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WEST ORANGE, N.J. – His favorite stop was The Nevele, since it was effectively two hotels in one. Right next to The Fallsview. Each had its own game room, so Ian Eagle could play video games in one and easily head to the other and pick up a pingpong paddle. There was no babysitter, unless you counted the television. His parents had shows to prepare for. Sometimes three per weekend, maybe 40 weekends of the year. Their son roamed free.
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This was the mid-1970s in the Catskills Mountains. The Borscht Belt. Monica Maris opened, Jack Eagle followed, and then they closed together, and their schtick killed, because the audience didn’t know they were married until then. For a few months around the end of 1975 and the beginning of 1976, Ian joined them on stage. He was 6, almost 7. He put on a suit he hated – “I looked like a dummy from a ventriloquist act” is how he describes it now – and did impressions of Howard Cosell, Muhammad Ali and W.C. Fields.
Exciting, at first. The crowds? Ate. It. Up. Still, he didn’t last long on the grind. When Ian didn’t perform, his father gave him money for a toasted bagel with butter and a milkshake. “And it hit me that I wanted the bagel and milkshake,” Ian Eagle says. “So the determination was made. I was wise beyond my years.”
It’s Presidents Day lunch hour at the Chit Chat Diner, and this eclectic spot is buzzing. (Eagle had predicted as much. A lot of big Herbert Hoover fanboys in West Orange, he texted on his drive over.) In about a month and a half, clear across the country, he’ll sit in a football stadium and call three games as the new primary television play-by-play voice for the Final Four. It’s a fairly imposing responsibility, given that the previous guy did the job for 32 years.
But when Eagle spins yarns about his mother’s singing voice, or his dad’s trumpet, or a thousand people packing a room at The Concord Hotel, he’s tying now to then. A kid sometimes backstage, sometimes occupying an empty seat in the room, always curious which bits of the act hit and which don’t. Or on stage, all dressed up, just trying to make sure everyone has a hell of a time, including those right beside him.
“You go back and forth a little bit with quips, but at some point, I come to tears,” says Sarah Kustok, Eagle’s partner as the color analyst for Brooklyn Nets broadcasts. ”I’ve got my finger on the cough button, gut-laughing so hard, and no one from the audience would know. There’s all those small little moments that make every experience a beautiful one.”
A couple weeks later, Ian Eagle stares into a video camera from his home office. He’s on a media conference call with the Final Four television crew to preview the NCAA Tournament. He is, naturally, a main attraction, the one CBS Sports chairman Sean McManus says is “stepping into large shoes filled by Jim Nantz for so many years,” the one element in the epicenter of a billion-dollar operation that’s different.
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The moderator asks Eagle for some thoughts on the gig.
“The little kid in me, 1979 watching Bird versus Magic, and then one day being on a webinar to discuss it,” Eagle deadpans, pausing for effect and shaking his head. “It’s overwhelming, in many ways.”
Immaculate delivery. Dry as a bone. All pretense of tension or pressure gone.
He guesses he’s called 600-plus basketball games with analyst Bill Raftery, both at the professional and college levels. He’s worked with analyst Grant Hill for almost a decade, even if the start of the relationship remains a running joke. (Going into their first broadcast together, a Duke game in 2015, Hill thought “Ian Eagle” was “Iron Eagle,” and a pseudonym Mike Krzyzewski was using at the team hotel. “It’s only been onward and upward from there,” Hill notes.) He’s worked with sideline reporter Tracy Wolfson for years, with producer Mark Wolff on NFL games, and with director Mark Grant since 1999.
While Nantz moved out of a seat Eagle hasn’t sat in before, it’s a familiar perch. “I’d say for most that are taking over a position like this, there would be so many elements of mystery,” Eagle says. “And I’m dealing with none of those things.”
But the box-cutter wit, seamless presentation and on-air chop-busting belie the intentionality in the work to get there.
If he wasn’t born for it, he was born into a way to become it.
Jack Eagle was a gifted trumpet player who dropped out of Erasmus Hall High in Brooklyn, N.Y., to play with big bands led by legends such as Buddy Rich. He didn’t get on stage as a comedian until Buddy Hackett noted that he was funnier than the opening act and suggested he try stand-up. He was a 5-foot-4, 210-pound revelation. “Roly-poly comedian and actor” is how the Los Angeles Times described Jack Eagle in a 2008 obituary, information that gives his son a chuckle. “I think that might have been self-dubbed,” Ian Eagle says. It set up Jack for his biggest break: a role as Brother Dominic in a Xerox commercial that aired during the 1977 Super Bowl. “I’ve always seen myself as more of a Gregory Peck type,” Jack protested to the Times back then.
