Chris Marlowe holds court
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DENVER — Pregame NBA press conferences are, in a word, boring.
The information that comes out of them — injury reports, starting lineups — is undoubtedly useful. But they’re obligatory for coaches, and they often lack the emotion of the postgame sessions following exciting wins or agonizing losses.
Nevertheless, Denver Nuggets play-by-play broadcaster Chris Marlowe dutifully attends these updates deep in the halls of Ball Arena. In a sport coat, tie and monk strap shoes, he asks questions about defensive matchups and scribbles notes with a multi-color ballpoint pen. Marlowe no longer dons the mop of shaggy blonde hair that earned him “The Lion” nickname during his beach volleyball days, but he still has the jawline of a drill sergeant.
This season marks Marlowe’s 22nd with the Nuggets, making him one of the longest-tenured play-by-play broadcasters in professional basketball. With a California-cool approach, Marlowe represents remarkable staying power in a time when social media, streaming and cable TV contract disputes have changed the ways people consume sports.
“His experience and his energy stand out,” said Katy Winge, a Nuggets reporter and analyst for Altitude TV, and one of Marlowe’s broadcast partners. “I was so young when I first came into the industry … and he was so helpful and so generous with his time. It was evident that this was so second nature to him. It’s a part of his identity. It’s who he is.”
Sports fans can feel as strongly about their hometown broadcasters as they do about their team’s starting point guard. Even national commentators know fans prefer the local option. Not only do they know the teams better, but longtime broadcasters like Marlowe represent “something stable,” said Jared Bahir Browsh, the director of the Critical Sport Studies Program at the University of Colorado Boulder.
“The teams win and lose, the players come and go, but [broadcasters] are a connecting strand to our experience as sports fans for so long,” he said. “And so it's hard not to develop an emotional and parasocial relationship when they're always there for those moments.”
Marlowe joined Altitude TV — the team-owned regional sports network — in 2004, near the beginning of Carmelo Anthony’s Denver era. Today, he bears witness to another great No. 15: Serbian superstar center Nikola Jokić. An NBA champion and three-time MVP, Jokić is widely considered one of the best basketball players of all time and is unquestionably the best player in franchise history. This, in a way, gives Marlowe a difficult task. How many different ways can a broadcaster say this guy rules?
Marlowe looks for unique angles before each game in addition to the “Jokić is awesome” updates (which were on pause for a couple weeks this season as Jokić recovered from a knee injury). Recently, Marlowe focused on guard Peyton Watson’s development and the two-way contract of forward Spencer Jones.
“Just give me somebody who’s not Jokić and not [point guard Jamal] Murray,” Marlowe said with a laugh. “I don’t mind talking about Jokić. I love Jokić. He’s fabulous. And we talk about him basically every game because we have to. He’s like the Babe Ruth of the Denver Nuggets.”
Marlowe has a journalistic approach in how he calls games. He’s very clear that he wants the Nuggets to win — every local broadcaster roots for the home team, he said. But Marlowe takes pride in the fact that he doesn’t refer to the Nuggets as “we” or the opposing teams as “they.” He doesn’t whine about fouls or bark at the refs. (That’s the job of his broadcasting partner of 20-plus years, Scott Hastings.)
“I try to be as unbiased as a home announcer can be,” Marlowe said.
Play-by-play broadcasters occupy a unique space in media. They are part documentarian, literally telling the viewer what’s happening from one second to the next. But they’re also part showman, keeping the at-home audience engaged and providing the official voiceover to the team’s most memorable moments.
Sometimes, that voiceover is just Marlowe screaming “YEEAAAHHHH!”
Video: Peter Vo, Rocky Mountain PBS
Chris Marlowe was born in Los Angeles in 1951. He grew up in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood. Founded by Methodists in the early 1920s, the Palisades — a hilly, residential area between the Santa Monica mountains and the Pacific Ocean — became a popular home for artists, including Marlowe’s parents.
His father, Hugh Marlowe, had a long career acting in television shows, stage plays and films, including 1950’s “All About Eve.” Chris Marlowe’s mother, K.T. Stevens, was also an actor. The daughter of Oscar-nominated director Sam Wood, Stevens starred in several films throughout the 40s and 50s and later became a cast member on “Days of Our Lives” and “The Young and the Restless.”
“I always knew that my parents were actors and they had a lot of famous friends,” Marlowe said. “I think that's probably one of the reasons I have kind of an outgoing personality. You really kind of need that in broadcasting.”
Marlowe was a star athlete at Palisades High School, where he played basketball and volleyball. He earned a scholarship to play both sports at San Diego State. Marlowe realized that his dreams of playing in the NBA were overambitious — he “saw how good everybody [else] was” — but he earned All-American honors in volleyball, leading his college team to a national championship in 1973.
