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Announcer Gus Johnson adds to big-time aura of Ward-Kessler on Showtime
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For the biggest Bay Area boxing match in memory Saturday, Gus Johnson brings a major league presence as Showtime’s announcer for the Andre Ward-Mikkel Kessler bout at Oracle Arena in Oakland.
Ward is bidding for Kessler’s WBA super-middleweight championship as their fight completes the opening set of bouts in the Super Six championship.
Johnson is granted a weekend away from his usual NFL duties on CBS to preside, along with analyst-commentators Al Bernstein and Antonio Tarver.
Johnson is busy, busy, busy. I caught a couple of minutes of Gus doing Marv Albert’s old gig, calling the New York Knicks’ game at Indiana on radio, as we played phone tag Wednesday. He reached me after the game, and I’d say he was dining on room service in his room in Indianapolis, so we were comfy.
I’m warming to Johnson on boxing, as I warmed to him on CBS’s college basketball coverage, beginning in 1995, and then additionally on the NFL crew as of 1998. He also worked boxing long before claiming the Showtime job in 2008, doing so alongside analysts such as Gil Clancy and Dave Bon Tempo. He says he didn’t campaign hard for the Showtime job when the cable network began to overhaul its boxing personnel, but “I was hoping for it, that’s for sure.”
Johnson, 42, brings a bit of youth to a position long held by Steve Albert, Marv’s younger brother. Ironically, one of Steve’s most memorable career stints was his role, mostly at Oracle Arena, as the Golden State Warriors’ TV play-by-play man in the early 1990s. Steve is amazingly unassuming about the ups and downs of the profession and has been filling in on Showtime’s second crew as Nick Charles battles cancer.
Although Johnson has his detractors on the non-boxing side of fight sports (notably during the EliteXC extravaganza on CBS last year), he does bring considerable credibility, having been an amateur boxer in his youth in Detroit, where he also saw the Pistons and occasional boxing at Cobo Arena with his pop.
In recent years he has turned to other fight sports so those post-game room service binges don’t take a toll. “I like to keep in shape,” he says, adding ruefully that Achilles’ tendon trouble has reduced his basketball play.
He didn’t strive to be an announcer until after college. “I wanted to be the guy who replaced Sweet Lou Whitaker at second base” for the Detroit Tigers, Johnson told me. He played baseball at Howard University, where he earned a degree in political science, and by age 24 he had become a weekend anchor at a TV station in Washington, D.C.
Already, the flap over the judges for Ward-Kessler and whether the WBA defense would be sanctioned gave Johnson issues to dig into when he arrives in the Bay Area, but he figures Kessler knew that came with the territory when he signed. “He took that willingly,” Johnson said.
The same could be said of Johnson’s increased immersion into boxing. Calling the Carl Froch-Andre Dirrell bout earlier in the Super Six, Johnson was the one who kept making the best case for penalizing Froch for rough-housing instead of Dirrell for holding, as happened in a bout that Froch inexplicably won by decision.
That poli-sci degree will come in handy, as it undoubtedly often does in the hallways at CBS.
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