The New York Knicks and Houston Rockets playing Game 5 of the 1994 NBA Finals while O.J. Simpson was being chased by Los Angeles police in his white Ford Bronco will forever be one of the most surreal moments in sports and American history. And Mike Breen was in the middle of it.
Breen recently joined Richard Deitsch’s Sports Media Podcast to discuss the NBA playoffs and his iconic play-by-play career. During the interview, Breen reflected on trying to call an NBA Finals game as the country was locked in on the low-speed chase with Simpson after a warrant for his arrest was issued in connection to the murders of his ex-wife Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman. Breen was calling Game 5 of the 1994 Finals for WFAN, which was the radio home of the Knicks from 1988-2004.
“The O.J. game is still one of the memories I will never forget, because I called it on radio and it was one of the most bizarre nights I’ve ever had calling basketball,” Breen told Deitsch. “The game starts and we had a TV monitor in our booth as well. And now NBC goes to the split screen and everybody is talking about it. At halftime, people weren’t talking about the basketball game – a critical NBA Finals game – they were talking about O.J. And I’m calling the biggest game of my life.”
Breen said by the NBA Finals, the radio broadcast had gotten friendly with all the fans that regularly sat around the booth. Those fans were locked into NBC’s split screen broadcast. But trying to keep his focus on Game 5 of the NBA Finals, Breen asked their statistician, the late Harry Robinson, to shut turn off the monitor.
“I can’t concentrate,” Breen recalled telling Robinson. “The O.J. thing was so drawing, I said, ‘You gotta turn it off.’ So he goes to turn off the monitor and all the people around us, all friends, everybody we knew, screaming at us, ‘No, no! You can’t turn it off!’ Because they wanted to watch O.J. on the TV while they were at the Garden watching the game. And because we knew them so well, we kept it on. I’m just thinking, ‘this is just too bizarre, I can’t believe I’m in the middle of this.’”
Ironically, as Breen was calling the NBA Finals amid the O.J. chase, Simpson was supposedly listening to the NBA Finals from his infamous white Bronco. Jeff Van Gundy, who was an assistant coach with the Knicks in 1994, previously shared this fact after learning it from Pat Riley.
One of the strangest factors in the chase, was how slow the white Bronco was driving on the Freeway despite being pursued by LAPD. Riley, who had a home in Los Angeles at the time, told Van Gundy he saw the driver of the white Bronco, former NFL player A.C. Cowlings, that summer. And according to Riley, the driver told him he was instructed to drive slow because Simpson wanted to hear the end of the NBA Finals game before getting pulled over.
Although Mike Breen had the radio call for WFAN in New York, Simpson was probably listening to the national broadcast in Los Angeles, which featured Joe McConnell and Bob Lanier.
