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Mike Patrick, a versatile sportscaster for ESPN who called National Football League games on Sunday nights for 18 years, died on Sunday in Fairfax, Va. He was 80.
His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by his physician, Dr. Mark Vasiliadis. Kevin Kiley, a friend and former colleague at ESPN, said Mr. Patrick had been treated for heart and kidney illnesses.
Mr. Patrick was one of ESPN’s best-known announcers, calling college basketball, football and baseball, in addition to N.F.L. games. He brought a commanding voice and an unobtrusive style that made it easy for analysts to work with him.
“He was probably as egoless an announcer as I’ve ever worked with,” Fred Gaudelli, the producer of ESPN’s “Sunday Night Football” games for 11 years, said in an interview. “He had a very natural way of announcing, not as a carnival barker or a screamer.”
Paul Maguire, who worked with Mr. Patrick and Joe Theismann on the Sunday night games, said: “One thing about Mike is that he made the three-man booth work. He was the leader. Joe and I were followers when he took the reins.”
ESPN, which launched in 1979, did not get the rights to televise N.F.L. games until eight years later. It was a coup for the cable network, even if the package was for games played only in the second half of the season. Mr. Patrick almost did not get the job.
“I tried to turn it down!” he said in a conference call with reporters in 2003. He recounted how he told Steve Bornstein, then a senior vice president of ESPN, that he preferred to call college sports: “He said, ‘Are you an idiot? This is the biggest thing we’ll have.’ I thought about it for a day and said yes. After all, he knows better than I do.”
In 1998, ESPN bought the rights to the full season of “Sunday Night Football,” and Mr. Patrick continued to call the games through the 2005 season, when NBC took control of the package.
Despite his television prominence, Mr. Patrick maintained a low profile compared with contemporaries like Al Michaels and Pat Summerall.
“The day he walked into a broadcast booth, that was the big thing for him, not recognition,” Mr. Kiley said. “He was naturally deferential.”
Mr. Patrick was born Michael Carduff on Sept. 9, 1944, in Clarksburg, W.Va. After he was adopted by his stepfather, Robert Frankhouser, he was known as Michael Patrick Frankhouser, Mr. Kiley said. His mother was Eleanor (Freeman) Frankhouser.
Mike got a taste of professional sportscasting in high school by holding up cards to tell Jay Randolph, a future network announcer who was then calling games on a local radio station, where the football was.
“Jay was looking for someone to help him because when the ball gets inside the 1-yard line, he couldn’t tell exactly where it was,” Mr. Patrick told the sports website of West Virginia University in 2018.
He graduated from the George Washington University in 1966 with a bachelor’s degree in speech and started his career at WVSC Radio, in Somerset, Pa. In 1970, he left for WJXT, a television station in Jacksonville, Fla., where he was the sports director. He was also the play-by-play announcer for the Jacksonville Sharks of the short-lived World Football League and the voice of Jacksonville University’s basketball games. He was elected to the school’s athletic hall of fame in 2009.
Mr. Patrick moved on to WJLA, a TV station in Washington, D.C. (it later moved to Arlington, Va.), where he was a sports reporter and a weekend anchor while also calling basketball and football games for the University of Maryland. Mr. Kiley recalled joining WJLA as a fill-in sports anchor on Saturdays, knowing little about how to be one.
“I came in on Saturday morning for a 6 p.m. show, and all of a sudden Mike walked in, from his vacation,” Mr. Kiley said in a phone interview. “He spent the day with me, and I did a good enough job that they hired me.”
Mr. Patrick joined ESPN in 1982, beginning more than 30 years of calling Atlantic Coast Conference basketball games, including matchups between Duke University and the University of North Carolina, many with Dick Vitale as his partner; the women’s basketball Final Four, from 1996 to 2009; the College World Series; and college football bowl games.
His last assignment was the 2017 AutoZone Liberty Bowl between Iowa State University and the University of Memphis.
His survivors include his wife, Janet (Bishop) Patrick.
In the first year of “Sunday Night Football,” Mr. Patrick’s analyst in the booth was Roy Firestone, who was better known for his interview show on ESPN and his celebrity impressions; they were joined by a different former player every week appearing as a guest analyst. It did not work out well.
“Roy was trying to get off jokes, and they’d have Dick Butkus one week, O.J. another and Jim Brown another,” Mr. Gaudelli said. “One week, Ed Marinaro showed up and said, ‘I’m happy to be here, but I haven’t watched a game in a year.’
“At the end of the season, Mike told the producer, John Wildhack, ‘If you ever do this again, I’ll quit.’”
The guest analysts were gone the next season, and Mr. Theismann replaced Mr. Firestone. Mr. Maguire joined them a decade later.
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