Art Chandler’s voice echoes in the rafters of historic Cameron Indoor Stadium. His Southern drawl weaves between the dozens of championship banners and the retired jerseys of Duke legends. Like the brushed wooden accents and the rowdy Cameron Crazies, Chandler is a fixture in Cameron Indoor Stadium. He retired in May after serving as the public address announcer in Cameron for the last forty seasons, during which he called over 600 games and narrated the glorious feats of 12 ACC championship teams, four national championship teams, dozens of All-American athletes and one legendary coach.
“Threeeeeee Redick!” Chandler and I are sitting courtside in an empty Cameron Indoor Stadium. He is demonstrating how after 2006 National Player of the Year J.J. Redick would nail one of his signature 3-pointers, sending the Cameron Crazies into a cheering frenzy, he would get so excited that he’d allow himself to express some of that energy in his voice. It was just a slight elongation of the last syllable, but this trivial showing of emotion was a rarity for Chandler, who prided himself on being an invisible part of the game.
“I worked hard not to show bias,” Chandler explains. “I think the P.A. announcer is a source of information about what’s going on in the game. I don’t think attention should be called to him any more than to the referees. The referees keep the game going and I think the P.A. gives information.”
Chandler remembers a time when Coach Mike Krzyzewski’s name did not adorn the polished hardwood floor and no banners hung proudly from the stadium’s rafters. He remembers when Duke basketball was not a perennial national championship contender and Cameron Indoor Stadium was Duke Indoor Stadium—a small arena that would only fill up when cross-town rival North Carolina came to play. And he remembers how he thrust himself into the P.A. announcer position.
It was 1969 in the bleachers of a half-empty Duke Indoor Stadium when Chandler accidentally offered his deep, crisp voice to Duke basketball. Chandler was the ophthalmology residency program director for Duke University School of Medicine, having received his own medical degree from the institution several years before. The Blue Devils were facing the University of Virginia, and when a Duke player made a fantastic play on the court and the crowd cheered in admiration, Chandler fumed in frustration. He doesn’t remember what happened; in fact, I’m not sure if he even saw the play. The poor calling of the P.A. announcer had distracted Chandler. He decided to vent his frustration to the man sitting to his right, who happened to be an assistant director in the Duke Sports Information office. The next season, Athletic Director Carl James offered the job of P.A. announcer to Chandler, who held the position for the next 40 years without ever being paid.
TOOLS OF THE TRADE
Art Chandler never planned nor aspired to be a P.A. announcer, but his smooth voice combined with his athletic experience and keen intellect made him an ideal candidate to narrate Duke’s evolution from an average college basketball team to a national powerhouse boasting the game’s most famous head coach and most historic arena.
It began with his voice. Chandler was born and raised in Hinton, W.Va., a coal-mining town deep in the Appalachian Mountains, and it was there that he developed his slow Southern accent. “I was blessed with a fairly good voice. I was blessed with a fairly good ability to speak into the microphone. It didn’t scare me,” says Chandler. During college he joined the microphone club that performed radio dramas and sometimes covered sporting events. He began to learn how to effectively use his voice by manipulating the pitch, volume and inflection, and this limited experience in voice control was the perfect foundation for a career as a P.A. announcer—the action on the court rolled off his tongue with precision and the utmost clarity.
As a practicing ophthalmologist and medical school professor, Chandler possessed the work ethic and intellectual capabilities necessary to man the microphone with accuracy and grace. Although he willfully admits that he slacked off during his first two years at Washington and Lee University, he quickly realized his mistakes and transferred to Florida Southern College in hopes of bettering his chances of being accepted to medical school. He excelled at Florida Southern and was president of the senior class, but his past academic failures couldn’t be washed away entirely, and he was rejected from all thirteen medical schools to which he applied. Rather than give up on following in the footsteps of his father and becoming a physician, Chandler worked even harder. After receiving his master’s in nuclear physics and radiation biology at the University of Tennessee, he reapplied to medical school. Despite being accepted at Harvard, Chandler chose to enroll at Duke and then continued his studies at Columbia Medical School in New York City. Chandler devoted the rest of his life to training future doctors at several of the country’s most elite medical schools: Stanford, Duke and North Carolina. And even though he taught medicine in Tar Heel country, Chandler never forgot where his allegiances lied. “I wore my Duke pin to work every day and it drove them crazy,” says Chandler. “I’m not a Carolina hater…I really respect Carolina; what they’ve done, their ideals, and their keeping everything reasonably straight. And I want them to do the best they can…the better they do, the better we are if we beat them.”