Growing up a Los Angeles sports nut in the 60s and 70s meant Marlowe spent a lot of time with broadcasting legends.
“We had three of the greatest announcers ever there: Chick Hearn, Bob Miller, Dick Enberg,” he said. “I followed all of them, but my idol was Chick Hearn. He was, in my opinion, the greatest basketball announcer that ever lived.” To this day, Marlowe uses some Chick-isms in his broadcasts, like referring to a traveling violation as a “bunny hop in the pea patch.”
After graduating, Marlowe followed in his parents’ footsteps. He appeared on the soap opera “Love of Life” and played a bionic man on the NBC sitcom “Highcliffe Manor.” (It shared a time slot with ABC’s “Mork & Mindy,” starring Robin Williams, and only lasted one season.) Marlowe enjoyed being on set and performing; it was the grind of constantly trying to book roles that didn’t feel sustainable, he said.
“You could have been starring in Othello, but they want to make you audition for a bartender,” he said. “I could be Chris Marlowe as a broadcaster.”
Marlowe continued to play indoor and beach volleyball after graduating from San Diego State and throughout his acting career. In 1976, his teammates voted him captain of the U.S. national indoor team, but the group failed to qualify for that year’s Olympic games in Montreal. The group also missed the 1980 games in Moscow. By then, Marlowe was balancing acting roles and a burgeoning broadcasting career in which he mostly provided color commentary for indoor and beach volleyball matches.
Still, Marlowe continued to play for the U.S. national team. He was 30 years old by the time the 1984 Olympics games came around and no longer in his prime. Coaches cut Marlowe from the team three months before the ‘84 games, which took place in his hometown of Los Angeles.
“I thought my dream of making the Olympics was over,” he told The Athletic in a 2020 interview. “I went to Los Angeles, got an apartment and a job as a bartender in Malibu.”
Six weeks before the start of the Olympics, setter Rod Wilde broke his leg in a match against the Soviet Union. Marlowe rejoined the roster and was unanimously voted as team captain. A month later, he had a gold medal around his neck in front of his hometown audience.
“That opened some doors for me,” Marlowe said.
Before the internet, before streaming, before podcasts and online sportsbooks, the path to sports broadcasting immortality didn’t have so many steps. Vin Scully, for example, became the voice of the Dodgers a year after graduating college. He stayed in the role for 67 years. Al Michaels was in charge of booking women to appear on “The Dating Game” before he got an offer to call Lakers games with Marlowe’s hero, Chick Hearn.
It’s difficult to imagine today a fresh-faced 20-something getting the keys to a team like the Dodgers, even if they possessed Scully’s once-in-a-lifetime talent. It’s a lot easier to imagine that person hosting a podcast with their friends and replying to Pat McAfee clips on X.
Social media has made contributing to the sports media ecosystem easier than ever. Anyone with a smart phone sharing their thoughts on a game has a chance to reach millions of people. But play-by-play broadcasting remains the job of a relative few. Open broadcasting positions are rare due in part to “job hugging,” and even rising stars in the industry are finding themselves out of work.
“You want to be a sports broadcaster?” The Athletic’s senior MLB reporter Britt Ghiroli said in a recent TikTok. “You should know that it is a completely unfair business.”
In 2024, at the National Sports Media Association's awards weekend, a student broadcaster named McKenzie Kane asked Marlowe about the best way to get into the business.
“What advice do you have for us youngsters who might be discouraged knowing that there’s no immediate path to this industry?” she asked.
“There are … a number of different paths,” Marlowe said. “The best path is nepotism.”
Kane laughed in response, but Marlowe was hardly joking. Just look at the numbers.
The second best way to get into broadcasting is by being an athlete, Marlowe continued. That was his journey.
Marlowe began his on-air career as a color commentator, using his expertise and personal history to provide analysis and anecdotes to indoor and beach volleyball broadcasts. His transition to the play-by-play role took place in the mid-80s thanks to a gnarly sunburn.
At the time, Marlowe worked as a color guy for Prime Ticket, a regional sports network serving the Los Angeles area. He was calling a beach volleyball tournament with Keith Erickson, a former NBA and Olympic volleyballer who handled the play-by-play duties.
“When they started televising beach volleyball, they put us on the sand one day in a broadcast position,” Marlowe said. “And the sun was beating down, and [Erickson] got terribly sunburned and said, ‘I don't want to do that anymore.’ And so that's when I kind of graduated to the play-by-play role.”
Whereas color commentators largely stick to the sports they know from their playing days, play-by-play broadcasters are more adaptable. Marlowe grew confident calling volleyball and basketball games, but also football, gymnastics and more esoteric sports like fencing.
“Making that transition was a good one for me because when you're the play-by-play announcer, you can do anything,” he said.
