PITTSBURGH — It is Wednesday night and the lineups for Duquesne and Chicago State are being introduced in UPMC Cooper Fieldhouse. See the gentleman in the gray and white striped shirt, wearing headphones at courtside? That’s Ray Goss and he’s No. 1 in the nation. In tenure, that is. This is his 56th season as play-by-play announcer for Duquesne, long enough to go through 11 head coaches. He’s 87 years old.
Now let’s jump in the car and dash down Forbes Avenue to Petersen Events Center. Won't take long, it's not two miles away. Pittsburgh and Wake Forest are playing in an ACC game. See the guy with headphones in Pitt blue and gold, sitting near the Panthers bench? That’s Bill Hillgrove and he’s No. 2. This is his 55th season at Pitt, long enough to go through nine head coaches. He’s 83.
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This, then, is the tale of two local legends who have traveled remarkably parallel paths. How many hundreds of radio voices are out there around the country calling college basketball games? And the two who have been at their current microphones the longest work an eight-minute drive apart. They’re not exactly close friends, but colleagues who definitely respect — and most uncertainly understand — one another.
This from Hillgrove. “It beats a real job. It’s been a blessing; I get paid to talk. If you can’t play the game, you can broadcast it. And you can broadcast it a hell of a lot longer than you can play it.”
This from Goss. “I tell people I’ve never worked a day in my life. I just flap my gums a lot.”
We should go back seven hours earlier on this gameday Wednesday, to a restaurant in suburban Pittsburgh, and two gentlemen talking basketball over salads at lunch. They had not seen each other since September, when both were inducted into the Pennsylvania Association of Broadcasters Hall of Fame. Goss and Hillgrove once had the chance to catch up every year at the Pittsburgh-Duquesne game, but that series stopped in 2018, so their roads now seldom cross. Hillgrove lives with his wife in Murrysville, just outside Pittsburgh. Goss, a widower, makes the 55-mile trip in from his home in Indiana, Pa.
But no matter if one is here and the other is there, they are often linked by their mutual astounding longevity. Vin Scully times two. So what about being No. 1 and No. 2, as college basketball voices that have not been stilled for more than half a century?
Let the noon hour give-and-take begin.
Hillgrove: “It just sort of dawned on me. I never paid much mind to it, did you Ray? I’ll drive (Goss) back and forth from Indiana to Duquesne just so I’m not No. 1, and be the oldest guy in the market.”
Goss, recalling his words at the Hall of Fame ceremony in September: “I thanked two people. The guy who invented radio, Marconi, and the guy who invented basketball, James Naismith. When you think about it, if it wasn’t for radio and basketball, I don’t know what I’d be doing.”
Hillgrove: “I liked that (speech).”
Goss: “I take it one year at a time. I don’t even think about next year.”
Hillgrove: “Now I love one-year contracts. If I’m not doing the job throw my ass out.”
“To be our age and still have that full faculty at your command is rare. I know a lot of people my age who are slowing down in all ways, mentally, emotionally.”
Goss: “And your voice starts to go.”
Hillgrove: “I have a guy who listens to me closely and I told him, if I start losing my fastball, you tell me. He hasn’t called me so I guess I can still do it.”
Goss: “I have a couple of people do that. I’ve gone back to listen to tapes. I sound pretty much the same.”
You’d think competing in the same market might fan competitive flames between the two, maybe see who ends up staying the longest. A race to the last adjective. Hillgrove: “We’re both so subject to Mother Nature. We’re more concerned about that than we are about anything.”
Goss: “There’s some animosity between Pitt and Duquesne fans but I always root for Pitt. I grew up rooting for Pitt.”
Hillgrove: “And I grew up rooting for Duquesne.”
They are both sons of Pittsburgh. Hillgrove remembers walking a half hour to Forbes Field to see the Pirates play, paying a dollar to get into the left field bleachers. Goss took the streetcar to the ballpark. Both attended Duquesne for similar reasons, using streetcars and buses to get there every day. They yearned for broadcasting careers and they could get a start on the student radio station. Both were disc jockeys for a time. Goss would spin classical music, Hillgrove hosted a talk show.
Their roads parted a bit from there. Goss headed for small market radio where he broadcast everything from high school football to American Legion baseball games — where he once called a game from someone’s kitchen overlooking the diamond because the park had no phone lines — to outhouse races at a county fair. He badly wanted to work in the NBA and he had an offer from CBS in the 1970s to do regional games, but the idea was scrubbed because the national ratings the year before were so lousy. Goss still has the unexecuted contract that symbolizes a dream that slid away. Hillgrove did TV work and also became a mainstay as the voice of the Steelers, along with Pitt football and basketball.
So in some ways, they’ve represented two worlds; Goss small-town America with mid-major Duquesne, Hillgrove the big city lights with power league Pitt and the aura of the beloved Steelers. “I wasn’t known in Pittsburgh,” Goss says. “I’m still not known in Pittsburgh. I tell people I’m the least known play-by-play. Bill was on TV and everybody knows him. When I walk down the street nobody knows me, which is fine.”
Hillgrove has broadcast for Pitt teams in more than 20 NCAA tournaments, including one that came within agonizingly close reach of the Final Four. The sight of Villanova beating the Panthers in the 2009 Elite Eight in the last seconds is still clear in his mind. Goss’ last NCAA tournament experience with Duquesne was 47 years ago. The first Final Four he saw in 1966, when he slipped in without a ticket. The first Dukes game he broadcast was in the 1968 NIT.
