More than half a century ago, a high-school basketballer with a sagacious mind needed inspiration. A fellow point guard was outplaying him. So, the coach approached to ease the tension.
“Son, he puts his pants on the same way you do,” the coach advised. A young Walt Frazier didn’t skip a beat. “Are you sure, coach?” Frazier replied. “I think this guy is jumping into them with both feet.”
Advertisement
Frazier’s love of language, his passion for pithy plays on words existed long before he became a broadcaster.
On Friday, Frazier, 77, will receive the Curt Gowdy Award for Electronic Media at the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame. He is the first person already in the Hall of Fame as a player to receive the award individually.
For all the coolness of Frazier’s off-the-cuff wit — the rhymes and the $10 words that have laced the Knicks’ broadcast for more than three decades — people closest to him attribute his success in the booth not just to his intellectual dexterity or his curiosity, but also to his preparation.
His enthusiasm for language ramped up once he joined the Knicks’ broadcast in the late 1980s, jumping on with Greg Gumble for segments on the pregame, halftime and postgame show. He studied the thesaurus as if there were some upcoming, life-altering test on synonyms. He would read The New York Times’ arts and leisure section and write down words or phrases that he enjoyed.
Today, he has a collection of notebooks in his home that are scribbled with his favorite words and audacious rhymes. He says he’s used only 30 or 40 percent of what’s in them on the air. He will occasionally scan through the older notebooks hoping to rediscover a long, lost gem.
When he first got into broadcasting, his at-the-time girlfriend would mail him tapes of his recent commentaries that he would listen to on the plane, as if he were still an athlete studying the previous night’s game film. She was a former English major, so she would tour him through the dictionary or help him with pronunciations of the especially obscure.
“I became so obsessed,” Frazier told The Athletic recently. “She would see me come and run into the other room and lock the door. ‘Leave me alone! I showed you!’ And then you ride around the city, and you see culinary and right away, you know what that means.”
Advertisement
And now, so does an entire fan base, thanks to any time a Knick shows off his culinary skills, slicing and dicing to the hoop.
When Frazier first started in radio, his voice was too quaint, so he would go to loud bars and talk to strangers to practice projecting.
He watches games in his home on mute and calls them as if they’re live, rehearsing what he’s going to say before he releases it into a microphone.
“Whatever you’ve heard me say on the air, I’ve said hundreds of times in my living room by myself,” Frazier said. “When people say they thought I had stuff written down, because of the spontaneity with which it comes out of my mouth, I go, ‘I don’t choreograph the game.’ ”
The catchy phrases started with his mother, who would teach him life lessons with sayings he still quotes today.
She would tell him that “It’s nice to be important, but it’s more important to be nice.” After he got famous and would come home to see her, her greeting words would be: “Don’t gain the world and lose your soul.”
After more than 30 years on television and radio, his love for language has defined his career. Frazier is not just a basketball analyst, able to break down a pick-and-roll or critique the Knicks when necessary, a realm into which many team broadcasters do not venture. He’s a poet.
Every once in a while, when he drops a term like lilliputian, a word he is surely the only NBA broadcaster ever to use on air, his longtime producers, Howie Singer and Spencer Julien, start cheering from the production truck. Singer or Julien will turn on the mic to encourage, “Yeah, Clyde!”
Frazier will laugh at the talkback in response.
“If you get a lilliputian and a precocious neophyte in the same game, you’ve won,” Singer said.
Frazier always plays the hits. His biggest ones, of course, are the rhymes: posting and toasting, swishing and dishing, bounding and astounding. But the true diehards fawn over zingers like precocious neophyte, a descriptor only a handful of rookies fit when Frazier is particularly impressed with them. It’s possibly the most-popular Clyde-ism at Madison Square Garden — Singer’s and Julien’s favorite, as well as play-by-play broadcaster Mike Breen’s.
Advertisement
“The first time I heard that, I couldn’t keep myself composed on the air,” Breen said.
It’s a double-whammy. Dropping precocious on an NBA broadcast? OK, that’s probably been done before. But neophyte, which Frazier almost exclusively uses to describe rookies, is unique to one person. Pairing them together, if he were anyone else, would appear overzealous.
