Radio star

As a teen, Allen Stone’s journey with sports was primarily intellectual. He liked all aspects of heady sports culture from history and statistics to humaninterest stories and its cultural underbelly.

Although he didn’t set out to become a sportscaster, his interest took him from radio to TV broadcasting to pubic relations and beyond.

He did the morning broadcast on WRR-FM, which is now The Ticket, but when the show lost its sports anchor, he was asked to step up to the plate while also doing the news.

“Since I had a sports background, it was so easy for me,” he explains. “I went to them and said, ‘I’d really rather be the sports director,’ so I did.”

From there Stone caught a lucky break and managed to land a job as the weekend sports anchor at Channel 4, even though he had no previous TV experience.

“Then I got hired by the Dallas Mavericks when the franchise first came together,” he says. “I was one of their original employees, which quickly moved me into public relations and broadcast. I went back on the air as the Dallas Mavericks’ main TV announcer for 13 years.”

He left the Dallas Mavericks in the early-‘90s to work for ESPN part-time, but he needed some extra work. As an SMU grad, he found out the school was looking for a play-by-play basketball announcer.

“I thought, ‘Oh that would be fun, my alma mater. I’ll do that for a while until I figure out what else I want to do longterm,’” he recalls with a chuckle. “My mindset was, ‘I’ll do this for a season.’ That was 23 years ago.”

He shuffled through other jobs, but he always kept the SMU basketball gig, he says — although he shifts back and forth between being a play-by-play announcer and the guy who adds color and trivia to the show. When he retired last year, it freed up his schedule to allow him to spend even more time announcing games at home and away.

“Obviously getting into sports opened a ton of doors for me,” he says. “I got to do a lot of things, but I don’t see myself as a sports addict,” he says. He doesn’t want his life to be “dominated by sports,” but rather something he does for his own personal enjoyment.

“I’ll turn 70 in August, and I keep thinking SMU is going to get rid of me anytime now,” he says. “Or I’ll think, ‘Now that I’m retired I should probably give it up,’ but I’m having so much fun right now because SMU is doing so good. I did it for so many years when they were bad.”

And he figures since SMU’s basketball coach Larry Brown is 75-years-old, maybe that’ll buy him some extra time.

“Because I’m not that old,” Stone says.

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Materials DUE

February 5

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Late February