Announcer Goss a winner, even when Dukes aren't
PITTSBURGH — To Ray Goss, the job of describing 30 college basketball games every winter truly has become a lost art.
No college sports announcer knows more about losing than Goss, Duquesne University's basketball play-by-play voice for 40 years. Only seven announcers in history have worked longer for a school than Goss, who has described only 10 winning teams since moving behind the Dukes' microphone in 1968.
Exactly half of those 10 winners came in his first five seasons, meaning Goss has had only five winners in 35 years.
"I used to lie awake at night, probably like the coaches, thinking, 'We could have won if we had done that, or should we have done this,"' said Goss, who is believed to have called more losing games than any Division I announcer. "But while I lean toward Duquesne, my job has always been to be as objective as possible."
What stands out to Duquesne's relatively small but loyal fan base is how good Goss is, even though he has spent nearly a lifetime describing bad teams. He is polished and professional — CBS once auditioned him for an NBA job — even during the worst of times.
At Duquesne, best known nationally as Pittsburgh's "other" school, there have been plenty of bad times since a long string of very good teams in the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s segued into a grim and seemingly endless stretch of losing.
"Maybe I'm getting older or more mature, but the losses don't bother me as much any more," said Goss, a native of Carnegie. "I hope we win, but I'm there to do a job."
Most announcers are frequently asked by fans to choose the best team they watched. With Goss, it's the reverse: he is asked which Duquesne team is the worst. There are plenty of candidates, with records such as 3-24, 5-23, 7-22, 8-22, 9-21, 9-20, 10-18 and 11-21 in the last quarter-century.
"That 3-24 team we had two years ago, I'd drive down to the game and think, 'We don't even have a chance,'" Goss said. "That's why this is really exciting right now."
So how's this for a 40th anniversary present, Ray Goss? Just when Goss feared he might never call another winner, second-year Dukes coach Ron Everhart has transformed what was one of the worst programs in Division I into a winner.
The Dukes, two years removed from that worse-than-awful 3-24 record, went into the weekend with a 14-7 record — two victories away from assuring themselves of only their third winning season since 1981.
No wonder the 71-year-old Goss sounds like a kid again. Or maybe it's because he still calls high school games, as he has been doing since the 1960s.
"I do them to keep sharp," Goss said.