Frazier explaining the difference between a precocious neophyte and “your regular neophyte,” as he puts it, is as tremendous as the modifier itself.
“Well, a neophyte is young and dumb. He gets schooled. He’s a neophyte. He doesn’t know the ropes,” Frazier said. “Precocious neophyte is, he’s a little more advanced than that. He’s not going for the okey-doke, as we say. He’s not going for the backdoor play — showing them the ball, getting them up in the air, drawing a foul. So, a precocious neophyte is ahead of just your regular neophyte, who’s in awe just playing in Madison Square Garden.”
This is who Frazier is; it’s how he talks when there is no microphone near him.
For example, back in the spring, just after New York City mayor Eric Adams removed the vaccine mandate so that Kyrie Irving could return to the Brooklyn Nets full time, Breen mentioned the news to Frazier.
“Kyrie is back,” Breen said.
Frazier felt the urge to edit him.
“Yeah,” Frazier responded. “Kyrie had a good emancipating.”
Why did he respond that way?
“Emancipating is just better,” Frazier said.
He has an inside joke with his friends when he starts rhyming during a casual convo: “They go, ‘Hey Clyde, save it for radio,’ ” he said.
“If you and I were having a conversation, I don’t think we’d be talking about your sagacity, but he does,” Breen said. “These are words that he really uses.”
The persona percolates into each part of his personality.
Jill Martin, a former on-air personality for Madison Square Garden and a close friend of Frazier’s, remembers a time when the two were shopping for the broadcaster’s sparkling suits. Martin noticed a swatch that looked completely out of whack: polka dots and stripes in different colors.
Advertisement
“Clyde,” she said. “How do these two patterns go together?”
Martin is now the fashion correspondent for “The Today Show.” She knows what she’s talking about. But Frazier always retorts with the winning one-liner.
“Jill, everything goes together,” he responded.
The Clyde-isms didn’t have a 100 percent approval rate when Frazier started using them on the radio years ago.
After playing 13 seasons for the Knicks and Cavaliers from 1967-80, Frazier joined the Knicks’ broadcast in the late ’80s. His segments on the pregame, halftime and postgame show did not run longer than three to four minutes.
“I was very uncomfortable that I would start talking and I couldn’t finish,” he said.
An inauspicious start meant an inevitable adjustment. He had to limit words. That’s when the thesaurus and arts and leisure section came into play. It’s when he created this language that’s specific to the MSG broadcast. He says one of the reasons he’s continued to use SAT words is to educate kids who are watching.
The method works. Is there a 12-year-old Knicks fan who doesn’t know what omnipotence means?
But Mike McCarthy, a producer on the Knicks’ broadcast from 1982 to 2005, recalls a time when New York was not yet fluent in Clyde.
Broadcast 101 says people on TV or radio should use the simplest, shortest words so they don’t turn off their viewers. You don’t want a listener to feel dumb or get distracted because you communicated in an inaccessible way. Frazier was breaking those basic rules with his riveting vocabulary. He sprinkled in the rhyming, too.
“I remember fighting on his behalf many times with people from upper management, Knicks management, because there was this impression that it was gimmicky,” McCarthy said. “Like in a lot of cases in the broadcast world, things have to gel and people have to be given time to become familiar with the listeners and/or the TV audience.”
Advertisement
There is ingenuity to Frazier’s on-air cadence. Sure, if any other broadcaster referenced a “precocious neophyte” on TV, those might be the last two words that person spoke on air.
“He’s the only one I think in sports broadcasting that can use some of these words,” Breen said. “But they’re perfect when he uses them.”
Now, Frazier’s voice and, more importantly, his unmatched brain are an essential part of the Knicks experience.
“What was once intentionally criticized for being shtick is now a commonplace,” McCarthy said. “And I don’t think Knicks fans could even fathom doing without it.”
Related reading
NBA 75: At No. 45, Walt ‘Clyde’ Frazier showcased his cool style on and off the court
(Top photo of Frazier: Rocky Widner / NBAE via Getty Images)