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Along the way, Jack met Monica Maris, a vocalist, at The Playboy Club in Chicago in 1967; Monica opened for Jack from the start. They married and lived in Queens, N.Y., but had traveled to Miami for gigs when Monica’s water broke earlier than expected, and along came Ian in February 1969.
During all those months and years of tagging along on tours, when he wasn’t consuming his parents’ act or milkshakes, Ian Eagle inhaled television of the era. “Three’s Company.” “Love Boat.” “Good Times.” “M*A*S*H*.” “Mork & Mindy.” Name it. He watched it. “TV became my best friend,” Ian Eagle says. No one worked video store clerks better for VHS copies of “Animal House” or “Stripes.” Sarcasm and absurdity became second languages. Of course, he watched sports, too, like everyone awed by Cosell in his prime. He was 8 when he approached his parents separately and told them he wanted to be a sportscaster.
Well, they both said, that’s what you’ll do.
His father, though, had one additional note. “You realize,” Jack Eagle said, “you’re going to have to get rid of your lisp.”
“What lithp?” Ian Eagle replied.
Father handed son a tape recorder. For two weeks, Ian Eagle taped himself talking, replayed it, and worked it out until the lazy ‘S’ vanished. “In grade school? No one said sh–,” Ian says. “No one said, ‘Yeah, you should work on that.’ It took my parents to just tell me, ‘Fix it.’”
As Eagle pursued his career path, the influencers already on air – Marv Albert, Bob Costas, Al Michaels, Verne Lundquist, Brent Musburger – tinged their broadcasts with humor. Occasionally a wink to the audience, occasionally an overt attempt to bring everyone in on a joke. For Eagle, that was the calling. “It wasn’t cut and dried,” he says. “It wasn’t paint by numbers.” He craved seeing things from different angles, with confidence he could make the audience see it, too. He also determined, very quickly, that he would never say no. That the sportscasting life would be a new version of an all-consuming adventure. One hotel to the next. One show after another. “If you’re not willing to try something new, you’ve now cut off a potential opportunity,” Eagle says. “You just never know what’s going to lead to the next thing.”
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It meant more work. Closing the door to his office at home and coming out only for dinner, so he could prepare for the various games in various leagues on the upcoming schedule. Listening as much as talking, such that he could get a feel for the myriad color analysts he’d work with and create the impression that they’d known each other for years on the broadcast. “You can’t go into a game thinking, I’ll just do my thing and hope that my partner figures it out,” Eagle says. “No, it doesn’t work that way. It’s the opposite. You need to go in with a plan of what works with who your partner is that day.”
It is the gravity holding Eagle’s feet to the ground, between the one-liners. “He’s very, very thorough,” says Jim Spanarkel, another color analyst who’s worked with Eagle on hundreds of college basketball games. “He really has his ear to the ground in terms of knowing what’s going on in the environment in the sport that he’s working on and preparing for.”
Says Kustok: “The way he prepares for every day is as though it’s his very first broadcast he’s ever doing. The volume of games he’s doing, the travel that goes into it, the different leagues that he’s covering, the multiple sports that he’s covering – it doesn’t matter. You would have thought that he had two weeks to sit and prepare for every game. There are no shortcuts.”
It is, however, no accident almost every game has a laugh track.
Eagle, Kustok says, is obsessed with being a good teammate. The investment into the people with him and beside him is perhaps just as important as identifying how to pronounce “Sarunas Jasikevicius” correctly during his first NCAA Tournament in 1998. (A task that haunts Eagle to this day, it should be noted.) “You get to a stage where you really know each other well, and then it’s no longer the working relationship,” Eagle says. “It’s just the relationship.” From there, the lines get blurred. Two friends talking, with millions listening along.
This is how Eagle and Spanarkel can be on a call years ago when Spanarkel makes a proclamation – “There’s nothing better than a Navy-Army basketball game!” – and the game action immediately takes a back seat.
“Did you just call it Navy-Army?” Eagle asked.
