Dick Vitale plans to win a national championship Tuesday in Charlotte. How?
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Dick Vitale, 86, will call Duke vs Texas Tuesday in Charlotte after four cancer battles.
- Doctors limit Vitale’s pregame talking; he conserves voice and avoids crowds on gameday.
- Vitale says the “best thing I’ve done” is spearheading his pediatric cancer research fund.
Dick Vitale is on the other end of the phone, talking about his 46-year career at ESPN that has led to the Dick Vitale Invitational.
The game will feature No. 6 Duke vs. Texas playing at 8:45 p.m. Tuesday in Charlotte’s Spectrum Center. It will also feature Vitale, the broadcasting legend who has battled four different types of cancers over the past four years. He plans to be at the microphone Tuesday alongside Jay Bilas and Dave O’Brien, calling the action.
Vitale is 86 years old. The familiar voice remains recognizable, although hoarser due to the ravages of cancer and the endless bouts of chemotherapy and radiation. At this point, to him, each game he calls feels like a milestone, and a miracle.
“I get emotional talking about it,” Vitale says. He chokes up for a moment, then pauses to gather himself. “This game Tuesday — and every game I’m doing now — it’s like a dream. I never thought, after what I went through, I’d be there at courtside again. So for me, Tuesday will be like winning the national championship.”
That Vitale is able to work at all is a treasure for college basketball fans, who have grown up with his catchphrases (Awesome, Baby! PTPer! Diaper Dandy!) that have long been established as an exuberant part of the game’s soundtrack. He broadcast his first game for ESPN on Dec. 5, 1979, and more than a thousand others since. His enthusiasm is infectious, even now, as he navigates the twilight of his career.
While not everyone cottons to Vitale’s assertive broadcasting style — “Get a TO, bay-beeee!” he likes to yell every time a team goes on a run — it’s hard to find anyone who has ever had a negative personal interaction with him. He’s gifted at making people feel good.
‘We have so much hate going on’
The first time I saw Vitale in Charlotte was in 1994, only about a week after my new job had started with The Charlotte Observer. The men’s Final Four was in town — the first and only time that’s happened. My assignment one day was to go to Charlotte’s airport, watch Vitale walk through it after his plane landed and just see what happened.
He was mobbed, of course. Shouts of “Dickie V!” rang through the concourse. Vitale loved it, posing for one photo after another, signing one scrap of paper after another, making one joke about his bald head after another.
The man has always been extroverted, and as eager to please as a golden retriever puppy. He hates turning down anyone. “Treat people like you want to be treated,” he says. “My parents taught me that. And that’s something that’s missing right now in our nation. We have so much hate going on. It just frustrates the hell out of me. If we all treated each other like we wanted to be treated, it would be a different world.”
‘The only thing I feel bad about’
Vitale’s version of the golden rule is why what’s going on currently is so difficult for him, when he has to treat his voice like the finite and precious commodity it is.
“The one thing I feel bad about right now,” Vitale says, “is all through my career, I never said no to anybody for interviews, radio shows, whatever. I’d go to shootaround and talk to the coaches and also talk to the local radio guy, working that game for his school. I’d do local TV. Whatever. And now, the doctors give me strict orders of things that I have to do if I want to keep my voice. On the day of a game, I can basically do hardly any talking, until it’s game time.”
So Vitale doesn’t plan to go to the pregame shootaround Tuesday in Charlotte. He has already done his coaching interviews in advance, by phone, with Duke’s Jon Scheyer and Texas’ Sean Miller.
Vitale will try to avoid the crowds he used to love wading into — there are innumerable photos of Vitale crowd-surfing at various arenas with various students over the decades. Now he mostly stays silent before the game, on doctors’ orders.
And he usually works in a three-man booth these days, which means he doesn’t have to carry as much of the conversation on-air. After fighting melanoma, lymphoma, vocal cord cancer and lymph node cancer over the past four years, he just feels blessed to be there.
As for a full retirement from broadcasting? He can’t stand the idea.
Says Vitale: “What am I going to do if I don’t do games? Sit around the house and mope?”
What Vitale worries about during games
Vitale’s worries while broadcasting a game now are more the physical worries of an 86-year-old man rather than the mental ones. He can still remember the ninth man on both teams’ benches and what they can do well. “Talking about basketball strategy — I can still do that in my sleep,” says Vitale, who was a head coach in both college and in the NBA before being hired by ESPN.
But he worries that he might lose his voice mid-game one day. And standing for the national anthem after he has been sitting for a solid hour or two? That can be a problem.
“Chemo and radiation — it really wears on your body,” Vitale says. “My legs have taken a beating, and I’m going through all kinds of therapy to get my strength back. It’s an effort to get up when I’ve been sitting for a long time. I’m probably going to need (his fellow announcers) to help me up during the national anthem.”
For years before he was diagnosed, Vitale raised millions for pediatric cancer research under the umbrella of The V Foundation for Cancer Research — named for his close friend, the late N.C. State basketball coach and cancer warrior Jim Valvano. Even while he has been fighting cancer himself, Vitale has redoubled his efforts to raise more and more money. He primarily does so through the “Dick Vitale Gala” he holds in Sarasota, Florida, close to his home, every May. Through the Dick Vitale Pediatric Cancer Research Fund, the V Foundation has now awarded over $105 million in research grants to advance childhood cancer treatments and care.
“I’m obsessed now more than ever about raising that money for kids battling cancer,” Vitale says, “because I’ve lived a full life. But an 8-, 9-, 10-year-old kid going through what I went through, with the chemo and the radiation? It really troubles me…. I’m in a lot of hall of fames, even though I can’t run, jump or shoot. But the best thing I’ve ever done — the very best thing — is raise the money for pediatric cancer.”
What matters most to Vitale
At one point last week, Vitale and I continued our interview by sporadically texting each other. For every one thing he texted me about basketball during that time, he probably sent 20 about the pediatric cancer fund, which you can learn more about at DickVitale.com.
Vitale has made his own personal struggle with cancer quite public on social media, hoping to help others along the way (he also offers a “motivational tip” video on most days). He will sometimes post photos of himself in a hospital bed, just before or after treatment. During the time he couldn’t talk at all during vocal cord cancer — “a nightmare for me,” he says — he would write messages on a board and sometimes post photos of those.
After multiple surgeries by doctors who now have become close friends, Vitale returned to the broadcast booth in February, for Duke’s game at Clemson. He called several more games in February and March, including the ACC tournament in Charlotte, but has mostly been off the air since.
So Tuesday in Charlotte will be another milestone for Dickie V, as he starts another college basketball season — unsure of how many games he will do exactly, but sure that “I’m going to be doing games this season, and I’m going to be excited.”
Through it all, Vitale has been employed by ESPN. The network and its people are “like a second family to me,” Vitale says. ESPN recently extended Vitale’s contract through the 2027-28 college basketball season, with company chairman Jimmy Pitaro making the announcement at Vitale’s most recent fundraising gala.
Vitale says most of his dreams have already come true, but not all of them. He wants to see all of his grandchildren graduate from college. The youngest one is a sophomore, still two years away.
Most ambitiously, Vitale wants to live to age 100. And when he reaches 100, he says, he wants to call at least one game for ESPN.
“That’d be cool, wouldn’t it?” he says. “At this point, it’s only 14 years away.”
