled as confetti fell. They formed a broadcast one-two punch for decades until Heinsohn passed away in 2020.
Scalabrine, who took over Heinsohn’s full-time duties after Carter’s death, said he empathizes with Carter, but said he received advice from Gorman about continuing the Boston legend.
“People look at trying to take over someone as if doing the whole comparison thing. It’s natural for that to happen,” Scalabrine said. “But Mike said, ‘Skull, you just have to be yourself.’
That’s the wisdom Scalabrine passed on to Carter as he prepares to take over from Gorman.
Carter called his career thus far “a series of super lucky breaks.”
He attended Syracuse University, a top broadcasting school that trained announcers like Mike Tirico and Ian Eagle, and roomed with Ian’s son, Noah, who is a substitute announcer for Nets games on the Yes Network. became.
Carter then spent two years at Alabama as a sports reporter and anchor before going on to cover college sports for ESPN.
Despite the flagship name, Carter found the network could not compare to working at a local station where he could develop an intimate relationship with his team’s fan base.
“You’re calling games and you’re just in one spot and you move on to the next spot. I don’t know. It’s hard to feel that way,” Carter said. “When you parachute onto a broadcast show, you might tell someone something about your favorite team. Or you might tell a joke that makes someone laugh. But it’s temporary.”
But Carter said the opportunity to call the Celtics game became a reality after NBC Sports Boston laid out a “succession plan” for Gorman, who will retire in early 2023.
Mr. Carter went into the interview without thinking too much about it, believing that he would end up hiring someone “someone famous, someone from Boston, or preferably both.”
Eventually, in mid-May, an email arrived in his inbox asking him to do a demo while the Celtics were in the middle of the playoffs.
Carter recalled responding to that message with an emphatic “YES!!!!” —The agent was very sorry and told him to act as if he had been there before.
Throughout the season, Gorman has helped groom Carter, talked about the expectations of the job and prepared him for when he is gone.
He also helped Ms. Carter learn more about Boston, giving her restaurant recommendations and inviting her to his apartment, just a few hundred yards from TD Garden.
“He’s done a really good job of being there, but not being there.” [the] not at all. He doesn’t show up like, ‘Hey, I’m the guy now, look at me,'” Gorman said. “He’s taken a lot of mental notes about how audiences treat me, having been there for so long.”
Even with his growing popularity locally, Carter admitted it still comes as a shock when people approach him to take pictures and talk about the team.
“When something like that happens, I’m laughing for about 10 minutes afterwards,” he gushed.
The warm reception from the Boston faithful helped ease the stress of his continuing to follow Gorman’s advice and eventually taking the job.
At Monica’s Trattoria, a classic Boston sandwich shop, one of the fans who regularly sits on Level 300 – a “real rowdy” – approached him and the two joked about the team.
As he was doing pregame shoots, another person beckoned him over and called him “Drew Carter” in a thick Boston accent – Carter’s “Welcome to Boston Moment #1”
And during the season, Carter was walking up the stairs to the concourse at TD Garden when a “enthusiast” stopped him in his tracks.
“You’re doing a great job,” he said.
