The Morning Journal (Lorain, OH)
Play-by-play man recalls Joe Tait
Tim Alcorn: “Joe’s passing has been very difficult and emotional. Joe wasn’t just a broadcaster. He was my best friend.”
Tim Alcorn has no shortage of Joe Tait stories.
The first one goes back to the beginning.
In the early 1980s, Alcorn, then a journalism student at Kent State, received a press pass through the school’s student radio station to cover a game between the Cavaliers and Celtics.
After arriving to the Richfield Coliseum early, Alcorn headed to the media press room. There, he saw Tait, then the Cavaliers’ radio playby-play commentator, sitting at a table with Johnny Most, who held the same title for the Celtics.
Most was the closest thing Alcorn had to a living god. As a kid growing up just north of Boston, Alcorn spent countless nights listening to Most narrate Celtics games. Despite growing up in a different part of the country, Alcorn had also listened to Tait, an example of the reach and reputation Tait had as a basketball commentator.
With no hesitation, Alcorn walked over to the table to introduce himself.
“Thirty years later, I still don’t know what possessed me to go up that table and talk to them,” Alcorn recalls now.
Once the introductions were over, Tait invited Alcorn to sit down at the table and tell them about himself. Alcorn gave them a quick summary, letting them know he was a student at Kent State and was pursuing a career in broadcasting.
“Are you calling any baskets?” Tait asked in a way only he could.
“A few,” Alcorn responded, still starstruck.
As the meal ended and the opening tip crept closer, Most and Tait finished their meal. Before Tait stood up to leave, he had one final request for Alcorn: Send Tait some of his work so he could offer feedback.
The minute Alcorn arrived back to Kent’s campus he began to compile a tape of his highlights to send Tait’s way.
“When Joe Tait asks you to do something, you do it,” Alcorn says now.
A few weeks later, Alcorn was back at the Coliseum as a fan. During a break in the action, he went down to radio row to talk to Tait.
“Timothy!” Tait said excitedly upon his arrival.
He was always “Timothy” to Tait.
“I liked listening to your work.”
From there, their relationship evolved. First, Tait was Alcorn’s mentor. Then he was his colleague. Then he was his friend.
Like so many other Clevelanders, it was a crushing blow March 10 when Tait, 83, died after a lengthy battle with kidney disease and liver cancer.
“Joe’s passing has been very difficult and emotional,” Alcorn said. “Joe wasn’t just a broadcaster. He was my best friend.”
As Alcorn was progressing through his career as a radio broadcaster, Tait was a constant in his life. Upon graduation from Kent, Alcorn worked at WOBL in Oberlin before moving to WEOL-AM 930 (a Cavaliers affiliate station), where he eventually became the station’s main high school play-by-play broadcaster. When Tait found out Alcorn was the main high school radio man, he had a request: He wanted to call games with Alcorn. Alcorn was floored. “It kind of scared me at first since I’m just this high school play-by-play guy,” Alcorn said. “I make mistakes, and I’m going to be calling games with an NBA icon.”
Alcorn and Tait ended up calling one game a year together though the 1990s and 2000s. In total, they called close to 20 games together.
“I loved every minute of it,” Alcorn said.
Tait’s introduction to the Cleveland sports scene came in 1970 when he, at the behest of then-coach Bill Fitch, became the Cavaliers play-by-play in their inaugural season. For the next 40 years, Tait was the voice of the Cavaliers.
“You have to remember that when he started there wasn’t a lot of local television coverage of the Cavaliers,” Alcorn said. “There certainly weren’t these big outlets that put every game on television. If you were a Cavs fan, you got the Cavs games through Joe Tait on the radio.”
Tait saw it all.
He was there at the beginning when the Cavaliers struggled to find their footing in the league.
He was there in 1976 for Dick Snyder’s “Miracle of Richfield.”
He was there in 1989 when Michael Jordan ripped Cleveland’s heart out with “The Shot.”
He was there in the 2007 when LeBron James led the Cavaliers to their first Finals appearance.
“He spanned so many eras and so many decades,” Alcorn said. “He started in Year 1 and was there for the good years and the lean years.”
Tait’s tenure in Cleveland spanned so much more than just the Cavaliers, however. For 15 seasons (seven on the radio, eight on TV), Tait was the Indians’ play-by-play announcer. Additionally, he also called games for the Cleveland Barons and the WNBA’s Cleveland Rockers. Later in his career, he began calling Mount Union football games while also serving as a Board of Trustees member for the school.
In 1980, then-owner Ted Stepien took over the Cavaliers and fired Tait. In his two-year absence from the Cavaliers, Tait called games for the New Jersey Nets on the radio for the 1981-82 season before calling Bulls games on television for the 1982-83 season. In both years, he returned to Cleveland after the basketball season to continue his duties as the Indians’ play-by-play man.
“I’ve said to a couple people that it’s so appropriate that his name was Joe because he was an average joe, and I mean that in a good way,” Alcorn said. “He was a great guy that was one of the listeners. He was a fan, which is why I think everyone was so comfortable calling him Joe. He was one of them. He had so much passion and energy for the game.”
No matter what was happening on the floor, Tait always had the uncanny ability of making listeners feel like they were sitting in the chair to Tait watching it happen.
“When he did a game, it was always for the fans,” Alcorn said. “If it was an exciting shot, he would let you know. If he was upset at an official, he would let you know. He called it from that fans’ perspective, but he called it in a way that just made it incredibly special.”
Tait retired from broadcasting Cavaliers games in 2011, where he was replaced by John Michael. After the death of longtime television play-by-play man Fred McLeod prior to the 20192020 season, Michael was bumped up to the television broadcast, with Alcorn sliding in as Michael’s replacement on the radio. For the past two years, Alcorn and color commentator Jim Chones (who called a small handful of games with Tait in the 2010-11 season) have called games at Rocket Mortgage Arena from the “Joe Tait Media Perch.”
“To sit in that chair that he sat in and call games from it has made it all the more special to me,” Alcorn said. “I simply try to broadcast games and do games that would live up to his standard. I don’t know if I’ll ever meet that standard, but it’s an honor to sit in that perch that bears his name. His voice will always be in my head, and he’ll always have a special place in my heart.”
Tait’s legacy didn’t stop when the duo went on the road either, and there was always someone —whether it be another commentator or a team’s radio engineer — who had a Joe Tait story.
“It warmed my heart that he was beloved around the league,” Alcorn said.
Tait, an eight-time winner of Ohio’s Sportscaster of the Year, was elected to the Broadcasters Hall of Fame in 1992 and received its Legacy Award in 2004. He was also named to the Naismith Hall of Fame along with many other local ones, including the Lorain Sports Hall of Fame in 2011. Tait’s passing reverberated around the league, with LeBron James, Steve Kerr and Mark Price tweeting words of remembrance for Tait, among others.
“I know one of the popular things now is to do the Mount Rushmore of this and the Mount Rushmore of that,” Alcorn said. “If there’s a Mount Rushmore of NBA radio play-byplay guys, Joe Tait’s on it.
“I don’t know the other three guys but you’re not leaving Joe Tait off that Mount Rushmore.”