But even with an Olympic medal in his trophy case and a face for TV, Marlowe’s path to play-by-play has more in common with the grind-it-out, gig economy of the 2020s than the journeys of his broadcasting predecessors. His resume reads like a Charles Portis novel. Broadcasting took him to Acapulco, Mexico for cliff diving competitions; to Paradise, Nevada, for the World Series of Poker; and Memphis, Tennessee, for XFL games with Brian Bosworth.
He joined Altitude TV in 2004 and has called Nuggets games ever since.
From 2004 to 2013, the Nuggets made the playoffs every season. But every year, besides the 2009 campaign when they advanced to the Conference Finals, Denver lost in the first round.
Losing seasons followed. By the time the Nuggets finished with 46 wins in the 2018 season, it marked the team’s first winning record in five years. They still missed the playoffs.
Then Jokić had his breakout. He earned All-Star honors for the first time in 2019, and the sports media outside of Denver started to recognize the reserved Serb’s dominance. The Nuggets made it to the playoffs that year as the No. 2 seed in the Western Conference. Led by Jokić and Jamal Murray, Denver beat the San Antonio Spurs in the first round to advance to the conference semifinals, where they eventually lost a heartbreaking Game 7 to the Portland Trailblazers.
The loss to Portland was a tough end to a promising season, but Denver fans took solace in the fact that the Nuggets, after years of post-Melo malaise, were back. They had their superstar in Jokić, a roster of exciting young players and championship ambitions.
Chris Marlowe, sitting courtside at the broadcasting table, prepared to enter one of the most exciting chapters of his career. There was just one problem: thousands of fans wouldn’t be able to watch.
In September of 2019, about a month before the Nuggets’ 2019-20 season tipped off, the contract expired between Comcast and Altitude TV. Kroenke Sports & Entertainment, which owns the Nuggets, also owns Altitude TV.
Comcast said Altitude “demanded significant annual price increases for the same content.” The decision to drop Altitude meant thousands of local fans with Comcast — the largest cable provider in the region — could not watch their home team. They would also miss out on Marlowe’s broadcasts.
In a November 2019 lawsuit, Altitude accused Comcast of trying to drive Altitude out of business so that the cable giant could collect the license to air Nuggets games.
The dispute and ensuing blackout of Nuggets games lasted for years. It came at a cost. In 2022, the Nuggets approached the lowest local viewership ratings of any NBA team in the previous 15 years.
“We’re in this new era where we’re losing our connection to these really talented people because of the market we’re dealing with,” said Browsh, the Boulder professor.
State lawmakers tried, and failed, to pass a bill that would help end the blackouts in 2022. “We're losing a generation of fans,” said then-Colorado House Speaker Alec Garnett (D).
Marlowe had called Nuggets games for 15 years before the blackouts started. His career with the Nuggets is about twice as long as that of Jokić, who is on track to become the longest-tenured player in team history. Blackouts aside, Marlowe is a known figure at Ball Arena and beyond.
“Fans come up and say, ‘Chris, how are you doing? I've listened to you my entire life,’” Marlowe said. He gave himself a light smack on the cheek as if he was trying to wake himself from a dream. “That's impressive. You know, on the road [I] get a lot of that too, even now.”
Last year, Comcast and Altitude resolved their dispute, making the local broadcast of Nuggets games available to a majority of Coloradans for the first time in years.
“You might have missed some of the last five seasons, but there’s plenty of great play coming,” Denver Mayor Mike Johnston said in a February 2025 press conference announcing the end of the blackouts. “Every one of those games you can catch is a new chance to train a new generation of young fans to realize what they have in their hometown.”
That could prove to be a difficult task, and not only because younger people are less likely to have cable. Research shows they prefer watching highlights instead of full games and the rise of streaming has made “locationless fandom” more popular. Browsh, for example, is a lifelong Philadelphia 76ers fan. He can just as easily watch Sixers games through streaming platforms like NBA League Pass as he can watch Nuggets games through local cable (or on the team-owned streaming service, Altitude+).
“It’s almost like technology made every fan local,” said Shelina Taki with PMG Worldwide, a marketing firm that released a study about sports fandom trends last year. “You don’t need a hometown anymore. You just need access to the platforms.”
Sports fandom may increasingly transcend state lines, but inside the borders of Ball Arena, Marlowe has a mayoral quality, chatting with arena staff and Altitude employees as he bounces between the green room and press conferences before tip-off.
Ever the athlete, he reserves his energy for gametime.
“When he sits down in this chair, it’s like he comes to life,” said Winge, his broadcast partner. “It’s like a different version of him comes out.”
Type of story: News
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. To read more about why you can trust the journalism of Rocky Mountain PBS, please visit our editorial standards and practices page.
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. To read more about why you can trust the journalism of Rocky Mountain PBS, please visit our editorial standards and practices page.