Mike Breen almost quit broadcasting early in his career: ‘I can’t do this anymore’

Mike Breen is the lead NBA play-by-play announcer for ESPN/ABC and the New York Knicks. His worlds will collide next week when the Knicks take on the winner of the Spurs-Thunder series in the NBA Finals, and he’ll be on the call.

Breen’s broadcasting career has been storied and celebrated, but the 65-year-old admits there was a time early on when he almost gave up the business altogether.

Breen was profiled by The Athletic’s Andrew Marchand as he prepares for his 21st-consecutive NBA Finals call. In the piece, Breen recalls how he got started in the industry as a student at Fordham, saying that a fellow student, Michael Kay (yes, that Michael Kay), befriended him and helped him feel comfortable at WFUV, the college radio station.

After college, Breen bounced around several TV and radio gigs before doing play-by-play for the Marist Red Foxes basketball team in 1985. However, after failing to get the Villanova basketball play-by-play job a few years later, he felt like he was spinning his wheels.

“I was thinking, ‘I can’t do this anymore,’” Breen told Marchand, “I’m not making any money. I had to borrow money from my parents to pay for my rent. I told my dad, the steam fitter, I was thinking of quitting. I said, ‘Why don’t you give me the application for the steam fitter union? Maybe I’ll do that, and I’ll start making some money.'”

As Breen tells it, his father, a former Marine, told him that he’d promised to give broadcasting at least five years and still had two and a half to go, so he should stick with it.

Six months later, Breen was hired to produce on WNBC Radio and frequently filled in for Dave Sims as host of SportsNight and for Don Criqui on Imus in the Morning. The exposure from those roles eventually led to work on the Knicks pre- and post-game shows, and he was hired as the Knicks radio play-by-play announcer in 1992. He started working as a team TV play-by-play announcer in 1997, a job that became permanent in 2004.

Breen is well known as one of the nicest people in NBA broadcasting and is considered by his contemporaries to be one of the leading PBP voices of their generation. The New York Knicks’ booth routinely tops the Awful Announcing local NBA broadcaster rankings, and he remains one of the biggest reasons why.