Finally, Chandler’s own athleticism and consequent knowledge of the sporting world enhanced his ability to announce games in such a demanding environment. He is shy when it comes to talking about his own athletic accomplishments, but he played varsity tennis at both Washington and Lee and Florida Southern. At the same time, Chandler mastered the game of basketball from an administrative standpoint, as he managed the basketball teams in high school and at both universities. He learned the inner workings of different basketball strategies and rules, so at Duke he was able to immediately understand and articulate all the plays, shots and fouls that he saw on the court.
GAME TIME
Chandler and I are sitting several seats down from his usual spot along the sideline, where a small plaque displaying his name adorns the wood above his desk space. Cameron is dormant: the bleachers that house the raucous students are folded, the scoreboard is off, and no microphone sits in front of Chandler’s throne. Although Chandler gained recognition for the work he did on the sideline, he explains that it was his work ethic and preparation that allowed him to work fluidly and flawlessly during games.
His preparations usually began two hours before tip-off when he would arrive at the arena and begin studying the opposing team’s roster to learn the correct pronunciations. If he had any apprehension about an unusual name, he would find a representative from the other team to confirm the pronunciation—there was no room for mistakes during the game. Coach K arrived in 1980 and coincidentally the first game that season was against the Polish national team. To prepare, Chandler worked with Coach K’s mother, who Chandler refers to as Mama, for two days. He worked hard, poring over the roster and refining his pronunciations. When he finally felt comfortable with the roster, Chandler asked her if he sounded good. She said, “Not bad, but nobody would ever confuse you with being Polish.”
Once the game began, Chandler’s goal was to disappear. In contrast to the boisterous P.A. announcers commonly found in the NBA screaming and hollering after each play, Chandler was always calm and collected. Although the Cameron Crazies chanted and Cameron literally shook with the energy of several thousand screaming, die-hard fans, Chandler remained stoic and focused on the sideline. “I tried to keep it absolutely flat and equal,” explains Chandler. “The only time I would change the inflection a little bit is when I was announcing the starting lineups. I’d give our team a little more emphasis than the opposing team. But during the game I think I kept it pretty flat.”
He watched every dribble, pass and shot, leaning over his microphone when appropriate and informing the crowd as to what was occurring on the floor. When the referee made a call in the opposing team’s favor, Chandler kept his composure and relayed the information to the crowd—ever careful not to intensify the explosion of boos and jeers. And when the call went in Duke’s favor, or a certain Blue Devil made an impressive pass or powerful dunk, Chandler remained balanced.
Coach K stood 20 feet down the sideline from Chandler for 30 years, and he always appreciated Chandler’s old-fashioned approach to the profession.
“In Cameron, the P.A. announcer doesn’t need to generate energy,” says Coach K. “The Cameron Crazies, the band and cheerleaders all take care of that. Some might call his approach conservative in comparison to other places. For Duke, it worked perfectly.”
A VERSATILE VOICE
Art Chandler knows how to use his voice. In Cameron, it was a steady source of information for the masses. The crowd could rest assured his reliable twang would enlighten them toward any action on the court. But Chandler did not only put his voice to good use during basketball games.
In Saudi Arabia during the First Gulf War, Chandler used his voice to run the medical services of a military hospital near the border of Iraq. At the age of 49, Chandler joined the Army Reserve and remained active for 18 years. After the First Gulf War erupted in the Middle East, Chandler was called for duty in 1991. This was one of only three times in his career that he missed calling a game in Cameron. Although he was halfway around the world, Chandler was still a member of the Duke family. Coach K, a graduate of West Point, sent him a “care package” filled with Duke memorabilia and a comforting letter. When Duke was playing UNLV in the national semi-finals, a fellow serviceman interrupted Chandler during church to inform him that the game was on Armed Forces Radio. Chandler smiles when he remembers that his comrade could not correctly pronounce Christian Laettner’s name. Chandler, of course, had pronounced it perfectly hundreds of times in front of thousands of spectators.
In the drab walls of the Duke University School of Medicine, his voice was a teaching tool. Future physicians looked to Chandler for knowledge as he taught ophthalmic anatomy to first-year medical students and mentored third- and fourth-year medical students who took ophthalmology as an elective. As the ophthalmology residency program director, Chandler’s voice was a final source of guidance that prepared resident physicians for their board exams. He then performed the same work at North Carolina although he was not in charge, and at both hospitals he oversaw a surgical and clinical practice.
Most important, Art Chandler’s voice raised a family. In this context, his voice did many things. It loved and it disciplined, but sometimes it was absent. Chandler says, “Looking back [on my life]…I would have been a little more careful with my first marriage, but I had so many things going on I just didn’t spend the time I should have.”
He laments the fact that he was so busy dedicating his time to Duke medicine and basketball that he didn’t spend enough time with his first wife, Deborah. This was the only time during our extensive interviews that I ever heard vulnerability in his voice. However, it was only for a brief moment. Chandler continued talking about his family and it became evident that he was always a good father to his children, and eventually he learned to be a better husband. He will soon be celebrating thirty years with his second wife, Sarah.