The two did not attend Duquesne at the same time. “We never knew each other,” Hillgrove says. So where did they meet? Both voices in unison: “Probably at a Pitt-Duquesne game.” They now occasionally listen to one another’s broadcast. “We learn from one another,” Hillgrove says.
And on this day, they swap stories over lunch.
Such as the student days at Duquesne. Goss describes how other kids at the radio station would turn the lights off while he reading news copy or shoot water pistols at him, trying to make him break up on the air.
Or the modern problems of following the game while sitting down low on the floor. Hillgrove brings up the mop guy at Georgia Tech who blocked his view, Goss the time at Dayton an usher got mad at him because he had to stand to see the game. “He told me I was going to have to stay seated. I said I’m paid to do this game, I’m going to stand if I need to. And he walked away.”
They agree on the importance of handy arena bathrooms, when a man is on the air for hours. Goss tells the story where one time he called for a commercial break, started his stopwatch, and knew he had one minute to get to the bathroom and back. He just made it.
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They talk broadcast partners. Hillgrove worked a long time with Dick Groat, an extraordinary athlete who was a Duke All-American in basketball and also a National League batting champion for the Pirates. He played both Major League Baseball and the NBA. “The thing I remember is the big men could fall on their faces and he wouldn’t react. But if the guards played bad, he’d put his head in his hands. He was a guard and if the guards played bad, he couldn’t stand it.
“Below the Mason-Dixon Line a lot of people didn’t know he played shortstop and above the Mason-Dixon Line a lot of people didn’t know he played basketball.”
Goss now works with former Duquesne player Jarrett Durham, who is 74. “We have to be the oldest radio team in captivity,” Goss says.
They talk of life on the road. Goss now often needs to get through airports in a wheel chair because of neuropathy with his feet. Hillgrove mentions the trip to Buffalo, where the plan was to continue on to play at Colgate. A snowstorm forced a cancellation, so when it was gametime, he went on the air with the players in his hotel room singing Jingle Bells. “I remember calling the Weather Bureau and asking how many more inches of snow do you expect? He said, pal, up here we deal in feet.”
They talk about the basketball games they’ve missed in more than a half-century. Hillgrove has been absent for several because of conflicts, either with Pitt football and basketball playing on the same day or his work on the Steelers. His only medical miss has been one game with back spasms.
Goss to Hillgrove: “I did several Pitt games when you couldn’t make it. I remember one game down at UAB.”
Hillgrove: “That was the day that Pitt lost to Penn State 48-14. I did the football but I wished I had switched.”
Goss has kept careful count. In 55 years he has missed three Duquesne games. The first was 1978 when he was auditioning for the possible NBA job, the third during the pandemic when he tested positive for COVID. But the second absence, in 2011, is the one that broke his heart.
He was in Montana to call a Duquesne game in the CBI postseason tournament. He had talked to his wife of 50 years, Dee, earlier in the day. He invariably called her after every game but since this was in a different time zone and would end late, he told her he’d call the next day. It was their last conversation. Dee died in her sleep of an aortic aneurysm. He stayed home to mourn during the next round; It was the first Dukes game he had missed in 33 years.
They both sense the passage of time, and the changes it brings. They regret their teams no longer meet, a casualty of modern scheduling. “The Pitt-Duquesne game on a Sunday afternoon, that was the place to be,” Hillgrove says. “Those days are behind us.”
Goss has a question you would never hear in a conversation of young broadcasters.
“How many Halls of Fame are you in, Bill?”
Hillgrove counts in his head and comes up with five. Goss has four.
But no matter the rolling decades, the fire still burns. “When I get to the game I think the adrenaline kicks in,” Goss says and Hillgrove knowingly nods. Retirement? “Not in my lexicon," Hillgrove says. Goss seconds that. “People ask me that. I used to do four or five games and week and run a radio station and now I just do two games a week. What are you talking about? I am retired.”
Still, there must be accommodation to the years. When Hillgrove took the Steelers job, owner Art Rooney II told him he liked Hillgrove’s energy. “But that was 53-year-old energy and now it’s 83-year-old energy,” he says now. “I may have to make some tough decisions and I don’t know which way I’m going to go.”
There is the natural question of what it has all meant to them in the end, but they agree this is no time for an answer. “We’re so busy doing things, that to be reflective like that would take probably a step away and I’m not ready to step away.” Hillgrove says.
“Neither am I,” Goss says.
They chat a bit longer about mutual friends from the Pittsburgh sports scene. One has dementia, another just lost a wife, another has a wife fighting cancer. Goss pulls out the book he wrote 16 years ago on his experiences — "Misadventures in Broadcasting."
“You have this, I know,” he says to Hillgrove. “I’m going to write mine, but only after I give something up,” Hillgrove says.
Their broadcast generation is dwindling but they share the gift of lasting longer than nearly anyone else. That would seem to be fodder for any good future lunch conversation. “We ought to get together more often,” Hillgrove says to Goss as they part.
That night, each will call a victory, in modern arenas with huge video boards. They could never have imagined such high definition monstrosities back when they began, but now they use them to help keep track of the game. Two miles apart, their legacies continue, one basketball bounce at a time. Life is good.
