VOLLEYBALL HISTORY
Where are they now?
Denver has found a nugget in versatile
broadcaster and Olympic volleyball
gold medalist Chris Marlowe
C
hris Marlowe could always talk a good game. Marlowe, 62, parlayed his knowledge of sports and his natural gift of gab into a fulfi lling ca- reer after playing at the highest level of volleyball. Marlowe is in his 10th year as the television play-by-play announcer for the Denver Nuggets, where he routinely makes volleyball references as NBA stars spike basketballs out of bounds.
Not many guys could be compared to both Chick Hearn (longtime Los Angeles Lakers announcer) and Karch Kiraly as contemporaries, but Marlowe is in both conversations. “Well, I am not nearly as good an announcer as the great Chick was,” Marlowe said. “And Karch was the greatest player of all time, so there is no way I was the player he was. But just to be mentioned in the same sentence as both is a thrill for me.” Marlowe’s thrills began long before his NBA gig. He was a high-profi le player for San Diego State in the 1970s, helping the Aztecs men’s team claim their lone NCAA championship in 1973 and creat- ing a volleyball craze in the community. “We used to pack that gym and we were the toast of the campus,” Marlowe said. “I will never forget that time in my life and how much fun I had with my teammates.”
Marlowe, who was twice named the most valuable player of the USA Volleyball Open Nationals, was also an exceptional beach player. Two of his eight career victories were at the Manhattan Beach Open and a third was at the 1977 World Championship event. He had a roller coaster ride with the U.S.
Men’s National Team, culminating with him being the fi rst American volleyball player to pull out a Stars and Stripes fl ag after they won the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games gold medal in Long Beach. Ironically, Marlowe was cut from the team a few months before the 1984 Olympics, but a surrender fl ag was not in his bag. When setter Rod Wilde broke his leg just weeks before the competition, head coach Doug Beal added Marlowe back on the roster to fulfi ll the role of back up setter to Dusty Dvorak. His team- mates voted him captain of the squad shortly thereafter.
“I always felt bad for Rod because he was such a great player,” Marlowe said. “Even though athletically he was a better setter than me, I felt like I was a better fi t to back up Dusty on that team. When the team voted me captain for the Olympics, it was a great feeling because it confi rmed what I believed my value to the team truly was.” Marlowe, whose father Hugh was an actor, spent part of his life after volleyball pursuing acting. That landed him on a soap opera, on camera with Tom Hanks in an episode of the sitcom “Bosom Buddies” and a bit role in the movie “Rounders” with Matt Damon. Sports broadcasting, however, was his true calling. He and partner Paul Sunderland (also a team- mate on that 1984 Olympic team) attracted a cult following for their work on early Prime Ticket Network broadcasts of AVP Tour events when Marlowe’s trademark sign off was “the beach is now closed.”
MIKED-UP MARLOWE: Olympic volleyball gold medalist Chris Marlowe enjoys his job in Denver, where he does television play-by- play for the NBA’s Nuggets.
Marlowe and his family now enjoy living in a suburb of Denver, where he has spent several of the past high school seasons as an assistant to his daughter Grace’s top-ranked prep team at Arapahoe High in Colorado. Beal also had a daughter on one of Marlowe’s daughter’s teams during that time, so the pair was reunited nearly 30 years after the gold medal experience. “I didn’t always agree with him, but I always said Doug had the smartest volleyball mind I have ever been around,” Marlowe said of his former coach. “It was great to have daughters on the same team.” He also stays in touch with volleyball by announcing, working NBC telecasts for Olympic beach volleyball and on the AVP Tour’s productions. He revels in his current situation with Altitude Sports, the company that employs him and affords him the opportunity to talk basketball within earshot of the likes of LeBron James and Kevin Durant. “I am doing what most guys do anyway,” he said. “Talk and analyze basketball – but I am getting paid to do it. It’s a wonderful situation and I have no plans on giving it up for awhile.”
— Jon Hastings 24 | VOLLEYBALLUSA • Digital Issue at
usavolleyball.org/mag
PHOTOS: ALTITUDE SPORTS/BRUCE HAZELTON
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