THE GAME CHANGES
Art Chandler is a symbol of Duke’s past. In contrast to the flashy video screen that now hangs above center court and the digital monitors that stretch the length of the entire sideline that is visible during televised games, Chandler is old school. “Not everybody likes change, but whether it’s for the good or the bad, change is inevitable,” he says.
When Chandler first began his job as P.A. announcer, he remembers being allotted more freedom and spontaneity at the microphone. The sports information representatives would give Chandler some mandatory information that needed to be announced, and he could fit it into the game as he pleased. But in today’s big-business, no room for bad publicity environment, Chandler had to follow a detailed script for the entire game that chronicles the content and length of each promotion, song or cheer to be played during breaks or timeouts, and allocates the responsibilities between the band, the video screen, and Chandler. Associate Athletic Director Jon Jackson is a member of the team that is burdened with the responsibility of keeping Duke’s basketball program and arena modern while maintaining its tradition and history.
So while Duke has added modern amenities that fans have come to expect like video screens and digital scoreboards, Jackson explains that preserving tradition is the utmost priority. He says, “We have a unique situation where you want to celebrate your past because it’s special, you want to celebrate the present because it’s special, and you hopefully want to celebrate your future.”
Chandler, the voice of Cameron for 40 years, will not be a part of that future, but during our interviews he wanted it to be clear: he did not choose to retire because he disagreed with the gradual modernization of Cameron and college basketball in general; rather at the age of 77, his health was beginning to interfere. He was simply tired.
Although Cameron could be renovated, painted, and updated through the years, its P.A. announcer could not be refurbished. After two hip replacements and several battles with cancer, Chandler’s health is not what it used to be. So he decided several seasons ago that he would retire after the forty seasons mark. It was a pleasant coincidence that during his final season on the sideline he was able to narrate one of the most dominant Duke teams ever to play on Coach K Court.
“This season was a joy. You could watch them on the floor and tell that they really liked each other. There was no envy. They didn’t care who got the points, who got the assists, or who got the blocks. And if somebody made a mistake you didn’t see a bad facial expression,” says Chandler. So although they were far from being the most talented team that he ever witnessed, he told me that he thought they were the best “team.” This is quite a compliment for the 2010 National Champions who followed a talented line of Duke teams that were among some of the best college basketball teams ever assembled. After Coach K returned to Durham following the victory in Indianapolis, Chandler joked, “I wanted to thank you very much for my going away present.”
For the upcoming 2010-2011 season, Duke football and volleyball announcer Trip Durham will take over the microphone in Cameron Indoor Stadium, but Chandler’s name will still be engraved on the plaque that sits atop the P.A. announcer’s desk. Jackson explained that the process for choosing the new P.A. announcer was a substantial undertaking, as the athletic department wanted to ensure that Chandler’s replacement fit into the somewhat conservative profile that Chandler had established in the celebrated basketball arena. Jackson explained that Durham is expected to bring a younger, more modern energy to the position, and he has been working alongside Chandler to establish his own voice while keeping Chandler’s legacy intact. Chandler’s famous introduction, “Here comes Duke,” which has been welcoming the Blue Devils to the court since former Duke center Alaa Abdelnaby suggested it in the early ’80s, will still be used to introduce the Blue Devils. And Jackson has ensured that Chandler will still be able to come to every game and cheer on the team that he considers family.
“I think Art might be missed when it comes to his voice, but his presence will not be missed,” says Durham. “He is still going to be an integral part, I would think, of game day as a fan. His legacy is strong, and I don’t think it’s one that’s going to fade away any time soon.”
Art Chandler was not just a good P.A. announcer; rather he believes “the announcing gig was just a small, albeit fun, part of a full life. Miss it? You bet. I already am.”
Even though Chandler worked hard to not be noticed, many Duke basketball fans, including myself, will miss his voice inside Cameron. I first met Chandler on Ninth Street in Durham, just off of Duke’s East Campus. On the phone his voice sounded so young and smooth that I almost forgot that he was an elderly gentleman until I saw him standing there outside the pub where we had planned to meet. Being an avid sports fan and Cameron Crazie, I was nervous to meet this man who had so ingrained himself in the essence of Duke basketball. He had his Duke pin proudly displayed on the lapel of his sport coat, just to make sure everyone understood where his allegiances lied. Upon extending my hand and making my introduction, his eyes lit up and he let go of his cane to shake mine in return. Art Chandler knows how to choose and deliver his words, and the first words that came out of his mouth that day summed up his extraordinary life and the way he approached it: “Nobody has had more fun in life than me. Nobody.” And you know what? I believe him.
Get The Chronicle straight to your inbox
Signup for our weekly newsletter. Cancel at any time.