Steve Kerr will be doing a lot of talking in front of the camera in April.
2010 photo by Emmanuel Lozano, The Arizona Republic
Arizona basketball great Steve Kerr will be back in the Final Four this season, 23 years after helping lead the Wildcats there.
Kerr, an NBA analyst for TNT and an occasional college analyst for Fox Sports Net, will join CBS for the Final Four games on April 2 and the national championship game two nights later. He will join play-by-play man Jim Nantz and Clark Kellogg on the telecast.
(Richard Deitsch of SI.com has many more details about the new broadcaster configurations for the NCAA Tournament.)
For Arizona fans, it will be nice to have Kerr in such a prominent college role, especially one in which he excels. Kerr is a natural storyteller and completely at ease on the air — lighthearted yet informative.
Back in 1988, Kerr and Sean Elliiott carried Arizona to the Final Four, where the Cats lost 86-78 to Oklahoma. Kerr suffered through one of the worst shooting nights of his career — 2 of 12 from 3-point range.
Lute Olson in his autobiography “Lute! The Seasons of My Life” wondered if the presence of Kerr’s mother at the game had some kind of impact:
“This was one of the very few games in Steve’s entire career that she was able to attend. I coached Steve for five years and I never saw him have an off day shooting, so I have to believe that the fact that his mother was at the game affected his performance. I think he was trying so hard to have a perfect game for his mother. After he missed his first few shots the pressure just grew and grew. Shooting is as much mental as physical; sometimes it seems like a great player can almost will the ball into the basket, and I think Steve’s desire was so strong that it took him out of his natural game.”