{"id":54560,"date":"2017-07-18T20:36:34","date_gmt":"2017-07-18T20:36:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=54560"},"modified":"2017-07-18T20:36:34","modified_gmt":"2017-07-18T20:36:34","slug":"mike-tirico-would-like-to-talk-about-anything-but-mike-tirico","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=54560","title":{"rendered":"Mike Tirico Would Like to Talk About Anything but Mike Tirico"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mike Tirico Would Like to Talk About Anything but Mike Tirico<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The New York Times<\/a>
\n2017-07-15<\/p>\n

Juliet Macur<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/a>
\nMike Tirico<\/a> in the NBC booth before calling the Belmont Stakes<\/a>. Tirico will take over for Bob Costas<\/a> as the host of the Winter Olympics<\/a> next year but prefers to avoid talking about himself and his background.
\nCredit Uli Seit for The New York Times<\/em><\/small><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

BALTIMORE<\/a> \u2014 Don\u2019t pay any attention to Mike Tirico<\/a>, even if you\u2019ll be seeing much more of him, and soon.<\/p>\n

Tirico has been a fixture in sports broadcasting for nearly three decades, his voice a prominent and familiar soundtrack for football and basketball and soccer and tennis and \u2014 actually, you name the sport, and he has probably worked it.<\/p>\n

This week, he\u2019ll host his 21st British Open<\/a>. In the fall, he will take over Al Michaels\u2019s<\/a> spot on \u201cThursday Night Football<\/a>.\u201d Next February, he will replace<\/a> Bob Costas<\/a> as the host of NBC\u2019s Olympics coverage, a not-so-subtle hint that he also is the network\u2019s choice as the new face of NBC Sports<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Yet don\u2019t mind Tirico. He insists. When he was in Baltimore in May to call the Preakness Stakes<\/a> for NBC, he explained why he wants it that way.<\/p>\n

In contrast to the yelling, preening and debating in vogue on sports shows, Tirico said, he strives to be an invisible narrator. It is an old-school notion, but Tirico\u2019s shtick is that he doesn\u2019t have a shtick \u2014 and that might just be why he appeals to such a broad audience…<\/p>\n

…Those questions stem from a 1991 profile of him in The Post-Standard<\/em> of Syracuse, N.Y.<\/a>, when he was just starting his career. In that article, Tirico said he wasn\u2019t sure if he was black.<\/p>\n

Ever since, perhaps regretting offering even that small peek into his private life, he has preferred to avoid the subject. Though he once described his relatives as \u201cas white as the refrigerator I\u2019m standing in front of right now,\u201d a Washington Post<\/em> article in 1997 described Tirico as \u201cthe first black play-by-play man (with a little Italian heritage in the family tree) to handle a golf telecast.\u201d<\/p>\n

But these days, at a time when the nation is transfixed by a discussion of race relations, Tirico just doesn\u2019t want to go there. He told me to say he was mixed race, and that was that…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tirico will take over for Bob Costas as the host of the Winter Olympics next year but prefers to avoid talking about himself and his background.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,1245,8,20],"tags":[27319,27320,27321,2640,7222,2327],"class_list":["post-54560","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-biography","category-media-archive","category-usa","tag-juliet-macur","tag-mike-tirico","tag-nbc-sports","tag-new-york-times","tag-sports","tag-the-new-york-times"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54560","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=54560"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54560\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54561,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54560\/revisions\/54561"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=54560"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=54560"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=54560"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}