On Tuesday, January 9, 2024, the Nebraska Cornhusker men’s basketball team upset top-ranked Purdue, 88-72, in Lincoln.
I listened to most of the game on the radio while watching the TV with the volume turned down.
I wanted to write a column about how much I appreciate longtime Husker basketball announcer Kent Pavelka. Then a fellow by the name of John Gaskins of Sioux Falls, SD, offered a wonderful complimentary post on Pavelka’s facebook page.
I contacted John and he graciously allowed me to share his post in this column.
A little bit about John.
He is a graduate of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and currently works in radio and television in Sioux Falls. He is a sports play by play announcer.
Here is John’s facebook post.
THAT was the coolest Nebrasketball win since No Sit Sunday 10 years ago and a Top 10 all-timer.
First win over a No. 1 in 42 years! I have tears, goosebumps.
Five years of utter brutal basketball wasteland misery flushed fully out of the system. Huskers are exorcising basketball demons, and Fred Hoiberg is on track to pilot one of the most compelling, mind-blowing, impressive comebacks from the dead stories I can ever remember in any sport at any level.
Hoiberg’s records were 40 wins and 83 losses at NU, and 18 wins vs 61 losses in the Big 10 in his first four years.
This is nothing short of magic, if it continues.
Even if it doesn’t, there will always be January 9, 2024.
That is what is so cool about sports. The struck-by-lightning jolts of euphoria that you never, ever forget and nobody can take from you. They are rare. But they are real, and they are spectacular.
Best part was listening to the call of Kent Pavelka, who has been on the mic for NU hoops for 50 years.
During the broadcast, he flashed back to his 12-year-old self, watching a Huskers win over #1 Michigan in 1964 at the Coliseum.
He also called NU’s last win over a No. 1 team at Missouri in 1982, recalling he had to whisper like a golf announcer because MU students were throwing things at him.
Kent did NOT whisper tonight. He also did not scream out of his mind. At the buzzer, he excitably but under control mentioned the historical significance, followed by the PERFECT call:
“Sign your name, Fred Hoiberg! There’s your signature win!!!”
It was an ode to the same call, same words for Doc Sadler when the Huskers beat #2 Texas in Lincoln in 2011.
From that point on, it was pandemonium on the immediate postgame celebration. Fans were screaming as they came by and stormed the court. You could hear them high-fiving Kent and him repeating, “how ’bout that” as analyst Jake Muhleisen handled most of the announcing for several minutes, allowing Kent to bask in the moment.
“He’s earned it,” Jake said.
During the postgame interview with Hoiberg, Kent, settled down but clearly still emotional, who has done over 1,000 Husker hoops games, said this is why he still does it, for moments like this.
He mentioned how in 10 days, the Huskers will honor and celebrate the 30-year anniversary of perhaps the program’s finest hour, the 1994 Big 8 Tournament Championship team, and the return to Lincoln of coach Danny Nee.
Talk about a magical time!
Kent mentioned Omaha World-Herald columns from a few years ago that said Husker hoops “has no identity, a nondescript, mediocre program. Well, this is your identity: Fans coaxing the team, team responding to fans. I’ve seen a lot of great teams leaving Lincoln with tails between their legs.”
It is a CHORE sometimes to be a Nebraska basketball fan. A test of will, spirit, intestinal and mental fortitude, and of sanity. It defies logic. You suffer gut punch after groin kick of losing, despair, and ridicule. Only the strong and idiotic survive.
When there are breakthrough wins (and it appears breakthrough seasons) like this, when Haley’s comet hits, when you see daylight and make it out of the forest, when you are pardoned out of jail and get to see how the rest of humanity lives, it is a shot of rocket fuel adrenaline into the veins that comes with goosebumps and tears of joy.
Nobody knows this better than Kent.
I would have been a shaking, tear-filled mess without tuning into his call of the moment, but I am glad I did because I don’t know if any announcer on the planet has more of a decades-rooted pulse and connection to a program and its long-suffering fans than Pavelka.
Listening to Pavelka’s infectious, rollicking, exuberant calls of Husker football and hoops while growing up in the 1980s and 1990s was the No. 1 factor in me wanting to become a sport announcer, and specifically a play-by-play guy. It was a gift he had no idea he was giving, and I am guessing dozens if not hundreds of sports announcers who grew up in Nebraska during that time feel the same way. It is an intoxicating exercise and vocation, regardless of the level of sport you are calling, and it never gets old. What a treat to still hear him call games and celebrate with me and all the lunatics going out of their gourds at PBA.
And to think … some people don’t like or watch sports.
It’s Tuesday night. I better go to bed. It is going to be mighty difficult to sleep!
And that, my friends, best describes Kent Pavelka, and the night of January 9, 2024.