I've never followed basketball. I'm not even sure how the game is played. Still, my father watched the Lakers religiously and his life was sure brightened by the obviously-impeccable play-by-play descriptions of Chick Hearn. Hearn was so good at it that, when I passed through the living room and a game was on, I sometimes found myself mesmerized by the mile-a-minute sound of his voice, rattling off every move of every player in a way that sure sounded interesting. Maybe the games weren't always, but Chick sure was.
One time, I wrote an episode of Garfield and Friends and booked Chick Hearn to play a mouse who called a very silly basketball game played with groceries instead of a ball. Chick was not altogether delighted to be there and he was utterly baffled by the words we expected him to read. At one point, I had Garfield hurl a meat loaf down court, zoom down ahead of it and catch his own pass. The dialogue said, "Garfield passes to Garfield" and Mr. Hearn kept stopping and moaning, "Hold it! How can Garfield pass to Garfield? And on the next page, you have the wrong number of points where he makes the free throw with the honeydew melon." He also, we found, could not talk half as rapidly reading from a script as he could, ad-libbing it all while watching a game. We finally convinced him he should just read the copy and not worry about the logic…which he did, without ever quite achieving the level of excitement and energy he had for even the most one-sided real game.
Still, when he did what he did best (i.e., real games, not cartoons) he was amazing. And he sure made a lot of sports fans happy.