The whole complicated mess wasn’t really Kevin Calabro’s fault.
Know that from the beginning.
He was never going to be the next Bill Schonely. Calabro was very talented, but he also had no chance of being loved by Trail Blazers fan base as “The Schonz” always will be. Schonely was the original voice of the franchise, in the living rooms of this region from the beginning.
Calabro could not be like the man he replaced on your television screen, the team announcer Mike Barrett. Calabro did not grow up in this state like Barrett, going to elementary school, then high school, and then attending college here. Like many children in this state, Barrett breathed in the Blazers like oxygen.
No it was never happening. And it wasn’t Calabro’s fault.
Calabro, hired in the summer of 2016, was not to be accepted as the then play-by-play radio host Brian Wheeler. Or even the wild Mike Rice, who felt almost every night as one of your relatives. And let’s be honest, Jordan Kent, the man chosen this week to take over Calabro and watch this coronavirus-disrupted season, has a better chance of being loved by the fan base.
Kent is an Oregonian. Calabro is a boy from Seattle. And over here, sometimes that’s the difference between having a chance to be loved and, well, maybe I just like it.
Calabro threw away the keys this week. He is 64 years old and, like many of us, he tries to discover what a pandemic has to do with him. NBA teams are ready to resume play in Orlando. None of the local broadcast teams will be there in person. Instead, they’ll call the games from studios in their home cities. And on top of that, the Blazers franchise just endured its biggest round of layoffs in more than a decade.
The news leaked Wednesday morning.
“Calabro resigned,” said a source.
A source from the team soon confirmed this and told me: “It is not a layoff. His decision, 100 percent. “Then came a press release in which the franchise released the news. Calabro would not join the team for the league restart in Florida.
“It was a very difficult decision to make and I want to thank the Allen and Chris McGowan family for their support and understanding,” Calabro said in a statement. “I will always be grateful to the Rip City fans for welcoming me into the family.”
The Blazers should pay attention to the franchise’s broadcast history as it seeks a full-time replacement for Calabro. The franchise has a chance to give Kent, the former Oregon Ducks basketball and football player, a test run. For the rest of this season, he will be alongside analyst Lamar Hurd, a former Oregon state basketball player. It is a state-friendly bipartisan broadcast now. I don’t know if it will work, but I’m testing it.
Calabro never really had a joust.
That is something I am thinking about after his departure. Calabro still lives in Seattle and travels to games. He was the announcer for the Sonics for a couple of wonderful decades before becoming one of the best national broadcast voices in the league. Calabro was certainly talented. But also, it was evident to everyone that Calabro would always be more Pike Place Market than Pioneer Courthouse Square.
The announcer did not help fans when he occasionally slipped and said “Sonics” when referring to “Blazers” during a broadcast. His family of origin is difficult to shake.
It is not Calabro’s fault that Paul Allen followed the Sonics. It is not his fault that the Blazers billionaire owner, who sometimes commuted to helicopter games, appreciated the best of Seattle. Allen hired Bob Whitsitt, the Seattle general manager. Later, he went after Nate McMillan: “Mr. Sonic” – as his head coach. The owner also selected Brandon Roy and Martell Webster, a couple of Seattle kids.
Later Allen added another, Jamal Crawford.
The Blazers owner saw Calabro leave the Sonics and take a leading role as an ESPN broadcaster. It should come as no surprise that years ago Allen left Calabro a permanent offer to become the voice and face of the Trail Blazers if he ever got tired of the national grind.
In 2016, Calabro charged.
Barrett and Rice, with time remaining on their contracts, were called to a conference room, one by one. It was Rice first, then Barrett. It is not an easy thing for team president Chris McGowan to follow the marching orders of his boss and owner while knowing that he is making a move that is sure to be very unpopular with top fans. But that is exactly what happened that summer.
Barrett and Rice were fired by an apologizing McGowan. Allen got his precious station. And Calabro is frowning.
Make no mistake, Calabro is talented. I marveled on Wednesday, listening to some of his best moments. The boy is good at his trade. If I were younger, with more time to connect with a generation of Blazers fans, I suspect that it could have eventually become a bigger part of the franchise. Schonely, who started north himself, did it. But in the end, Calabro ends up being a Seattle boy, hired by a Seattle-based owner, in what felt like a vanity move.
I’m sure Calabro had no idea what he was getting into.
I liked it, I didn’t love it.
It was never going to be Schonely, who was thrown into showers by Bill Walton and Maurice Lucas after the 1977 NBA championship game. It would never be Barrett, either, who was in diapers with this team. And he was never going to be as endearing as Rice, who danced with the Blazers Dancers and became the only broadcaster to be kicked out of an NBA game when he pitched in 1994 after barking at officer Steve Javie.
Calabro was never going to be accepted by a loyal and provincial faction of the fan base. He may disagree. But anyone who has seen Schonely on a game night walk the esplanade, pose for photographs, and bless children like Pope Pinwheel, knows that. And anyone who has seen fans rush to Barrett, now with the Portland Diamond Project as managing partner, and tell him how much they miss him, he understands.
None of this was Calabro’s fault.
He accepted the job in Portland. She did good. But in the end, he was always going to be the boy from Seattle.
