Marv Albert, born Marvin Philip Aufrichtig was born on June 12, 1941, he is an American sportscaster. Honored for his work as a member of the Basketball Hall of Fame, Marvin is commonly referred to as “the voice of basketball”. From 1967 to 2004, he was also known as “the voice of the New York Knicks”. Marvin currently works for Turner Sports, serving as lead announcer for NBA games on TNT.
In addition to calling both professional and college basketball, Marvin has experience announcing other sports such as American football, ice hockey, horse racing, boxing, and tennis. Marvin has called the play-by-play of eight Super Bowls, NBA Finals, and seven Stanley Cup Finals.
The Sportscasterhas also called the Wimbledon Tennis Championships for TNT with Jim Courier and Mary Carillo. He also worked as a co-host and reporter for two World Series from 1986 to 1988.
The sportscaster’s son, Kenny, is also a sports commentator, who calls baseball and football for Fox, New York Rangers games on the radio, and has been one of NBC’s commentators for ice hockey at the Winter Olympics, as well as NBC’s NHL coverage. His daughter, Denise, is a reporter for NBA TV.
He has two younger brothers who also are announcers. Steve Albert was the Phoenix Suns play-by-play announcer before his retirement following the 2016-17 season, and has also called play-by-play for several other teams, including the New Orleans Hornets, New Jersey Nets, New York Islanders, New York Mets, and Golden State Warriors.
Steve is best known for his work on Showtime Championship Boxing, notably the Holyfield–Tyson bouts. The sportscaster was the former play-by-play announcer for the New York Nets (ABA), USA Tuesday Night Fights, the Indiana Pacers and the Denver Nuggets. He also called national NBA games on the USA Network during its brief tenure in the early 1980s.
The sportscaster became embroiled in a sex scandal in 1997. A 42-year-old woman named Vanessa Perhach accused Marvin of throwing her on a bed, biting her, and forcing her to perform oral sex after a February 12, 1997 argument in his Pentagon City hotel room. DNA testing linked Albert to genetic material taken from the bite marks and from semen in Perhach’s underwear.
During the trial, testimony was presented from another woman, Patricia Masden, who told the jury that Albert had bitten her on two different occasions in 1993 and 1994 in Miami and Dallas hotels, which she viewed as unwanted sexual advances. She claimed that in Dallas, Marvin called her to his hotel room to help him send a fax, only for her to find him wearing “white panties and garter belt”.
The sportscaster maintained that Perhach had requested that he bite her and denied her accusation that he’d asked her to bring another man into their sexual affair. He described the recorded conversation of hers with the police on the night of the incident as “an Academy Award performance”.
After tests proved that the bite marks were his, Marv pleaded guilty to misdemeanor assault and battery charges, while the sodomy charge was dropped. Albert was given a 12-month suspended sentence.