Rich Burk reflects on bucket list week with Trail Blazers
The longtime Portland-area broadcaster has done a lot of things in his career. Calling a pair of Blazers games this week was new, however.
Rich Burk has done a little bit of everything in his decades of broadcasting in Oregon.
Just last week, Burk was on the mic for Oregon State’s 61-58 men’s basketball upset of USC in Corvallis, and in the last month has been on the call for gymnastics, women’s basketball and wrestling for the Pac-12 Network. In the summers, Burk’s voice has been narrating baseball games since he started with the Class A Portland Rockies in 1995.
But for as long as Burk has been in Portland, he had never done a Blazers game until back-to-back games on the radio earlier this week.
He got the heads up on Friday that he might be needed, received confirmation Sunday at 2 p.m. and then checked off a bucket list item when he filled in for Travis Demers on the radio for the 7 p.m. tip against the Lakers on Monday.
“From the time I was off the air in Corvallis at 5 o’clock on Saturday to the time I said goodbye on the postgame show [Tuesday], it was 100 percent Blazers with very little sleep,” Burk said. “It just wasn’t the standard time I had to prepare, but I did what I could and had so much fun.”
In the grand scope of his career, this week came somewhat unexpected. Had young Rich Burk had his way, he’d likely be headed down to spring training this month in preparation for another MLB season.
Growing up in Los Angeles and listening to Vin Scully on the radio, Burk once had dreams of landing in a Big League broadcast booth. And after getting his swings in with the Rockies and then the Class AAA Portland Beavers, he even got a few call ups in the 2000s. He did a few spring training games for the Padres, 10 games for the Montreal Expos in Puerto Rico1, three games with the Blue Jays, three games with Atlanta and another four with Pittsburgh.
He interviewed Bobby Cox and Chipper Jones, talks fondly of a conversation he had with Roy Halladay and remembers being struck by how loose everyone in the clubhouse was compared to AAA.
“I’d go visit these booths and I had a lot of contacts and I traveled around the country and I remember one night at Wrigley Field, it was a night game, and I was just looking out from the broadcast booth and getting goosebumps at the sight of the whole thing and imagining what it would be like,” Burk said. “I can’t tell you how many people told me, ‘Man, it’s just a matter of time until you’re in a Major League Baseball radio booth.”
Burk interviewed for a few positions, but never received that permanent call up.
“I came close a few times,” he said. “But in retrospect, I’m glad I didn’t get it. My kids are in college now and I wouldn’t know them nearly as well as I do. I just love the way things are here in Portland, working for Pac-12 Network, living in Hillsboro and doing the Hops and now a few games with the Trail Blazers.”
Burk came to Oregon in the 1980s to attend Pacific University and was baptized into Rip City by listening to Bill Schonely on the radio. Burk admired the way Schonely rose to the big moments of a game — and had no idea that one day it would be his voice on the radio, calling the same team.
“When I started calling small college basketball back in the 1990s, if you would have told me I would have done a pair of Blazers games I would have been ecstatic,” Burk said. “It was certainly a challenge and I love the challenge.”
— Tyson Alger
@tysonalger
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“I called a July 4, 2004, baseball game, in Puerto Rico, between two Canadian teams.”