The Utah Utes know how they want the Pac-12 basketball schedule to end this week. They need two home-court wins and two more of Parker Van Dyke’s sportscasting narrations to punctuate an adventurous season with a top-four finish in the conference and a successful sendoff for him and the program’s three other graduating players.
The postgame tradition after victories started in January when the Utes visited the Pac-12 Networks studio in San Francisco. Kory Mortensen, the athletic department’s creative/new media specialist, asked for a player to go on the set and discuss the previous night’s win at Stanford. His teammates prodded Van Dyke, who’s a business economics major, but has some interest in sportscasting after his basketball career ends.
The next day, Van Dyke summarized a win at California with a video clip, and has done so after subsequent victories with a style he describes as “a lot of nonsense.”
After a victory at USC that included his clutch 3-pointer, Van Dyke announced, “The Utes were on F-I-R-E fire!”
He’s mimicking the ESPN anchors he grew up watching, and he made “SportsCenter” himself with his buzzer-beating 3-pointer for the 93-92 win at UCLA. Van Dyke’s account of that game: “Incredible, sensational, magnificent, marvelous, whatever three-to-four-syllable word want to use … I can’t believe it. Bill Walton can’t believe it. No one can believe it.”
Kurt Kragthorpe has worked continuously for daily newspapers in Utah since 1977. He moved to The Tribune in 1990 and had a nine-year stint as sports editor, in between writing assignments that have included six Olympic Games, as well as several Super Bowls and major golf tournaments. Kurt and his wife, Sandra, enjoy traveling nationally and interna