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“Yeah, I called it Navy-Army,” Spanarkel confirmed.
“You’re the only person in the world to call it Navy-Army,” Eagle replied.
It’s why Eagle can rib Kustok about her general lack of pop culture awareness or her Pilates routine on the road. It’s why broadcasts with Raftery spin into Eagle confirming that, yes, there are indeed tolls on the roads between New Jersey and Storrs, Conn., and why Raftery can hop on that NCAA Tournament conference call and declare that going from Nantz to Eagle at the Final Four is like “going from five-star restaurants to Five Guys.”
“The people in our lives we love most,” Kustok says, “are the ones we love to give a hard time to.”
If something is lost between trips to game rooms in the Catskills and this weekend at State Farm Arena in Arizona, it’s the idea that it’s all on him. This was true for a while; Ian Eagle was, in a way, his only responsibility. Now? He brings everyone with him.
On March 15, 2015, a Saturday in Philadelphia, a scheduling quirk created a fairly seismic event: Kustok would slide into the analyst’s chair for a Nets game at the 76ers. She’d done color work before on college games. She’d eventually become the first full-time female analyst for an NBA franchise’s local broadcasts in 2017, when the YES Network promoted her from sideline reporter. But in the moment, the significance was not lost on anyone.
Kustok’s partner knew her well enough to understand what it meant to her. He told her she was prepared, that she knew the teams inside and out, and to talk about what she saw and have fun.
“This is just me and you,” Ian Eagle said then, “watching a game.”
Six days before the Final Four, Eagle sits courtside at American Airlines Center in Dallas. Duke and NC State are vying for the last spot in Glendale. The Wolfpack’s ebullient star, DJ Burns, with every pirouette and soft hook shot becoming the face of this NCAA Tournament, is cooking.
The most prepared man in the building does what he does.
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“In the DJ booth!”
“DJ! It’s on his playlist!”
“Mr. DJ, turn the music up for NC State!”
Ian Eagle is on one. At his side, Raftery and Hill clearly are amused by the bottomless sack of zingers. They start trying to one-up each other after the big buckets. When the cameras locate CBS football analyst Danny Kanell in the crowd wearing a red T-shirt that reads “BEN MIDDLEBROOKS’ UNCLE,” Hill chimes in. “I have a shirt that says ‘Bill Raftery’s Lackey,’” he says.
Eagle gut-laughs himself. “You know what? A thousand people have those same shirts,” he says.
It is a long way from Raftery and Eagle calling Nets games during some lean years, having to bring energy and enthusiasm to the airwaves with a hopeless product before them – though the connection is the same. “He’s probably the epitome of the off-air relationship (becoming) the main part of our on-air presentation,” Eagle says. It is a long way from Hill learning “Iron Eagle” is not his partner’s name. It is also easy. And entertaining.
A few years back, CBS folks told Eagle to hang tight if Nantz ever decided he’d had enough Final Fours, and now he’s in the chair. And it is three buddies, talking hoops. “He brings everyone into the fray,” is how Raftery puts it.
“The fun is something we all value and appreciate,” Hill says. “I hope that comes across on air.”
In 1998, Eagle had that first NCAA Tournament call in Sacramento, eight years after graduating from Syracuse and four years after his first full-time play-by-play gig with the Nets. There was the Jasikevicius problem, without any phonetic spelling available. (Eagle cracked it by imagining Albert’s classic “Yes!” call followed by “kev-ish-us.”) There was the South Alabama sports information director saying it might be complicated to find him if the crew had any questions during the game, because he played tuba in the pep band. (“I think they’ve now separated the roles,” Eagle says.) In the end, there was simply a desire to do the next new thing well.
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This is different, and not at all.
Ian Eagle is on stage in the desert this weekend. He’s not alone. He’s in a suit, with people he loves, looking to have a good time. “When you look at the lineage of the announcers that have done it, you have to respect what comes with the position,” he says. “If I view it through that prism, you feel the enormous weight. But when you strip that away (you) realize, oh, no, it’s three extra games to what I’ve been doing for all of these years. My style isn’t going to change. How I approach the games will not change. I’m not going to try to do the job in any other way than I’ve done it before.”
(Illustration: Sean Reilly / The Athletic; photos: Michael Hickey, Elsa / Getty Images)
