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After Lengthy Broadcast Career, Mike Patrick of ESPN and Clarksburg Roots Set to Hang up the Mic

By Connect-Bridgeport Staff on March 01, 2018 via Connect-Bridgeport.com

By JOHN ANTONIK
WVUsports.com
 
For those of us in now our 40s, 50s and 60s, Mike Patrick's voice on ESPN covering college and professional sports provided the soundtrack to our generation. His timing, humor, intelligence and enthusiasm made the bad games seem good and the good games seem great.
 
Patrick, who grew up in the Chestnut Hills area of Clarksburg, said one of the biggest lessons he ever learned in broadcasting came from another broadcasting legend, Dick Enberg: Make what you are doing at that moment seem like the most important thing in the world.
 
"I loved Dick Enberg, and I thought he was so good," Patrick said last week from his Northern Virginia home. "He always made me feel like he was at the most important event that he had ever been to. It could be a middle-of-the-season game in college basketball, but he made the people who watched the game feel like they didn't want to be anywhere else on the face of the Earth, and that's always what I tried to do because I felt that way."
 
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Mike Patrick and Ron Franklin were the megastars of ESPN's college sports coverage.
 
Franklin had sort of a Ron Burgundy persona in that he was always Mr. Broadcaster and sometimes took himself a little too seriously. I can recall many years ago when Franklin was working a West Virginia football game and he was reluctant to have idle conversation with the sports information people because he was saving his voice for the game broadcast the following evening
 
He'd rather sip warm tea and read the game notes, his handlers said. On the other hand, Patrick always took what he did seriously, but never himself.
 
"When people stop and ask me for an autograph, I still think of this little kid from West Virginia, 'Why in the hell are they asking me for my autograph?'" Patrick said. "It never dawned on me that people care like that. It's stunning."
 
What Patrick has accomplished during his fabulous 36-year run with ESPN, ending last week, is nothing short of stunning, especially for the Clarksburg kid who had dreams of becoming a professional baseball player.
 
Growing up in Clarksburg back in the late 1950s was like tearing a page right out of Norman Rockwell's Saturday Evening Post.
 
"It was a wonderful place to grow up," Patrick said. "Clarksburg was the perfect little city. It was the Glass Capital of the World; there was full employment and of course back then, I was so naïve I wouldn't have known the difference anyway. It was just a special place, and it had everything a kid like me could want."
 
His summer evenings were filled listening to Harry Carey and Jack Buck broadcast St. Louis Cardinal games on his portable radio, his body usually contorted in a 45-degree angle so he could hear every third word they were saying.
 
Click HERE for the rest of the report. 
 
Editor's Note: Mike Patrick, right, is shown doing a broadcast in his home state for the WVU mens' basketball team. Photo from WVUsports.com.



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